happy pi day!

Yes, today (3/14) really is pi day. So have a happy one!

Usually I celebrate pi day in the office by eating things I should not eat. However on this particular pi day, we are all on spring break and so very likely nobody is in the office, at least not enough to celebrate with a collection of tasty pastries and pies.

So instead I'm writing a blog post to pay homage to the venerable ratio. It gives me an opportunity to discuss an amusing pair of wackos. : )

Ralph René is deceased, but while living he made quite a stir (well not really) with his claim that $\pi$ is actually an algebraic number, in particular the value $\sqrt{2}+\sqrt{3}$. This is about 0.0046717 larger than the actual value of $\pi$, well outside the estimate $223/71 <\pi < 22/7$ proved by Archimedes in the third century BCE. Talk about setting knowledge back! René was not himself a mathematician, but he apparently got at least some of his ideas from a mathematician by the name of Dan W. Gaddy, who reportedly authored a book called Quadrature of the Circle. As a result, René used the term "Gaddy's pi" for the new value $\sqrt{2}+\sqrt{3}$ which he believes is the actual value of $\pi$. I haven't read Gaddy's book, but my guess is that it is nothing crazy. Gaddy allegedly gives a geometric construction which René misunderstood to imply that $\pi=\sqrt{2}+\sqrt{3}$. But the error is René's not Gaddy's---or so I presume. Admittedly I don't have hard information on this.

I would be curious to discover whether or not Gaddy is still alive, and if so, what he has to say about René's claims.

As for René, he is a nutjob of the highest order. He sold his "proof" that $\pi=\sqrt{2}+\sqrt{3}$ in the form of a 12-page pamphlet. Elsewhere on the net I have seen this pamphlet called Squaring the Circle, and misattributed to Gaddy. I don't think the pamphlet itself is freely available, but you can watch/read a "refutation" of René's claims here.

Another pi day wacko is a man by the name of Mohammad-Reza Mehdinia, who claims that $\pi=3.125$. I can't find a lot of information on this guy, but at least one random person on the net suggested that Mehdinia is motivated by the fact that 3.125 is closer to the Biblical value $\pi=3$. Frankly, I don't know what to make of his motivation. At first I thought he was in it for the money, since he has tried to sell a book on the subject. But then I discovered that he makes his book freely available on his website. On the other hand, there is no mention of the Bible or Qur'an in his book, so he's apparently not motivated by religion either. I guess the guy is just the old fashioned kind of crazy.

Anyway, I welcome further info on either of these two fellows and their work. Or if you know any other pi-conspiracists, let me know about them too! (Just use the comment box below.)

Happy pi day!

two useful firefox extensions

Here are two neat firefox extensions I think are worth sharing.

1. Google/Yandex Search Link Fix (as of 2013 Mar 07, not compatible with the latest version of Firefox)

You may notice that Google does not directly link you to its search results. This is particularly problematic for non-html links (e.g. pdf files). Suppose I'm looking for a pdf file of the paper "A New Method for Constructing Invariant Subspaces." If I type that into Google it comes up as a search result, but the link it gives me is as follows:

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=method%20of%20compatible%20sequences&source=web&cd=8&cad=rja&ved=0CF8QFjAH&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.math.sc.edu%2F~sanacory%2Fseminar%2Fabstracts%2F50826GA.pdf&ei=gYI4UbuyJIqTyQGIh4DYBw&usg=AFQjCNGfW8PLPNUjfZfS_nwLFea9ZnrJ0A&bvm=bv.43287494,d.aWc

Needless to say, this is not the actual address of the pdf file. In order to fix this situation, I'm using the so-called Google/Yandex search link fix. The Google link I get for the paper is now:

http://www.math.sc.edu/~giorgis/ISP.pdf

Glorious! The only problem is this extension is not currently compatible with the latest version of Firefox. Still, it works for earlier versions---and it works well!

2. Lazarus Form Recovery

Have you ever typed up a response to a blog post only to have it get lost when your browser crashes or the blog eats it? Man, that gets me! But it turns out that there is a firefox extension called Lazarus form recovery which automatically saves what you type and gives you the chance to recover it later if you want.

thanks for all the fish...

Well I think it's time to wrap things up here, at least for a good while. I just want to thank a few people for their involvement and support. First and foremost, thanks to Michael Long, for his incredible insight, as well as his friendship. Thank you to Tyler, Jack Angstreich, M. Delaflor, Michael Russell, Tom Cantine, Glenn Peoples, James Anderson, Brian Knapp, Josh Rasmussen, Tom Watkins, Larry, Matthew Flannagan, and Matt Slick. Though some of you may not even realize it, you all have helped me greatly in this project, and I deeply appreciate it. Thanks also to all those folks who helped out, but whose names I have regrettably forgotten. I still plan on commenting on other blogs, and perhaps even posting occasional updates here. However I no longer have the time to maintain this blog with any regularity. So I am changing its status to that of archive, and leaving it open to comments.

Sungyak Kim on faith and reason

Seminary student Sungyak Kim has an unusual vision of Christian apologetics. Quoting Soren Kierkegaard, he laments the existence of that apparently typical apologist who naively attempts to "deal with every accusation, every falsification, every unfair statement, and in this way is occupied early and late in counterattacking the attack." And who exactly does he have in mind, here? Well, it's hard to say exactly, but at the beginning of his piece he drops the names of William Lane Craig and Alvin Plantinga.

C-objectivity and Craig's moral argument

Christian philosopher William Lane Craig has developed and defended an increasingly popular forumlation of the moral argument for the existence of God:

(1) If God does not exist, objective moral values and duties do not exist.
(2) Objective moral values and duties do exist.
(3) Therefore, God exists. (Reasonable Faith, p172.)

His principal defense for premise (2) consists in pointing to our moral experience, where he thinks we apprehend the objectivity of morality. However I will argue that while there may be a semantic sense in which our moral experience does offer evidence for the objectivity of morality, nevertheless Craig has in mind a different, specialized sense of objectivity which involves the existence of a concrete exemplar, and which is unsupported by experience.

More on Rasmussen's New Argument

Recall that Joshua Rasmussen in his "New Argument for a Necessary Being" (2011), argues that

(1) Normally, for any intrinsic property p that (i) can begin to be exemplified and (ii) can be exemplified by something that has a cause, there can be a cause of p's beginning to be exemplified. (p1)

When I expressed concerns with his published defense of (1), he (first privately, and later publicly) offered the following supplement (my paraphrase): Consider mundane intrinsic properties of the form being an apple, or being aluminum, etc., which can begin to be exemplified. Clearly such properties possibly have a cause for their exemplification, and so inductively we infer (1).

Why did God want Jesus to suffer?

Christians face an interesting theological challenge regarding the crucifixion of Jesus, insofar as we want to know why Jesus had to suffer in order to save the faithful. God, being omnipotent, appears to have the power to save the faithful, regardless of whether he also sent Jesus to suffer on the cross. In order to explain why it was better for him to do so, we might be tempted to invoke the notion of justice. However, if we want to appeal to God's favorite system of justice to explain why Jesus had to suffer, then we must know why that system is ultimately good for us. Since we do not in fact know how God's rules of cosmic justice are ultimately good for us, then no appeal to those rules will serve as a satisfactory explanation.