Pi in the sky

Mathematics was a religion to the Pythogoreans.  There is a story that the guy who discovered irrational numbers died at sea, punished by the gods, which leaves the impression that maybe the Pythagoreans, ahem, tampered with the ropes on his mainsail or whatever.  Well, that's pure speculation on my part and the whole story is lost in the mists of time.  Has a ring to it though, a little like Prometheus giving us fire. 

The Sumerians and the Egyptians knew arithmetic, well they knew as much as they needed to know to do what they wanted to do which was mainly to divide land up into equal pieces and to build the pyramids and ziggurats which didn't require all that much precision.  They sort of knew about pi, in that they knew there was some ratio between the diameter and circumference of a circle, and they knew it was three and some change and they used various fractions like 25/8 to get a number close enough for their purposes.

At this point I was ready to bring up the story of the state legislature that passed a bill changing the value of pi to three, but the stern visage of The Scourge troubled my sight, so I did a little internet research and learned that that story is attributed to a variety of states and is false.  There was some confusing bill in Indiana in 1897 which proposed a variety of values for pi, but it never became law, and seems also lost in mist of time. 

The mathematicians who believe numbers are real are called Platonists after that philosopher who believed that we all lived in dark caves and that all we could see was an approximation of the real world, which existed somewhere.  I should bone up on my Plato but it just seems so daunting, better to just give my approximations and get this post done without looking up things forever.  Anyway Plato was still popular in the time of the early Christians and a lot of his philosophy was brought into Christianity.

And doesn't it seem a little miraculous that there could be some guy sitting on a pier in Greece selling a bucket of fifty sardines at say a quarter apiece, and this guy doesn't know any math, all he knows is to get a quarter for each sardine and afterwards to count the quarters, and you don't  know this guy or where the pier is but you know he will have fifty quarters if he sells them all.  Spooky action at a distance?  The proof of divine power?  I will leave it to the reader to decide.


This guy Papadopoulos is something huh?  A local boy, I believe he lives just a couple miles from the Ten Catt.  Imagine what a movie that will make, walking through Trumpworld with a wire.  Who will play Trump?  I recommend Jack Nicholson.  Not that this will necessarily lead to anything, 80 percent of Trumpists don't  mind him selling us down the river to the Russkies.  The daunting vision of Trump shirtless on horseback troubles my sight. 

I see there is a movie about, well not my favorite, but certainly the most interesting president, LBJ.  Woody Harrelson seems a good choice.  Haven't seen any reviews yet, but I get the impression it will concentrate on the good, civil rights, LBJ, and not the bad, Vietnam, LBJ.