Conquer Club

Read a couple articles today on the various extractions of pi, and the real takeaway is the accelerating pace of change in my lifetime.

When I was born, pi was only known to 20,000 decimal places.
By the time I started school, it had reached half a million.
By the time I first learned about pi, it had doubled again to a full million.
By the time I finished high school, it had doubled yet again to two million.
By the time my kids finished high school, pi was known to 52 billion decimal places.
Today, the record stands at 22 trillion.

That's a billionfold increase within my lifetime.

Really drives home the staggering changes the Information Age has wrought.

Yet it's most often rounded to the second decimal place in practice.

For me the smart phone is a better representation of "the staggering..."

My grandfather didn't have alternating current electricity or a telephone of any kind at home. He rode in trains across Canada and a boat to England to fight in France and return home.

My son has never used a phone attatched to a wire at home. or had to wait for Saturday to see bugs bunny, he can use YouTube on his smart phone. He has rode in airplanes to Hawaii.