Happy Pi Day! Celebrate by learning how to calculate pi by throwing frozen hot dogs, because . . .
. . . all the countless ways to approximate the most prolific irrational number in the universe, there are none quite as interesting or as surprisingly satisfying as throwing perfectly good food around your kitchen. In fewer steps than it takes to circumscribe your house in a circle of baguettes, you, too, can easily add a slice of pi into your dinner menu tonight. The best part is...it really works!
You could also do it by drawing lines on a piece of paper and dropping toothpicks onto the paper from about 3 feet up, but where's the fun in that?
Comments
Cuyr little way to calvuate pi to however many digits you want:
pu = 4 * 2/3 * 4/3 * 4/5 * 6/5 *6/7 * 8/7 * 8/9 * 10/9 ...
You can't just plug that into your favorite computer language and go, though; the languages don't keep teack of all those digits, and they round off instead. You have to write routines that store the numbers as text strings and THAT is a major pain to do without error.