Mathmatically Taylor

So today was a very sad day. I don't care for White Diamonds, but I do love Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and I am deeply saddened to hear that Elizabeth Taylor died today. In honor of her memory - go out and watch an Elizabeth Taylor movie! She's all drama and beauty - so worth an afternoon or evening with an Elizabeth movie...plus, your local library is guaranteed to have at least one Taylor movie (that makes it FREE!).
So I browsed her IMDb and found a few movies that look interesting:
Obviously, I'd start with Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, The Blue Bird, There's One Born Every Minute, Giant (hello Rock Hudson!), and since I just left Paris...I'd suggest The Last Time I Saw Paris.

I also saw something incredibly weird today. It has to do with Pi - and no, I didn't spell that wrong, I mean Pi. That would be that little weird symbol (π)that probably annoyed some of you during high school math. According to dictionary.com Pi is "used as the symbol for the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter." For most of us, we remember Pi as 3.14, but Pi is a really long number - in the wikipedia article it says "π is an irrational number, which means that its value cannot be expressed exactly as a fraction m/n, where m and n are integers. Consequently, its decimal representation never ends or repeats." Here is just a line of Pi: 3.141592653589793238462643383279502884197169399375105820974944592307816406286 ! Yeah, that would just be a line. You can check out the first 100,000 Digits of Pi here. Now I did not bother to learn Pi much farther past 3.14 and finding the π button on my calculator; however, there was an ambitious nerdy guy in my class that actually attempted to learn it to the first 100 digits. Now Pi has been around since Ancient Greece and all of the sudden here come some politicians with some legislation to make Pi just 3. Now why do these politicians want to bother with mathematics that have been around for millennia - could it be because Pi is WRONG? or maybe we need to adapt to a changing world? No - these politicians want to change Pi because we are rated 25th (in the WORLD) at mathematics based on results of 15 year olds. Instead of attempting to put more money and funding into schools to help boost the actual LEARNING of math, no, our politicians want to cheat and actually CHANGE math to make it easier for children. My state has recently cut 8 percent public school aid amounting to about $834 million; this makes me extremely sad and depressed. Cutting school funding and CHANGING math is not going to make us more intellectually competitive in the world. And besides - legislation in the states will do nothing to world mathematics; this legislation would only cripple future mathematicians in world markets. Dear GOD, I hope this legislation doesn't go through; otherwise, I think I could probably get a better education in communist USSR. Really, this is a WTF moment for the USA!

And here comes the punch line - the story is fake! Pi is safe for now, but I don't know if I'd put it past some politicians to try and get this through all just to make us "look" smarter than we really are. With all the crippling legislation that is seriously damaging the United States education system - I wouldn't put it passed the government to try and change it! When will the United States realize that they can't cut school funding and still expect the United States to be intellectually competitive on a global scale!? We are supposed to be a global powerhouse and we expect to keep that position while skimping on education - I think we need to wake up and overhaul the education system! And I think most importantly, teachers shouldn't have to be wasting time raising your children (teaching them about hygiene - having to brush their teeth - and disciplinary problems). If the teachers could focus on math instead of the things that should be taken care of in the home, we could be higher ranked than 25th in world mathematics.