- The beautiful number. As opposed to the golden ratio. (pi.ytmnd.com)
This morning, among its usual Monday welter of bad-news-about-the-newspaper-industry stories, the NYT reminded us about something else that isn’t new:
URL shorteners, which abbreviate unwieldy Web addresses into bite-size links, have been around for years…
via Shorter URLs May Offer Tracking Benefits to Marketers – NYTimes.com.
Years? How about millenia? After all, which is easier to remember:
π
or
3.14159265358979323846…
??
And not only that, Wikipedia reminds us that
The constant is named “π” because “π” is the first letter of the Greek words περιφέρεια (periphery) and περίμετρος (perimeter), probably referring to its use in the formula to find the circumference, or perimeter, of a circle.
Two shorteners for the price of one, then.
(Props to @BrentDPayne for putting π in a tweet, leading to this epiphany.)