On Monday 20 June 2016 15:19, Ian Kelly wrote: > Sure, but I think you've missed my central point, which is not that > they wouldn't have made reasonably precise measurements in > construction, but only that the storytellers would have rounded things > off for their audience. > > We still do the same thing today. A house appraisal will report its > footprint to the nearest square foot, but most people when talking > about it casually aren't going to say "my house is 1936 square feet". > More likely they'll just say "about 1900 square feet", since past the > first couple of digits nobody really cares.
There's a difference though. Nobody has tried to legislate the value of pi to match your casual reference to "about 1900 square feet", but there's been at least one serious attempt to legislate the value of pi to match the implied value given by the Bible. And some very large percentage of people in the world, especially in but not limited to the USA, will dispute your suggestion that "storytellers would have rounded things off for their audience" on the basis that every single word in the Bible is the inerrant, literal word of the god known as God. If the Bible implies that pi is 3, then by gum, that means it is 3. Or at least, that's what they *say* they believe. In practice, the literalists accept that the Bible contains metaphors, stories, and other non-literal text the same as everyone else does, they just pick and choose[1] which bits they choose to accept as literal in ways that strike others as naive, stupid, out- dated or outright wicked. [1] To be fair, as we all do, as the ancient Hebrews unaccountably failed to mark up their texts using <metaphor> <sarcasm> <just kidding> <we really mean this one> tags. -- Steve -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
