Wednesday, August 03, 2005
Pi And The Meaning Of Life
This TUD is a little involved, so read slowly.
Pi is a mathematical constant that is key to many branches of science. It is a number that seems to have an infinite number of digits with no repeating pattern.
If you were creating a universe, wouldn't it have made sense to make Pi an easy number? Why not 7? It's easy to remember and lucky! We know that Pi is 3.14.... in decimal (a numbering system that uses 10 digits). We probably use decimal because we have ten fingers (why we have 10 fingers and not 6 or 11 is a future TUD).
What if we had 8 fingers on each hand? We would probably count using hexadecimal (a numbering system based on 16 digits of zero thru f). Think about how much ink we would save writing really big numbers. It takes about 8 hexadecimal digits to represent a 10 digit decimal number.
Hang in there. The best is yet to come.
Here is a question for you mathematicians. If we represented Pi as a hexadecimal number, would it still be an infinite number of digits with no repeating pattern? I'm not a mathematician, but I'd wager it would (if not, I just discovered a whole new branch of mathematics). If so, why weren't people designed with 13 fingers on each hand? We would probably use a numbering system based on 26 digits. We could have used A through Z for the digits. Then Pi would hold all the knowledge in the universe. Somewhere in Pi would be the works of Shakespeare, the poems of Browning, the scripts for Saturday Night Live and an explanation for the meaning of life. It would all be there. All we'd have to do is keep discovery more digits in Pi.
Now that's what an intelligent designer would have done.
Religion
Satire
Unintelligent Design
This post is an example of the
Theory of Unintelligent Design (TUD), things in the universe that don't seem to be created by intelligent design.
Pi is a mathematical constant that is key to many branches of science. It is a number that seems to have an infinite number of digits with no repeating pattern.
If you were creating a universe, wouldn't it have made sense to make Pi an easy number? Why not 7? It's easy to remember and lucky! We know that Pi is 3.14.... in decimal (a numbering system that uses 10 digits). We probably use decimal because we have ten fingers (why we have 10 fingers and not 6 or 11 is a future TUD).
What if we had 8 fingers on each hand? We would probably count using hexadecimal (a numbering system based on 16 digits of zero thru f). Think about how much ink we would save writing really big numbers. It takes about 8 hexadecimal digits to represent a 10 digit decimal number.
Hang in there. The best is yet to come.
Here is a question for you mathematicians. If we represented Pi as a hexadecimal number, would it still be an infinite number of digits with no repeating pattern? I'm not a mathematician, but I'd wager it would (if not, I just discovered a whole new branch of mathematics). If so, why weren't people designed with 13 fingers on each hand? We would probably use a numbering system based on 26 digits. We could have used A through Z for the digits. Then Pi would hold all the knowledge in the universe. Somewhere in Pi would be the works of Shakespeare, the poems of Browning, the scripts for Saturday Night Live and an explanation for the meaning of life. It would all be there. All we'd have to do is keep discovery more digits in Pi.
Now that's what an intelligent designer would have done.
Religion
Satire
Unintelligent Design
This post is an example of the
Theory of Unintelligent Design (TUD), things in the universe that don't seem to be created by intelligent design.
