This isn't politics but a Congressman lying by shaving the truth. So how can you tell if a Congressman is lying? ... His lips are moving. But this ain't right: This is what good engineers do to understand and diagnose a problem. So this is what the Congressman said: Congressman Waxman had this testimony, this transcript. Engineers, good engineers, discuss a problem and seek to identify the parts, the elements. That is what the engineer was describing. Instead, Waxman takes a cheat "no written list of the potential causes to be explored." Congressman Waxman, engineers do not live in a world of written laws and precidents and manufactured rules. We deal with the natural world in part because it frequently surprises us with stuff we'd never seen before. We deal with reality, Mother Nature, and she is coy with her secrets. We don't have a stinkin' "written list of the potential causes" and if you, Congressman Waxman, think there is one . . .STAND AND DELIVER! Bob Wilson, one pissed engineer!
I'm at page 19 of the transcript and I can only read a couple of pages . . . and then I have to do something else. It is obvious the committee lawyer wanted "the secret plan" or "the answer" and has absolutely no concept of the scientific method. It is the clash of two cultures and one carries the 'thinking' patterns of the Inquisition. Bob Wilson
As a consulting engineer who has occasionally butted heads with legal types, I can only confirm that Shakespeare had the right idea
Politics should be kept out of science, otherwise we get goofy things like a bill to establish the value of pi.
Snopes does not mention Indiana, but does have the following, which suggests to me that the Indiana one might also be urban legend. Alabama says pi = 3? On the other hand, I would not put it past the goofuses who run our nation to do something like this, so maybe Indiana really did.
I've always been fond of 355/113 ... division of two pairs of three digit, odd numbers to approximate an irrational. Bob Wilson
HEY! I'm a Hoosier. And yes, we can divide two numbers. It's just like dividing one only twice as hard.
From the last paragraph of the Snopes article: And the only reason it died on the Senate floor is because a mathematician was coincidentally just happening to be visiting the senate at the time the bill was being debated and told everyone what nonsense it was. At the time I wrote the above post, I couldn't link to Wikipedia. Now I can, so here's a link to the article about [ame="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_Pi_Bill"]it[/ame]. Also, recommended book: A History of Pi by Petr Beckmann.
I often wonder why I spent all that time in school to become an engineer. It quickly became apparent, out in The Real World, that nobody listens to us. Critical decisions are made by bean counters and political hacks, not trained folks The worst - or best, depending on your perspective - example of this is Public Works. Key decision making responsibility is held by appointed political nice person kissers, who have zero knowledge of the systems they are in charge of I once had to explain why a given pump wasn't able to keep up with water demand. Put on the whiteboard many equations regarding various pump performance characteristics. The political hack looked at the white board, and his eyes glazed over. He finally stopped me and asked what the "x" stood for. "Which one?" I asked him "Any one" he replied Oy
probably why the tunnel ceiling collapsed here in boston or the 10' water main coupling let go after only 6 years.
