Happy Pi Day!

Today, March 14th, is International pi Day. pi being the Greek symbol for the highly irrational number that comes when you divide a circle's circumference by its diameter. It starts with a 3 and a decimal point and then disappears over the horizon.

Pi = 3.1415926535 8979323846 2643383279 5028841971 6939937510 more

Hence the day: 3/14 is how some parts of the world think March 14th is written.

A piece of trivia: if I convert "LEE" to digits, it becomes "120505". This sequence of numbers appears in the string of pi at position 1,733,630 counting from the first digit after the decimal point. The 3. is not counted.

However, doing the same with my full name gets the following response: The string 12050511051414050425 did not occur in the first 200,000,000 digits of pi.

Does that make me unique?

Or just irrational?
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Nine zeros.

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The governments are are playing loose and fast with billions of dollars of late.

It is easy to loose sight of what a billion really is. True, someone said that a man with a billion dollars is as well off as if he was rich.

But what does a billion mean?

A billion seconds ago:

It was 1959.

A billion minutes ago:

It was 107AD, the Roman Empire was in full flight.

A billion hours ago:

It was the Stone Age

A billion days ago:

In honour of Charles Darwin's 200th birthday, I can report that no animals walked this planet on two legs.

A billion is a seriously large number.
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How high?

A little mathematical nonsense to see me past tomorrow's exam.

The Earth, lovely thing that it is, is 24,880 miles (40,041km) in circumference.

That's 131,369,652 feet.

Now, imagine a ribbon going right around the earth, fitting neatly to the surface. (Yes, I know all about the mountains, valleys, trees and stuff. Just imagine it for the moment and forget the lumpy bits.). So this ribbon is 131,369,652 feet long.

Now, lets cut the ribbon and put in one more foot of ribbon and then go around and make sure the new ribbon is evenly adjusted around the globe. 131,369,653 feet of ribbon.

How far away from the surface will this ribbon be?

Can you see light between the ground and the ribbon?
Can you slip a piece of paper between them?
How about a cockroach passing through the gap? A mouse? A cat? A goat?

Answer tomorrow in the comments section.
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10 types of people.

There are 10 types of people:

Those who understand binary numbers and those who don't.
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Luck of the draw.

There are 45 balls in the normal Australian lottery.

You need six numbers to win it.

The probability of winning is one in 8,145,o6o but most people have a quick-pick which has about 24 entries, reducing the odds to a tad over one in 339,377.

So how likely are you to win?

If the church had bought a quick-pick every Saturday since JC was born, there is a 73.5 % probability that they would not have picked up a single first division prize in the 104,312 draws.

Lotteries: a tax on people who can't do maths.
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