FIITJEE, phones, and pi

If there is one thing FIITJEE is good for, it’s supplying good content for blog entries. At least 70% of the entries I made between May 2009 and May 2011 were related in some way to FIITJEE. (Most of the others were about Bleach, fan fiction, and other insignificant things.) If I had been a less sadistic person, I would actually have felt bad for the thousands of students across the country who have damned themselves this season to two years of merciless mind rape by joining FIITJEE and other concentration camps of the sort. Since I’m not, I feel no such thing. I went back to FIITJEE a couple of days ago to have one last marks sheet attested, thus officially ending my relationship with them. My loyal readers, FIITJEE is officially a closed chapter. There shall be no further mention of the topic in my blog after this paragraph, unless exceptional and unlikely circumstances arise.

Cohesiveness is something you will not find in this entry, as in most entries I post after a long period of inactivity. The next topic will bear so little relation to the previous that you will be apt to consider it moral treason; and I will advise you to take a short break and resume reading at a happier time, if you don’t feel like making the illogical jump right now. My dad bought me a Windows Phone when we were in Redmond. Some people may not like the Windows Phone, but it has everything I personally need, and an excellent user interface. If there’s one thing you can’t beat Microsoft at, it’s the visual appeal of their products. Then again, different people like different things.

I read an article in the newspaper today about how the mathematical community was considering replacing the concept of Pi with something else. “Tau”, they will call it, and its value will be twice Pi’s. If you ask me, this is one of the most pointless and irrational things a mathematician could do. Their reason for suggesting the change is that Pi doesn’t capture the essence of the circle – how it fails to do so, and what this essence is in the first place, they don’t say. But the reporter, in all his ignorance, seems to like it just because it’s novel. The headline was something to the effect that Pi’s 4000-year reign was about to end. What a presumptuous thing to suggest. One mathematician was quoted as saying that he was the most vehement in his anti-Pi agitations – or words to that effect. In making such a statement, he betrayed that his IQ approximated to Pi, which must be very embarrassing for someone who likes to think himself a proponent of logical reasoning. If the scientific community ever stoops so low as to effect this change, I will lose my respect for it.