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I am using a low code environment (Mendix) and I have to add a constant to my application. However, the symbol for constant is the pi symbol. I suppose pi is constant if you could ever wrestle it down. 
Seems like an odd choice of an icon for a constant.
Pi symbol[^]
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Among all mathematical constants, Pi is certainly the most well known. I'm not surprised they chose it to represent a constant. What would you have chosen yourself?
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Personally, after the third watermelon, I'm full."
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phil.o wrote: Pi is certainly the most well known
How well do you know pi?
phil.o wrote: What would you have chosen yourself?
A monkey.
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Everyone is born right handed. Only the strongest overcome it.
Fight for left-handed rights and hand equality.
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ZurdoDev wrote: How well do you know pi?
I can tell its first seven decimals without looking it up. But that is irrelevant, anyway. I'm not saying that everyone know a lot of decimals of pi, but that the existence of pi is known all around the world, for several centuries.
"Five fruits and vegetables a day? What a joke!
Personally, after the third watermelon, I'm full."
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phil.o wrote: pi is known all around the world, for several centuries.
Not sure how that is relevant to this topic, but whatever.
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Everyone is born right handed. Only the strongest overcome it.
Fight for left-handed rights and hand equality.
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Sometimes you regret that you didn't waste your money. For me, one of those is when I saw a T-shirt offered that had a huge pi symbol at the front, and the 2000 first digits of pi covering the back. Why didn't I buy it? I should have!
I could of course have had made a T-shirt like that. But it would be stealing somebody else's design. I don't want to do that. I wouldn't like anyone to steal my unique T-shirt designs.
(At the moment, I am wearing at T-shirt telling 'I say "sibboleth"'. Most people need an explanation, but when they get it, they return a confirming nod.)
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The ratio of the diameter of someone's belly and its circumference? 
I have lived with several Zen masters - all of them were cats.
His last invention was an evil Lasagna. It didn't kill anyone, and it actually tasted pretty good.
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This implies bellies are perfect circles. This takes a lot of hamburgers/fries/soda to get to that point.
"Five fruits and vegetables a day? What a joke!
Personally, after the third watermelon, I'm full."
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But then the icon could be a circle with a dot in the middle and then we would now be guessing how this symbolizes a constant.
I have lived with several Zen masters - all of them were cats.
His last invention was an evil Lasagna. It didn't kill anyone, and it actually tasted pretty good.
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When IBM introduced their 360 series, they used as a logo a circle with a vertical, down pointing radius (like that often used to mark an on/off button).
When the 370 series was introduced, they chose as a logo ... a larger circle!
I think this was created as an internal joke; I have never seen it in any official marketng material. One of my former-IBM-employees coworkers had it in several IBM internal memos. The logo had both the classical 360 circle and a larger one surrounding it, touching at the bottom where the radius touched. It really was a great idea, that should have made it to the public marketing material!
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Pizzas are fairly round. So what is the volume of pizza with radius z and thikckness a?
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Pi*z*z*a - very clever !
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| "The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." - Albert Einstein | | "If you are searching for perfection in others, then you seek disappointment. If you seek perfection in yourself, then you will find failure." - Balboos HaGadol Mar 2010 |
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Which leads to R, the universal gas constant.
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Why? Unless your computer has unlimited memory, the set of the values it can store exactly will always be a tiny subset of the infinite set of values it can only approximate. Not to talk of the infinite set of values it can't store at all.
I have lived with several Zen masters - all of them were cats.
His last invention was an evil Lasagna. It didn't kill anyone, and it actually tasted pretty good.
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True story, from a while ago when universities (e.g. in Bergen, Norway) still had classical IBM 308x mainframes (i.e. in the mid 1980s):
One professor at the Bergen University was teaching a course in numerical methods for calculating e.g. trigonometric functions, including error propagation and error estimation. When the students ran tests on the errors in arctan (which may be a little nasty, for extreme values), the errors turned out to be larger than would be expected for the given word length.
The professor was not one to just shrug at this with a a "so what?" - he made a request to IBM to investigate the cause of this greater-than-expected error. This is where my coworker came in, working at IBM at the time; he was set to analyze it.
That IBM 3083 library function, written in assembly, was a simple adaptation of the IBM 380 and 370 functions. Which were adaptations of the IBM 360 series function. (Now we are back to the early 1960s.) But even though the 360 instruction set was new, the library function was rewritten directly based on the IBM 7090 assembly code library function. Which was an adaptation of the IBM 709 library function...
The 709 was introduced in 1957. At that time, constants such as pi was calculated by hand, and entered in hexadecimal format in the source code. Being a constand, the job was done; no need to recalculate it.
But 709/7090 were 36 bit machines. The 360, 370, 380 and 3083 were 32 bit machines. In the move to a different word length, the least significant bits of the 36 bit hex value had simply been chopped off; noone had cared to look for rounding. The error estimates made by the professor had assumed a rounding of the least significant bit of pi.
Once IBM replaced the hexadecimal (and later chopped off) pi value from the 709, and replaced it with a properly rounded value, the arctan errors matched perfectly with the professor's estimates for the given word length.
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Clearly, it should have been 🥮 ... 
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
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ZurdoDev wrote: Mendix
Sounds like a lie.
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Does time fly when you're having Rum?
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Yes, it's a rum do.
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
-- 6079 Smith W.
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No, but the room does.
Software rusts. Simon Stephenson, ca 1994. So does this signature. me, 2012
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Time keeps on sipping, sipping, sipping... into the future.
(Apologies to Steve Miller Band)
If you can't laugh at yourself - ask me and I will do it for you.
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I am not sure but it is definitely worth a try, you know: just to verify/ check things.
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Scotch that idea - it's just another silly rum-or. You know, to tequila funny-bone.
| Ravings en masse^ |
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| "The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." - Albert Einstein | | "If you are searching for perfection in others, then you seek disappointment. If you seek perfection in yourself, then you will find failure." - Balboos HaGadol Mar 2010 |
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Quite possibly, but we need more proof.
"the debugger doesn't tell me anything because this code compiles just fine" - random QA comment
"Facebook is where you tell lies to your friends. Twitter is where you tell the truth to strangers." - chriselst
"I don't drink any more... then again, I don't drink any less." - Mike Mullikins uncle
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And do clothes fall off when drinking Tequila?
I'm not sure how many cookies it makes to be happy, but so far it's not 27.
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