Re: Pi in the Sky (Was: Re: EU thought crimes)
At 11:16 PM 2/22/03 -0600, The Fool wrote: Mary wrote: Sam wrote: Henry wrote: Elizabeth wrote: How do I stop my cat eating the furniture? Have you tried putting a velcro cover on? That's ok if you do not have children, but they tear the velcro - what then? Try guaranteed child-proof super-velcro: I have been using it ever since I had my fourth child - and my sixth cat. How on Earth did Mary give birth to six cats? (P.S. -- Your messages are coming through just fine now.) -- Ronn! :) Almighty Ruler of the all, Whose Power extends to great and small, Who guides the stars with steadfast law, Whose least creation fills with awe, O grant thy mercy and thy grace, To those who venture into space. (Robert A. Heinlein's added verse to the Navy Hymn) ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Pi in the Sky (Was: Re: EU thought crimes)
From: G. D. Akin [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: Killer Bs Discussion [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: Pi in the Sky (Was: Re: EU thought crimes) Date: Friday, February 21, 2003 8:15 PM Wrong! In Alabama, the value of pie is Pecan. George A P.S. Sorry, I couldn't help it. Top Posting == BAD. Quoting Whole messages == BAD. ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Top Posting: (Was: RE: Pi in the Sky (Was: Re: EU thought crimes))
Yes, it's annoying, but top posting is sometimes easier. I searched for a setting in MS Outlook XP that would put a little carat next to all the reply lines. Couldn't find one. I tried putting 'em in manually a few times. It's rarely worth the effort. Speaking of which, if anyone knows where that setting can be changed, I'd appreciate knowing it. :) As for quoting the entire post, G.D., if you can clip non-essential material from your posts it would be helpful and polite to those listmembers who only read the digest, but it's not absolutely necessary. Jon 'Welcome to the Federation Starship SS Buttcrack' ~Chrichton / Farscape -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of The Fool Sent: Saturday, February 22, 2003 12:57 PM To: Killer Bs Discussion Subject: Re: Pi in the Sky (Was: Re: EU thought crimes) From: G. D. Akin [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: Killer Bs Discussion [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: Pi in the Sky (Was: Re: EU thought crimes) Date: Friday, February 21, 2003 8:15 PM Wrong! In Alabama, the value of pie is Pecan. George A P.S. Sorry, I couldn't help it. Top Posting == BAD. Quoting Whole messages == BAD. ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Pi in the Sky (Was: Re: EU thought crimes)
At 11:20 PM 2/21/03 -0600, Steve Sloan II wrote: G. D. Akin wrote: Wrong! In Alabama, the value of pie is Pecan. I had a funny moment in the grocery store one day, when I walked by a table with someone handing out free samples of apple pie, and noticed that they were selling it for $3.14. Oh, pie for pi, I blurted, and the woman handing out the samples got a good laugh out of it. As funny as the sign: Free Pie: $3.14? -- Ronn! :) Almighty Ruler of the all, Whose Power extends to great and small, Who guides the stars with steadfast law, Whose least creation fills with awe, O grant thy mercy and thy grace, To those who venture into space. (Robert A. Heinlein's added verse to the Navy Hymn) ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Top Posting: (Was: RE: Pi in the Sky (Was: Re: EU thought crimes))
At 07:56 PM 2/22/03 +, Richard Baker wrote: The Fool said: Is manual. I'd have to compile it, then for every single message I'd have to do something like cut all the text, paste that text into a text file, run this par program, open the outputed text file, cut the text, and paste into message again. Sorry, not gonna happen. Doesn't your mailer have an outgoing mail event that can run a script? Even YAM for AmigaOS does that. I don't see anything like that in Eudora. Any other guesses what else it might be called? -- Ronn! :) Almighty Ruler of the all, Whose Power extends to great and small, Who guides the stars with steadfast law, Whose least creation fills with awe, O grant thy mercy and thy grace, To those who venture into space. (Robert A. Heinlein's added verse to the Navy Hymn) ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Pi in the Sky (Was: Re: EU thought crimes)
I have no idea what you are taking about. George A - Original Message - From: The Fool [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: Killer Bs Discussion [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Sunday, February 23, 2003 2:56 AM Subject: Re: Pi in the Sky (Was: Re: EU thought crimes) From: G. D. Akin [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: Killer Bs Discussion [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: Pi in the Sky (Was: Re: EU thought crimes) Date: Friday, February 21, 2003 8:15 PM Wrong! In Alabama, the value of pie is Pecan. George A P.S. Sorry, I couldn't help it. Top Posting == BAD. Quoting Whole messages == BAD. ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Pi in the Sky (Was: Re: EU thought crimes)
