Pi Crop Circle

telegraph.co.uk

I found this one on Digg the other day. The article calls this the "most complex crop circle ever", which clearly isn't true, but it is pretty clever none the less. What I found really entertaining is the discussion it spawned at Digg when someone made the, kind of obvious, observation that since this representation of pi was in base ten, it was obviously made by humans.

The decimal representation of pi, of course, completely changes under different bases. For example, in base eight it would by about 3.11038. Our base ten number system is inherited from the Arabic world and is completely a result of use having ten fingers and toes, nothing more. It would seem unlikely that an alien civilization would have the same number system as us. In fact, different cultures here on Earth had different number systems. The Babylonians had a base 60 system that we still carry in our clocks, among other places. The familiar Roman system wasn't a place value system at all.

It cracks me up that there still is a, so called, crop circle mystery. There is no mystery. The circles are made by humans. In fact, here's their website: circlemakers.org. These people are hardly shy of their creations. In fact, they rightfully consider themselves artists. Yet, UFO enthusiast still like to believe that there is no way us mere humans could have created such things.

Our perceptions of the world are what we make them.

Mike