Mar 13, 2005 21:39
It is my understanding that some people have fallen under the misconception that tomorrow, March 14, 2005, is "pi day." As one with some amount of background knowledge in this area, I feel it is my duty to point out the inaccuracy of this premise.
Apparantly, the misunderstanding has come about as a result of the figures which the Christian calender assigns to the date. 3/14 seems to have become unanomous with the first three digits of pi... 3.14. Well naturally, 3.14 is not pi...pi cannot be expressed in terms of a terminating decimal. In my oppinion, the most useful way to represent pi (despite the range issue) is arcsine (0).
Naturally, that brings us to...the radian calender (which is far more rational and useful than the Christian calender...except it like...uses irrational numbers, but that's ok)! Rather than using annoying things like the periheilon and apiheilon, my radian calender relies on the annual cycle of changing day and night hours, which is a sine-wave function of the date. The dates then take on values that are multiples of pi, which when fed into the sine wave function produce the appropriate light-hour factor. In other words, June 21 must be pi/2, because sine reaches it's maximum value on pi/2. Likewise, the December 21 becomes 3pi/2...sine's minimum value. The cross-quarters get values with 4 in the denomenator, and dates inbetween become slightly more complex. But anyway, it becomes obvious and imperative that September 20th, the autumnal equinox has the date pi! (0 and pi are the equilibrium points of the sine waves). Popular logic has misplaced the date by over a half-cycle!
That is all.