From: G. D. Akin [EMAIL PROTECTED] I have no idea what you are taking about. http://www.blakjak.demon.co.uk/gey_stv0.htm The following question was asked on a newsgroup: Please excuse my ignorance but I visit occasionally and read the mail and have contributed a little, but have now noticed someone saying that top-posting is considered rude. Can someone please explain what this is I do not know the expression and I would hate to be classed as rude by doing this inadvertantly. Many thanks. Pat Jeffo. The best way is to answer the post underneath as here. Top posting means putting the answer first. With a post the length of yours it really makes little difference, but some posts are quite long, especially when there is an original, then an answer, then a further comment. If people follow Netiquette correctly they will delete all the earlier posts except enough so you can see what they are replying to, and then answer thereafter. There are three reasons I do not like top posting. First, top posters tend never to snip, never to shorten that to which they reply. So people whose download time costs money are wasting money downloading enormous lengths of stuff they have already read. Second, and connected, is that you do not know with top posting whether someone has written something else later on, so do you waste your time going through it? Neither of these would matter if top posters snipped, but they tend not to. Third, it is much easier to read things in order, and you can see with good Netiquette how easily it flows. Let me give you a made-up example: Mary wrote: Sam wrote: Henry wrote: Elizabeth wrote: How do I stop my cat eating the furniture? Have you tried putting a velcro cover on? That's ok if you do not have children, but they tear the velcro - what then? Try guaranteed child-proof super-velcro: I have been using it ever since I had my fourth child - and my sixth cat. It reads easily and logically, which does not happen if you put the answer first - especially when there are further comments on the same thread. BUT not snipping is a far worse disease. If you read a five screen article, and you like it, it is the height of selfishness to leave the whole five screens while you add a single line to say how much you like it - and it does not matter which end you put it, it is still very unfair on others and shows a lack of respect for your fellow posters. You should leave in a paragraph or two, not more, unless you are specifically referring to bits. Then you leave in the bits to which you refer, and reply just after them. So, please snip, that is vital, please do not top post, but that is not so important. ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Pi in the Sky (Was: Re: EU thought crimes)
Wrong! In Alabama, the value of pie is Pecan. George A P.S. Sorry, I couldn't help it. - Original Message - From: Jon Gabriel [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, February 21, 2003 4:43 AM Subject: Pi in the Sky (Was: Re: EU thought crimes) From: The Fool [EMAIL PROTECTED] Reply-To: Killer Bs Discussion [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: Killer Bs Discussion [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: EU thought crimes Date: Thu, 20 Feb 2003 11:05:16 -0600 From: Alberto Monteiro [EMAIL PROTECTED] Andrew Crystall wrote: As a sidenote, in America the Holocaust was established by a court case as a fact and thus technically holocaust deniers could be taken to court on that basis. Uh? Does it mean that someone could be taken to a court by claiming that Pi = 4? Or by denying Evolution? Several states have _tried_ to return pi to the biblical value of 3. I was **sure** this was an urban legend... snopes bears me out: There is not now and never has been a bill in front of the Alabama state legislature to redefine the value of pi. Oh, and there's a reference to SIASL (Heinlein) at the end, so we're back to something vaguely ontopic. :) *grin* Jon From: http://www.snopes.com/religion/pi.htm Claim: Responding to pressure from religious groups, Alabama's state legislature redefined the value of pi from 3.14159 to 3 in order to bring it in line with Biblical precepts. Status: False. Example: [Collected on the Internet, 1998] HUNTSVILLE, Ala. -- NASA engineers and mathematicians in this high-tech city are stunned and infuriated after the Alabama state legistature 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 Guy Hunt 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. Science supports Lawson, explains Russell Humbleys, a propulsion technician at the Marshall Spaceflight Center who testified in support of the bill before the legislature in Mongtomery on Monday. Pi is merely an artifact of Euclidean geometry. Humbleys is working on a