Re: Starving people refuse to eat food aid

[Richard Casady]

On Sat, 12 Dec 2009 00:36:52 +0000 (UTC), David Scheidt
<dsch...@panix.com> wrote:

>40.211359 N 74.090080 W for my former apartment.

Minutes of latitude are usefully equal to one nautical mile. A second
is equal to a hundred feet, or very nearly. To digress slightly, if
you round off Pi to 3.14159 and calculate the circumference of the
earth, you get a result one hundred feet different than if you use the
16 places you get with the CalculatorThatTakesNoPrisoners. It use to
be difficult to get positions better than one mile, with a sextant.

Casady

[Keith F. Lynch]

Richard Casady <richar...@earthlink.net> wrote:
> To digress slightly, if you round off Pi to 3.14159 and calculate
> the circumference of the earth, you get a result one hundred
> feet different than if you use the 16 places you get with the
> CalculatorThatTakesNoPrisoners.

Indeed, the only reason to calculate more than perhaps 20 digits of pi
is "because it's there."

Here's a table of when 10^N digits of pi were known, by N, and the
gap in years for each such order-of-magnitude increase:

1 1400
2 1706 306
3 1949 243
4 1958 9
5 1961 3
6 1973 12
7 1983 10
8 1987 4
9 1989 2
10 1997 8
11 1999 2
12 2002 3

We're overdue for ten trillion digits.
--
Keith F. Lynch - http://keithlynch.net/
Please see http://keithlynch.net/email.html before emailing me.