FACT: Educators in the state of Alabama are chafing as the state celebrates a dubious anniversary: today marks ten years since the Alabama state legislature voted to change the value of the mathematical constant pi from 3.14159… to the “Biblical value” of 3.0. Ramifications were felt across the state. The use of “3.0” as the value of pi led to problems in schools, businesses, and local scientific pursuits, including a group of frustrated engineers at the NASA research facility in Huntsville. According to NASA/Huntsville’s director of special projects “Dr.” Jim Simon (doctorate pending), “We had strayed from using our Microsoft software and instead had been trying to figure out how to use an advanced Google search platform, which was sold to us as a powerful Cloud Computing system.”
Unfortunately, that effort proved frustrating for the “rocket scientists” any time they used calculations involving pi, based on the Alabama-standard value of 3.0, mostly because they were under the mistaken impression that they were contractually barred from using Cloud Computing on any sunny days. Given the hospitable local weather that left them unable to use their computers for an average of 290 days each year.
Filed under: Government, innovation, Microsoft, R&D, Society, Technology | Tagged: 2.0, Alabama, april, april fool, april fools, april fools day, Bible, business, cloud computing, computer science, culture, dixie, economics, economy, entertainment, God, Google, Google Search, HPC, humor, Huntsville, Jim Simon, King James Bible, life, machine translation, Mark Boslough, math, mathematicians, mathematics, Microsoft, Microsoft Research, NASA, pi, R&D, religion, research, rockets, science, semantic web, semantics, software, Solomon's Temple, space, tech, Technology, translation, Web 2.0, Web 3.0 | 21 Comments »
Shepherd's Pi 