Fun talk:Pi to one million digits

This is an excellent article, but is clearly liberal dogma propagated by the MSM. In Christ. Doggedpersistance 15:07, 1 August 2007 (CDT)

The Meatballs and Spaghetti Monster? Totnesmartin 15:17, 1 August 2007 (CDT)

Not a million

I have just counted all the numbers on this page twice and I can only find 999,923 digits. I feel the title of the article should be changed.

I make this 1,000,008. Can someone confirm the number? --Bob^{'s your uncle} 16:47, 17 October 2007 (EDT)

After it finished screaming in agony from the copy-paste memory load, Word's word count claims there's 1,000,000 exactly. --AKjeldsen^Godspeed! 16:52, 17 October 2007 (EDT)

You used a computer! Wimp! I counted them by eye and I still make it 1,000,008. I was up all night too.--Bob^{bing for apples} 13:58, 18 October 2007 (EDT)

Each line is 100 characters long (copy-paste into word, word count, characters). By an mathematical inference, that means that there are a multiple of 100 digits. Hence there are probably 1,000,000 decimal places, so it's actually to 1,000,001 digits. VirileSterile^yawn! 14:10, 18 October 2007 (EDT)

Oh, sure...

but what is it squared? HA! VirileSterile^yawn! 16:39, 17 October 2007 (EDT)

...Pi times as much? --AKjeldsen^Godspeed! 16:52, 17 October 2007 (EDT)

Wrong

This is wrong. There's a 3 that should be a 6 and a 9 that should be a 7. Who came up with this rediculous atrocity? This is a slap in the face to mathematicians everywhere. -Smyth 16:51, 17 October 2007 (EDT)

- There's an e that should be an i. Who came up with this atrocity? - Rivius

Disappointed.

This article has limited usability due to it's lack of annotation and or indexing.

Will the author please ensure that each digit is numbered sequentially as follows:

1) 3. 2) 1 3) 4 4) 1 5) 5

etc.

--Snakeoil 16:04, 13 April 2009 (EDT)

Favorite pseudoscientific madness

Now, take this and convert it to letters, using various simple codes, and then look for messages.

The novel Contact, Carl Sagan, contained, as part of the story, that encoded in the digits of pi was a message. When converted to a graphical display, way, way out, well beyond a million digits, was a perfect circle (within the coding accuracy), as I recall. And then there was more beyond that, ultimately a whole technological revelation. From whoever made this universe; in the story, this is a "race" so ancient that it's completely ridiculous, beyond what we think of as time.

But more to the point, the believers in the "Miracle of the 19" believe in a kind of message encoded into the letters of the Qur'an. Initially it was claimed to be a demonstration and proof that the text was perfectly preserved, but, as errors were found in the counts, Rashad Khalifa eventually was led to claim that the modern text of the Qur'an was corrupt and he threw out a verse to make one of his "important counts" come out a multiple of 19. But he'd already so heavily manipulated the counts that it was totally arbitrary. Turns out in counting letters and words in the Qur'an you have many choices to make. By "finding the correct way to count" you have created the match, it doesn't take much to make a count come out a multiple of 19. But then if you are constrained to make your next count in the same way, eventually you run into some limitations. And that's where he started to claim corruption of the text, after originally claiming that the same text was confirmed as being perfectly preserved.

If the code had been more sophisticated, error-correction would certainly have been a possibility. But it wasn't.

(In fact, there are plenty of known variations on the Qur'anic text, the idea that there is one single confirmed text is common woo among Muslims. I ran into this, to the point that when I showed photocopies of the Tashkent Qur'an, one of the oldest extent manuscripts of the Qur'an, showing variations, I was considered by the ignorant running the mosque in that city to be a dangerous heretic, and they banned me from the mosque. Well, they said "We can't stop you from coming here to pray, but you are forbidden to speak to anyone". But any serious Muslim scholar knows about this stuff. They were just stupid and ignorant and like many stupid and ignorant people, a bit vicious. Ignorance alone is remediable, but stupidity is actually what is called, in the Qur'an, "kufr," denial, or often translated badly as "unbelief." I've been privileged to see the reality of the Qur'anic text, which simply describes people as they are... from my point of view, of course.)

A similar kind of claim is made with the Torah code, where one counts every Nth letter, looking for messages.

The human mind is a "meaning-creating machine," we are designed to look for patterns. It's a survival trait, but it also can lead us down some strange paths, where a pattern is only coincidence. Of course, people who fall for this don't believe in coincidence.

Maybe they have more fun, maybe they don't.

In any case, pi is truly a "revealed message," with an uncorrupted text, if you've been very careful. So if we are going to look for patterns of meaning, why not there? Have fun! Don't stay up all night. And don't believe what you find, until and unless it's totally and clearly overwhelming and shows predictability. And even then, only believe it for a few minutes a week, otherwise you are gone. You will become a sweaty obsessive, you will have no friends except other loonies, and forget about holding down a job, children, and fluff like that. The Truth is all that Counts. --Abd (talk) 02:47, 4 March 2012 (UTC)