How dumb is the Indiana Government?
O.K., most of us know that the world "law" has two distinct meanings. One is what governments do, a rule, a legal code, that creates the due process that ends in either civil or criminal sanctions. That's what Indiana did with their "Religion Protection Act" or whatever they called it.
Now there's another definition of law, which is the discovery of a fact of nature that has nothing to do with governments. The law of gravity was first articulated by Newton, and defined bythe formula here, not that this is important, but it sort of makes this a serious diary.
Well, would you believe that the same State that this week couldn't quite accept the natural law of culture, which is that it changes over time, and cannot always be reversed by a legislature, even if signed by the governor had attempted this once before-- confusing the first definition of legislated law with the second of discovered fact of nature.
The year was 1897; and while it didn't get signed by the governor, or even presented to the senate, the assembly actually did pass it. These legislators didn't like the idea that the calculation of the ratio between the diameter and circumstance of a circle just kept going on and on. You know that thing called Pi. So they used the kind of law that they could control to put an end to this number, this calculation that was so disturbing.
Hey, although this is still April first, this is no April fools joke. It's described in this Wikipedia Article with the name, Indiana Pi Bill. Excerpted and condensed here:
The Indiana Pi Bill is the popular name for bill #246 of the 1897 sitting of the Indiana General Assembly, one of the most famous attempts to establish mathematical truth by legislative fiat.
The bill never became law, due to the intervention of Professor C. A. Waldo of Purdue University, who happened to be present in the legislature on the day it went up for a vote.
The impossibility of squaring the circle using only compass and straightedge constructions, suspected since ancient times, was rigorously proven in 1882 by Ferdinand von Lindemann. Better approximations of π than those inferred from the bill have been known since ancient times.
After a long discussion of Pi among friends, I did some research and happened to come across this. What a perfect day to bring this up on this website.