Math Woes
Hey, Dave again. So I just read this article about a japanese guy who recited pi to 100,000 decimal places. I'm reading the article thinking how accidentally hip that guy must be and dwelling on a growing desire to start a fan club, when I saw the article claim that "most math texts" report Pi as 3.141. Cringe. I have modestly memorized Pi to 3.1415926535... and I doubt any math text would commit the sin of rounding down a 5 (worse a 59). OK, to be fair math texts avoid rounding since it is misleading - science texts round like it's going out of style. But my guess is that "most math texts" show much better judgement and would NEVER report Pi to only three decimal places, but carefully introduce Pi as an irrational number and include a generous number of decimals, like Eric Weisstein's MathWorld entry on Pi.
I think it's a little like false authority syndrome - in a moment of hubris a reporter made a silly statement (that caught me in the wrong mood and raised some serious nerd hackles) in the hopes of sounding smart, much in the vein of the awesomely bad (and much more entertaining) technobabble we all love in Star Trek. Admit it - you love it!