• Drifting •

Often I see threads drift away from the original OPs intent. That is a very normal thing to happen, because forums lend themselves to be conversational. So, I thought it would be nice to have a thread without a topic. It can go any direction that you like it to go, just remember: no politics, no religion, no nasties.

Other than those restrictions, let’s just drift :slight_smile:

I will start by asking when it gets dark in the evening now where you live.

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Just drifting in to say it’s lovely weather here, sunny but chilly cold. Nevertheless I am off out for the day, going to take my camera with me in case I spot any foxladies :wink:

Hey guys, join in the fun to create some Monsters

Google is your friend :smiley:

Will they induce the most up-to-date global surveillance utilising satellites and google earth combined? Do you think? :smiley:

Google is everyone’s friend :slight_smile: The question is, will they turn into the Evil Empire? :rofl: (Star-Wars, not MS, !)

Yes, they will.

Who first defined PI? How many years ago?

Why he named it as PI?

Yes they are :smiley:

Uhm, I’m sure it’d be taken into account if someone was to rewrite the fundamentals. Maybe.

I’ve read somewhere that there’s a lab in Japan devoted to calculation of pi. They’ve discovered a trillion of digits or something of that scale so far.

Oh and, Ulrike, do you actually remember all those digits you said?

:smiley: No, not that good of a memory, but pretty good.

I have a strange thing though. I am a dyslexic, have sometimes a lot of difficulties with things that get twisted around, tumble into an odd pile. My husband sometimes uses this to confuse the heck out of me and we get a good laugh.

But back to the pi thing. The basic usage that I had to utilize this thing for was in mechanical engineering. We used most of the time just 3.14159 for all our calculations. That was exact enough then for the purpose.

Yeah, I know pi is 3.14159 26535 89793 23846 26433 83279 50288 41971 69399 37510…(truncated), usually used with about 10 decimal places for the purposes it is used most for. I have read somewhere that the number has never been fully completed, even with the help of computers (amazing), and yes, you do not round it up before you are finished. But that is just what it is :smiley:

:stuck_out_tongue: Make a square out of a circle :stuck_out_tongue:

Your theory is interesting. I know too little about it to talk intelligently about it, just learned the basics back in the days when I needed to work with this :slight_smile:

Which flavor?

This place is getting spookier and spookier. I have often had the self same thought myself and once asked my daughters tutor why it wasn’t so. He said that it would complicate things and when I asked; how? He got all upset and said that he had no intention of discussing it as far greater minds than mine had settled on 3.14. I just laughed and taught my kids to use 6.28 anyway.

One might prove this or other way is better, but it is how it is. When people started using it (I think there’s not even a definite answer who and when), there were no theories based on it and there was no way to see that 2*pi would be more convinient hundreds (thousands?) of years later. So we use what we have.

Perhaps they will, but if they have any balls then they will not make it exclusive to goverments only… The way I see it is that no one has anything to worry about if the survelance is benelovant. How cool would it be to zoom into google earth and watch real-time the traffic in cities and freeways? Still there are larger issues surrounding this idea, which come under further-reaching laws of privacy. The question is, can independent companies (such as google) avert and save the world from over-controling goverments, who in any situation always attempt to make the most of new technology/possibilities?

I think technology such as that will inevitably be used by governments. There is always a way under some pretense for gov to get their hands on stuff like that. They declare some emergency and they confiscate it. I do not trust any government, benevolence goes only so far with these guys. So it is. Or some guy can make some huge amount of money selling it to some government, ideals go only so far with many people.

I am actually surprised how little control the gov has implemented so far. I guess the bureaucratic machine is too slow to catch up with development right now. For how long?

I think that the goverments probably do have just such technology (only as good as the weather of course :smiley: ) but Google earth is years behind this implementation in many respects. It could get a whole lot better though, which is the interesting part.

If you mean gov. control over the internet, then I am glad of their un-wakefulness. Any future of the internet controled by goverment is a dealthly thing, only trusted peer-reviewed internet operators should decide what should and should not appear on the web… consider truly aweful things that can be available on the web, and consider a body set up to ensure all un-humane things are removed. There is a thin line…