theory which he says will prove that pi is determined by the geometry of three-dimensional space, which is assumed by physicists to be isotropic, or the same in all directions. There are other geometries, and pi is different in every one of them, says Humbleys. Scientists have arbitrarily assumed that space is Euclidean, he says. He points out that a circle drawn on a spherical surface has a different value for the ratio of circumfence to diameter. Anyone with a compass, flexible ruler, and globe can see for themselves, suggests Humbleys, its not exactly rocket science. Roger Learned, a Solomon Society member who was in Montgomery to support the bill, agrees. He said that pi is nothing more than an assumption by the mathematicians and engineers who were there to argue against the bill. These nabobs waltzed into the capital with an arrogance that was breathtaking, Learned said. Their prefatorial deficit resulted in a polemical stance at absolute contraposition to the legislature's puissance. Some education experts believe that the legislation will affect the way math is taught to Alabama's children. One member
Re: Pi in the Sky (Was: Re: EU thought crimes)
G. D. Akin wrote: Wrong! In Alabama, the value of pie is Pecan. I had a funny moment in the grocery store one day, when I walked by a table with someone handing out free samples of apple pie, and noticed that they were selling it for $3.14. Oh, pie for pi, I blurted, and the woman handing out the samples got a good laugh out of it. __ Steve Sloan . Huntsville, Alabama = [EMAIL PROTECTED] Brin-L list pages .. http://www.brin-l.org Chmeee's 3D Objects http://www.sloan3d.com/chmeee 3D and Drawing Galleries .. http://www.sloansteady.com Software Science Fiction, Science, and Computer Links Science fiction scans . http://www.sloan3d.com ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Pi in the Sky (Was: Re: EU thought crimes)
From: Jon Gabriel [EMAIL PROTECTED] From: The Fool [EMAIL PROTECTED] Reply-To: Killer Bs Discussion [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: Killer Bs Discussion [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: EU thought crimes Date: Thu, 20 Feb 2003 11:05:16 -0600 From: Alberto Monteiro [EMAIL PROTECTED] Andrew Crystall wrote: As a sidenote, in America the Holocaust was established by a court case as a fact and thus technically holocaust deniers could be taken to court on that basis. Uh? Does it mean that someone could be taken to a court by claiming that Pi = 4? Or by denying Evolution? Several states have _tried_ to return pi to the biblical value of 3. I was **sure** this was an urban legend... snopes bears me out: There is not now and never has been a bill in front of the Alabama state legislature to redefine the value of pi. Though the claim about the Alabama state legislature is pure nonsense, it is similar to an event that happened more than a century ago. In 1897 the Indiana House of Representatives unanimously passed a measure redefining the area of a circle and the value of pi. (House Bill no. 246, introduced by Rep. Taylor I. Record.) The bill died in the state Senate. Which is what I was reffering to. ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Pi in the Sky (Was: Re: EU thought crimes)
From: The Fool [EMAIL PROTECTED] Reply-To: Killer Bs Discussion [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: Killer Bs Discussion [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: Pi in the Sky (Was: Re: EU thought crimes) Date: Thu, 20 Feb 2003 15:46:23 -0600 From: Jon Gabriel [EMAIL PROTECTED] From: The Fool [EMAIL PROTECTED] Reply-To: Killer Bs Discussion [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: Killer Bs Discussion [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: EU thought crimes Date: Thu, 20 Feb 2003 11:05:16 -0600 From: Alberto Monteiro [EMAIL PROTECTED] Andrew Crystall wrote: As a sidenote, in America the Holocaust was established by a court case as a fact and thus technically holocaust deniers could be taken to court on that basis. Uh? Does it mean that someone could be taken to a court by claiming that Pi = 4? Or by denying Evolution? Several states have _tried_ to return pi to the biblical value of 3. I was **sure** this was an urban legend... snopes bears me out: There is not now and never has been a bill in front of the Alabama state legislature to redefine the value of pi. Though the claim about the Alabama state legislature is pure nonsense, it is similar to an event that happened more than a century ago. In 1897 the Indiana House of Representatives unanimously passed a measure redefining the area of a circle and the value of pi. (House Bill no. 246, introduced by Rep. Taylor I. Record.) The bill died in the state Senate. Which is what I was reffering to. Okay, One state 106 years ago. :) *grin* Jon _ The new MSN 8: advanced junk mail protection and 2 months FREE* http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
