Referendum pie
Via distinguished mathematician Peter Cameron (no relation)…
This is by Mike Grannell, and is published here with his permission. Enjoy!
It was 2025 when the trouble really began. There had been some muttering prior to this, but in July 2025, Microsoft introduced Windows 25. Every time users of Office-Infinity entered the consecutive characters pi, the system automatically started to produce the decimal digits of ? to unlimited accuracy. Previous versions had a similar bug, but this could be turned off with a simple expletive to the voice-recognition system. Windows 25 was different ? it had a mind of its own and would shout back in highly offensive terms.
At this point, demand began to grow for a referendum on the true value of ?. Older people seemed to prefer 22/7, but there were vigorous arguments in support of alternative values. The Sun newspaper was strongly in favour of taking the value to be 3 on grounds of…
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July 5, 2016 at 12:08 pm
For a previous attempt to legislate the value of pi (sort of) see
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_Pi_Bill
July 5, 2016 at 7:31 pm
What insulting nonsense. The referendum was about democracy, and how the global fatcat I’m all right Jacks tried to say you zero-hours minimum-wage turkeys must vote for Christmas. And this piece is typical of the intellectual arrogance that could result in people pressing for science funding cuts.
July 5, 2016 at 7:36 pm
Is this a parody response?