International Pi Day
3/14 is Albert’s birthday and
Π Day.
I assume you have all shopped for the perfect gift.
To start: Π ≅ 3.141592653589793238462643383279502884197169399
3751058209749445923078164062862089986280348253421170679….
On-line Opinion Magazine featuring annoyed rumblings from the leading edge of the Baby Boom firmly tied to a reality-based world.
Established: 21 November 2004
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18 comments
I had a pizza pie to celebrate. Yum!
I had a shepherd’s pie for dinner and key lime with my coffee.
I had a couple of beef, onion & mushroom pies. I keep a couple frozen pies packs. 🙂
Funny thing, one of the MMO games I play, Black Desert Online, had a special Pi Day event with Pi related rewards. Like a Pie that buffed some character stats for 314 minutes.
LOL
We are having a great political stoush over the stupid AUKUSA Nuke Sub’s deal! Made a few tweets… I hope it dies!!
The US has been training on nuclear subs for half a century. Hell, Jimmy Carter was a nuclear officer on a sub when he was in the Navy. This isn’t a month long tech school for any job on a nuclear boat. I understand the justification on the political side, but there should have been serving Australian Naval officers taking ride-alongs for a several years before the final decision was made. The US is not known for “user friendly” military gear.
i did a bunch of calculations, and yes, some of it included pi.
Agree Bryan. I tweeted your comment. 🙂
Seems Florida & the entire Caribbean, is about to be invaded by ~5,000 miles of Sargassum Seaweed. A LOT of it. 😱 Something new every year! 🤷🏽♂️🙄
Don’t think even 100 Nuclear powered Sub’s would be able to do anything about this Naval invasion. Probably make it worse. 🤔🥴
https://edition.cnn.com/travel/article/seaweed-sargassum-florida-caribbean-scn
So the problem with the French subs was that they were designed as nuclear subs but with the reactors taken out and replaced with AIP gear, thus were too expensive.
And the solution to that is to… buy nuclear subs that are even more expensive than the French subs.
One wonders how many people got paid off for that one to happen.
The unconstrained Red Tide currently in the Gulf may kill the Sargasso seaweed and the Gulf Stream may push it out to the Atlantic coast. The dead fish from the Red Tide could get covered by the seaweed which would be an improvement, but in a few years it won’t matter as the lower third of Florida will be under water.
The Subs should be fine, but any boat with an engine that uses sea water for cooling will be in trouble as their intakes will get clogged and their engines will overheat. This stuff stays on the top of the water.
Not exactly a celebration, but different strokes…
This whole Sub deal stinks. The Media and Politicians are all saying the USA is selling AU the latest ‘Virginia Class’ Sub’s. No… The latest US class Sub’s are the Seawolf (mod) which nobody outside the USA will ever get (and even any Virginia Subs will be heavily modified as there are quite a lot of top-secret systems that nobody outside the USA will ever see or get)! Now the USA/UK/AU have amended the original marketing rhetoric to say AU will get 3 to 5 “used” (whatever that actually means) Virginia-class nuclear-powered submarines sometime in the 2030s, with a new AUKUSA Class for the 2040s (yeah, right) to be primarily designed by the UK BAE, who have a terrible record and even former UK Navy Chiefs are voicing concerns over BAE having anything to do with the new Sub. I call BS On the while deal!
You may, possibly, have something to celebrate next week. Though, I’ll believe it when it happens. 😉
https://theDonald Trump says he will be arrested on Tuesday, calls for protests
Good luck all!
My understanding is that this was about desire to a punish local shipbuilding for problems on recently delivered vessels and political friction between local and federal powers. The Navy felt it was time to replace the current subs and concerned about Chinese influence. I know that New Zealand doesn’t want anything nuclear around, and have felt there was probably a similar vibe in Australia. That and cost excluded nuclear powered subs in the original RFP. I assume that the US/UK are subsidizing part of this deal and am positive that you’re right about some elements on the US subs to be delivered will be removed.
The whole sub thing makes no sense. If they were having trouble with the French, the obvious thing to do would be to re-open the bidding process. I seem to recall the Germans had a really good bid on AIP submarines.
BAE’s construction of the Astute class submarines has been a disaster. Somehow BAE managed to create a submarine more expensive than a Virginia class submarine (the Seawolf was cancelled due to expense) but not as capable. I’m not sure how they think they’re going to do better on the AUKUS submarines.
“My understanding is that this was about desire to a punish local shipbuilding for problems on recently delivered vessels and political friction between local and federal powers.”
Yep! But ALL of the problems (you can include NBN and other disasters the past half century) were caused BY the damned Governments, both State and Fed plus both ALP and LNP! They are all bloody incompetent and the entire “tender” process is primary school level at best!
My old Project Management Mentor and teacher, who was Primary Proj. Mgr. on Collins in SA, asked me to go and spend a weekend as a Engineering Consultant (given my GD creds and the fact that I had the highest level AU security clearance). He was very worried. I told everyone working on the 1st boat to get lost. Took a walk around & through the half built boat with my PM mate… Stopped with something really nagging at me… and my mate said “Yeah! Something strange is wrong here!” I walked though much slower, checked every mm of it… Then it hit me! One section had been plasma welded in place… the wrong way around! The stupid design had bugger all redundancy. There was a single armored conduit down one side of the boat for cables, pipes etc. On this one section, the conduit was on the wrong side! The two segments had to be replaced. I told my friend all the other issues I saw (which came to light for years after launch) and suggested he resign with a detailed letter as to why and cover his arse! He did.
I wouldn’t trust them to design a working mouse trap!
BAE has a local office as Eglin AFB is the US military’s prime development center for airborne weapons systems. The problem with the company is too much diversity.
The Germans seem to have had success with AIP/Diesel submarines and have made sales to other countries. I don’t see GE Electric Boat putting on extra people for foreign orders, even if they could find the people. They have been limited to US government financing and basically building the same sub for years, I’m not sure how well they could adopt to an Australian order. This is a political problem and it should be a military problem first.
It’s above my paygrade, but I know that when my aircraft when in for equipment upgrades, we had to relearn how to work when it came back because the new equipment was in different places in the racks and the colors and shapes of the knobs were wrong.
Whatever they do, the crews are going to need training before the subs are delivered.
The entire thing is a Political (AU/UK/USA) brain fart with no basis in reality!
The real cost, assuming the goods are delivered & work, will be over AU$1 Trillian just for the next 30 years! Another NBN & Collins!
F’k ’em all!
i struggled with math most of my school life, but i blew them all out of the water in geometry class, so calculations with pi mostly hold good vibes for me 🙂
And now it looks like they are going to have to replace their Taipan helicopters. Play with snakes, expect to be bitten.
The problem I had with geometry was showing why the obvious was obvious. It took me a while to figure out that most people couldn’t see things the way I saw them. It did help when I started coding and had to tell computers how to do things.