NP Alabama Pi

[Vaska Tumir]

Can anyone confirm or otherwise that the deliciously/eerily bizarre Alabama law proposal on pi ever got passed?  I found this posted from AGITPROP NEWS (5.20.98) on the Roy Bhaskar list.  

Vaska


9.  American as Apple Pi

HUNTSVILLE, Ala. -- NASA engineers and mathematicians in this high-
tech city are stunned and infuriated after the Alabama state legisla-
ture narrowly passed a law yesterday redefining pi, a mathematical
constant used in the aerospace industry.  The bill to change the value
of pi to exactly three was introduced without fanfare by Leonard Lee
Lawson (R, Crossville), and rapidly gained support after a letter-
writing campaign by members of the Solomon Society, a traditional
values group.

Governor Fob James says he will sign it into law on Wednesday.

The law took the state's engineering community by surprise. "It would
have been nice if they had consulted with someone who actually uses pi,"
said Marshall Bergman, a manager at the Ballistic Missile Defense
Organization.

According to Bergman, pi is a Greek letter that signifies the ratio of
the circumference of a circle to its diameter.  It is often used by
engineers to calculate missile trajectories.

Prof. Kim Johanson, a mathematician from University of Alabama, said
that pi is a universal constant, and cannot arbitrarily be changed by
lawmakers.  Johanson explained that pi is an irrational number, which
means that it has an infinite number of digits after the decimal point
and can never be known exactly.  Nevertheless, she said, pi is precisly
defined by mathematics to be "3.14159, plus as many more digits as you
have time to calculate".

"I think that it is the mathematicians that are being irrational, and
it is time for them to admit it," said Lawson.  "The Bible very clearly
says in I Kings 7:23 that the alter font of Solomon's Temple was ten
cubits across and thirty cubits in diameter, and that it was round in
compass."

Lawson called into question the usefulness of any number that cannot
be calculated exactly, and suggested that never knowing the exact
answer could harm students' self-esteem.  "We need to return to some
absolutes in our society," he said, "the Bible does not say that the
font was thirty-something cubits.  Plain reading says thirty cubits.
Period."




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