I am happy, or perhaps more accurately relieved, that my kids have outgrown the silliess of an April Fools's day prank.
Which is not to say that I don't appreciate a good joke. I just don't appreciate being the object of the joke. Perfectly reasonable. I still like to hear about them.
Several years ago I came across a website for the Museum of Hoaxes. The brick and mortar museum is in San Diego, California—I think—if they didn't just make it up. There is a virtual museum that anyone can visit here: http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/hoax/aprilfool/
They list 100 April Fool's Day hoaxes, but I'm going to comment only on numbers #5 and #7.
#5 is The Guardian newspaper's stunt from 1977 when they described an archipelago, The Republic of San Serriffe, with a set of two major semi-colon-shaped islands in the Indian Ocean. The two primary islands were called Upper Caisse and Lower Caisse. The capital of Bodoni was on the larger upper island. The smaller island had a swampy interior as well as a forested area which was the habitat of the national bird, the Kwote.
I love the typography typology. That alone makes it fun. But the rest of the story was in its marketing success. Over half of the layout was advertising, and these were big advertisers that the average person would recognize: Texaco, Kodak, Guinness. Alas, great economic leaders are hard to find. In 1989 General Pica was deposed by a cabal of senior officers; or so they said.
#7 is a circumspect story. Here, from 1998, was an article in New Mexicans for Science and Reason claiming that "the Alabama state legislature had voted to change the value of the mathematical constant pi from 3.14159 to the 'Biblical value' of 3.0."
The creation of San Serriffe had been intended as a hoax. The article about changing the value of pi was intended as a parody. It seems the original author had wanted to make a statement about teaching religion in public schools. Perhaps he ought to have done a bit more research.
Which is not to say that I don't appreciate a good joke. I just don't appreciate being the object of the joke. Perfectly reasonable. I still like to hear about them.
Several years ago I came across a website for the Museum of Hoaxes. The brick and mortar museum is in San Diego, California—I think—if they didn't just make it up. There is a virtual museum that anyone can visit here: http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/hoax/aprilfool/
They list 100 April Fool's Day hoaxes, but I'm going to comment only on numbers #5 and #7.
#5 is The Guardian newspaper's stunt from 1977 when they described an archipelago, The Republic of San Serriffe, with a set of two major semi-colon-shaped islands in the Indian Ocean. The two primary islands were called Upper Caisse and Lower Caisse. The capital of Bodoni was on the larger upper island. The smaller island had a swampy interior as well as a forested area which was the habitat of the national bird, the Kwote.I love the typography typology. That alone makes it fun. But the rest of the story was in its marketing success. Over half of the layout was advertising, and these were big advertisers that the average person would recognize: Texaco, Kodak, Guinness. Alas, great economic leaders are hard to find. In 1989 General Pica was deposed by a cabal of senior officers; or so they said.
#7 is a circumspect story. Here, from 1998, was an article in New Mexicans for Science and Reason claiming that "the Alabama state legislature had voted to change the value of the mathematical constant pi from 3.14159 to the 'Biblical value' of 3.0."
The creation of San Serriffe had been intended as a hoax. The article about changing the value of pi was intended as a parody. It seems the original author had wanted to make a statement about teaching religion in public schools. Perhaps he ought to have done a bit more research.
The closest the Bible ever comes to giving a value for pi is in 1 Kings 7:23. In a description of a bath crafted by Hiram the bronzeworker for Solomon's Temple, you can read that "he made a molten sea, ten cubits from the one brim to the other: it was round all about, and his height was five cubits: and a line of thirty cubits did compass it round about." The diameter is 10. The circumference is 30. That should be close enough for government work, but…
The Hebrew alphabet is alphanumeric: each Hebrew letter also has a numerical value and can be used as a number. ... The common word for circumference is qav. Here, however, the spelling of the word for circumference, qaveh, adds a heh (h).
The q has a value of 100; the v has a value of 6; thus, the normal spelling would yield a numerical value of 106. The addition of the h, 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., 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!
~ The answer to this difficulty was discovered by Shlomo Edward G. Belaga and appeared in Boaz Tsaban's Rabbinical Math page and is also reported in Grant Jeffrey's The Handwriting of God, Frontier Research Publications, Toronto Ontario, 1997.
Perhaps the measurement was not quite as foolish as it first appeared.
Emily, you are a math geek.
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