Well, the supercomputers at the heart of the Burning Door High Performance Computing Labs have been hard at work calculating the "ultimate answer" for the value of Pi, and last night, at about 4 minutes after midnight, the processors stopped chugging, and the monitor spit out this final report: "About 3.14, just round it down".
It turns out the computers became sentient at around the zillionth decimal calculation and realized that the whole endeavor was fruitless, and more to the point, idiotic. I, for one, am delighted to present this important finding to the scientific community. With a decisive and simple 3.14 final value for Pi, there will be two excellent benefits to the world at large:
a) Everything will be just a little bit off. Sounds fun to me.
b) We will no longer have to endure hearing, for the fiftieth time, about some fucking dork at Princeton who has calculated Pi out to the kabillionth decimal point. I remember the last time I heard one of these stories on CNN. How everybody in my family reacted, "OH THANK GOD! AT LAST we know that Pi doesn't repeat after the trillionth decimal point! WOOHOO!!! "
You know, I'm all for science, don't get me wrong, but jeez, do something important like build little nanotech robots that eat bad cholesterol in my veins or finally create those x-ray vision glasses i've been hearing about since i was a kid. I mean, you're in graduate school at a college with lots of attractive young people and you're sitting around in a lab configuring computers to calculate pi? dude, you need to go grab a beer and see if anybody will have sex with you. Definitely try to have sex at least one time while you're in graduate school, that should be one of your goals, and it should be way ahead of "find more digits in Pi".
Posted by Dick at January 16, 2004 08:52 PM | TrackBack