[lug] Fwd: Pi Day is coming

[Jeffrey S. Haemer]

The Wikipedia article Davide points to asserts that we use United States
customary units <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_customary_units>,
which are related to Imperial units but different.  That's clearly just a
nit.

What's at least slightly more interesting (well, at least to me), is how
binary-based some of the US measurement series are.  In liquid measures,
for example, we have four drams to a tablespoon, two tablespoons to an
ounce, four ounces to a gill, two gills to a cup, two cups to a pint, two
pints to a quart, and four quarts to a gallon.  1 gallon = 2^10 drams.

Oh, sure, a hogshead is 63 gallons, but that's clearly just an off-by-one
error.

Tau would, therefore, fit right into our US customary units. If, in
contrast, we go metric, we'll want to convert our formulae to use a
constant that's 10*pi.

Being pro-active, I say we move right now to call 10*pi, "Eta." After all,
Eta is 31.4..., so we can celebrate Pi day and Eta day at the same time,
and boast that every March 14 we "Eta Pi."

Who else is with me on this?

Plus, the day on which we celebrate by trying to drink *2^10* drams of
Irish Whiskey is exactly *two* days later.  *Two*.  To the *tenth.
*Coincidence?
I think not.


On Thu, Mar 14, 2013 at 7:09 PM, Davide Del Vento <
davide.del.vento at gmail.com> wrote:

> > But I'm a convert now to Tau day!!  Tau is 2 pi.  The Tau Manifesto is a
> beautiful piece of work on why the more fundamental constant is actually
> tau.  Let's celebrate come June 28th....
> >
> > Tau Day | No, really, pi is wrong: The Tau Manifesto by Michael Hartl
> >  http://tauday.com/
>
> I may convert to tau when the USA forgets the
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_units (I mean imperial?
> Imperial? Is our country imperialist? :-) converts to
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_system
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-- 
Jeffrey Haemer <jeffrey.haemer at gmail.com>
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