Pi has as many digits as our national debt, 15 trillion. If you add 1000 digits a second over the next 2000 years, you would still be only a half way there.
No engineer or mathematician or scientist in their right mind could possibly resist watching this film.
Pi is to science like McDonald’s secret sauce is to the Big Mac. It’s everything.
It’s pretty damn shocking to experience what everybody else thinks of engineers. We spend our whole lives with our head in the books, creating all these wonderful things that people adore, and this is our reward?
Ruthless businessmen cash in on all our hard work and become billionaires. Entire economies become enriched with the products of our imaginations. Our reward is poverty? Ignominy? Hatred?
People think engineers are paranoid for being afraid when they invent something worthwhile. Wall Street will come knocking on your door, and you better give them your invention, or they will drive you insane and throw you in the dipsy dumpster out back. You really think that’s a myth???
How many rich engineers do you know? Hell, how many middle class engineers do you know? Have you ever met an engineer socially? You probably think it’s because we’re nerds. Like hell, we’re too busy at work and keeping up with the state of the art.
Even after we retire we’re incapable of having a social life, of having a conversation, of relating to anything other than abstract mathematics. And this film, this universal attitude, is our reward????
Ah, but vengeance is ours at last. Every engineering calculation uses pi (because pi is the basis of sine, cosine, and trigonometry itself; and, by consequence, calculus, and thus, all of mathematics), but pi is always rounded off to 16 significant digits (16 out of billions of significant digits).
It’s no wonder Toyota’s brake pads screwed up, why jets collide, nuclear reactors blow up, shuttles explode, and bridges collapse.
Alas, Wall Street has found a work-around. They have options, futures, hedge funds, derrivatives, and mortgage-backed securities. And yet, all of these finely tuned operations are performed by — you guessed it, computers.
And who runs the computers??? Engineers do, paranoid engineers, engineers who want their slice of the pie, their piece of ass, their just reward, their fifteen minutes of fame…
What would happen if engineers and programmers went on strike? What if we gave everybody their own big number calculators and told them to run the world? And you thought Hasidic Jews were bizarre, that God was malicious.
You thought facility with math and numbers was a mental illness??
Just you try and live your life without — without — everything!!!!
