I think Sean may have set his mind-reading device to blow instead of suck.

"Oh, here's the problem. It was set to evil."

So the reason they've been wrong so many times is that the Bible predicted they'd be wrong.

Will people who are wishing for the End of the World please go stand all together and just kill each other, leaving the rest of us alone to NOT blow up the place? PLEASE?

So the reason they've been wrong so many times is that the Bible predicted they'd be wrong.

So if I predicted the same thing, does that make me infallible?

And then you take a piece of string and measure the circumference. And then you divide the circumference by the diameter. And if you know how to do long division, pi JUST HAPPENS.

But once you measure the circumference, God sneakily increases the length of the string to make it look like Pi is really 3.1415...etc. Just to test your faith, you see.

But...you can't! I mean, all you need to do is draw a circle using a compass and measure the diameter. And then you take a piece of string and measure the circumference. And then you divide the circumference by the diameter.

Although when I tried to look up things about how to prove pi, I kept seeing things about pentagons and Lemma's and things like this: [link]

which just scare me.

ETA Please note that I do not think that pi is three. I just, frankly, not even remembering that pi is the circumferance divided by the diameter or vice versa without looking it up, have no more proff in my head that pi is 3.14 than that pi is three. Although I am sure it could be proved to my satisfaction. But I have faith in pi being 3.14

There was an interesting link in the comments of that pi post: [link]

There are a lot of Hebrew words written in it, so I don't think copy and paste will work here, so I'm copying what I can of the English text:

The common word for circumference is (qav) Here, however, the spelling of the word for circumference, (qaveh) adds a heh (h) as a conjunction for the masculine singular noun.)

In the Hebrew Bible, the scribes did not alter any text which they felt had been copied incorrectly. Rather, they noted in the margin what they thought the written text should be. The written variation is called a kethiv, and the marginal annotation is called the qere

To the ancient scribes, this was also regarded as a remez, a hint of something deeper. This appears to be the clue to treat the word as a mathematical formula.

The Hebrew alphabet is alphanumeric: each Hebrew letter also has a numerical value and can be used as a number.

The [can't copy] has a value of 100; the has a value of 6; thus, the normal spelling would yield a numerical value of 106. The addition of the [can't copy] with a value of 5, increases the numerical value to 111. This indicates an adjustment of the ratio 111/ 106, or 31.41509433962 cubits. Assuming that a cubit was 1.5 ft. (3) this 15-foot-wide bowl would have had a circumference of 47.12388980385 feet.

This Hebrew "code" results in 47.12264150943 feet, or an error of less than 15 thousandths of an inch! (This error is 15 times better than the 22/7 estimate that we were accustomed to using in school!) How did they accomplish this? This accuracy would seem to vastly exceed the precision of their instrumentation. How would they know this? How was it encoded into the text?

That's way too mathy and gematria-y for me, and of that author's other stuff is not my way of looking at things.

I've never had the need to read the I Kings text as any more than an approximation, but if the author of that webpage didn't pull the translation explanation bits from a hat, it's pretty interesting.

Maybe pi is right and all the other numbers are WRONG.

Pi is what we've been considering "3" -- and "3" is actually 3.14etc.

ETA Please note that I do not think that pi is three. I just, frankly, not even remembering that pi is the circumferance divided by the diameter or vice versa without looking it up, have no more proff in my head that pi is 3.14 than that pi is three. Although I am sure it could be proved to my satisfaction. But I have faith in pi being 3.14

Hee! Sophia, I googled "calculator with pi" to get more digits than 3.14. The first hit was this: [link]

I plugged 30.00000 in for the circumference, and 10.00000 in for the diameter, and the calculator gave me "3" as the answer for both "calculated pi" and "rounded pi". I wish I understood.

I plugged 30.00000 in for the circumference, and 10.00000 in for the diameter, and the calculator gave me "3" as the answer for both "calculated pi" and "rounded pi". I wish I understood.

You can't have a circle with those dimensions, is the problem -- the calculator is telling you that 30/10=3, which is a completely useless piece of information that has nothing to do with Pi. (What it should really do is let you plug in either the diameter OR the circumference, and use Pi to tell you the other one.)

Mmmmmm, pi.

Egad, Plei, that baby girl of yours is unbearably cute. She looks like a real live kewpie doll. Tell me you are dressing her up as Bettie Boop for Halloween? I want to find a Max the Wild Thing costume for Isaac. It's his favorite book right now. Plus he kinda looks like Maurice Sendak drew him.