Blow Your Mind

Yesterday my friend Richard was cursing my name all day. I made him think of something that he couldn't stop thinking about. I gave him a thought that acted as a mental virus. Taking up all of his cranial processing power.

I noticed that he was reading Pi: A Biography of the World's Most Mysterious Number. He told me some stuff that he had read in the book. It reminded me of an interesting fact.

I pointed out to Richard that the relationship between a circle's radius and its circumference is linear. No big deal, C = Pi*R*2. I guess it was the way that I pointed it out. I said, "Say you have a basketball with a rope tightly wrapped around its equator. Then you take that rope and add 100 inches to its length. Now the rope has almost 16 inches extra between it and the basket ball. Here's the part that Richard couldn't get his mind around. Take the earth and wrap a rope around its equator. It's a really big rope. Now add 100 inches to the length of the rope. If you went around the earth placing sticks in the ground to make the rope taught again guess the length of those sticks. Almost 16 inches."