#Chucko Fats

[snipehuntpotatosack]

How to make a pi (post-apocalyptic tips)

Anyone can do it, with a little prep time.

1. Invent a numbering system. It has to have fractions.

2. Define a long standard of measurement, like the length between the tallest person’s feet when he or she plants them as far apart as he or she can. Get a piece of flexible tree or plant bark (one that can be rolled up and stretched out without breaking) and stretch it from one foot to the other - cut it off just where he or she steps on it. Call that long measurement a kweebl.

3. Cut several more pieces of flexible bark, making sure to include some with a light-color, the same length as the kweebl. They are all kweebls.

4. Define a short standard of measurement, like the length of the tallest person’s right thumbnail, with another piece of flexible bark. Don’t cut his or her finger, but cut it as close as you can to the beginning and end of the thumbnail. Make the cuts parallel. Call this short measurement a brunk. Make a few more, as above.

5. Get a piece of charcoal, or the burnt end of a stick, or something that keeps leaving a dark mark when you make a line on a piece of flexible bark that’s light-colored.

6. Put a brunk on top of a kweebl, starting exactly at one end of the kweebl (where the cut ends line up). Where the other end of the brunk ends over more empty kweebl, make a dark mark - from the top to the bottom edge of the kweebl.

7. Now move the first edge of the brunk to match the line you made. Go the second end of the brunk, which should now be over another spot of empty kweebl. Draw another line. Keep doing this until you’re out of kweebl.

8. There will be some empty kweebl on the end after the last line you drew. Cut it off, right at the last mark you made with the brunk. With this new, slightly shorter kweebl, make all the kweebls over again and throw out the old ones. Don’t get them mixed up. Call the new ones kweebltwo. Mark them all up with charcoal and brunks.

9. Since you have number, count the number of marks (lines you drew from top edge to bottom edge) you can see on a kweebltwo. Then count up from this number by one. Then count up from that number again by one. Save that number someplace. This is “the number of brunks in a kweebltwo.”

10. Make a sturdy wooden stick, maybe three brunks across, about as tall as a person (any person). Make one end sharp, like for digging. Near the other end, bore a hole through the wood, all the way through, but don’t come out the top (you know - like the eye of a needle. You must be up to those by now).

11. Look around for some ground that’s good for sticking things in. This would be not too hard, and not too soft. If it’s got plants, rocks or anything else around it, get rid of them and then smooth the dirt or sand out until it makes a nice big empty round place - about the size of a tepee, yurt, or small shed.

12. In a place that looks like about the middle of this empty space, stick the sharp end of the stick in the ground. Push it in hard. It shouldn’t go way in, but it should go in - well, some of the way. Now it should stand straight up, and not move if you tap it. In fact, if you tie a thin rope through the hole near the top and then pull on the rope (not as hard as you can - just medium), it shouldn’t move, just stay there straight up.

13. You need a really long, nice thin rope. It should be as long as a kweebltwo and a kweebltwo and a kweebltwo and a kweebltwo and a kweebltwo and a kweebltwo and a kweebltwo (and maybe another), but not easy to break. Look at some vines, the strong ones. If you’re in a climate without vines, migrate.

14. Put one end of the rope through the hole at the top of the stick - let’s start calling it a pole. Pull it through until about half of it is through. Take the two loose ends.

15. Now make a smaller version of the pole! (Just like brunk was a small version of kweebl.) It can be only two brunks across, maybe about as long as a child’s arm, but it also has to have one sharp pointy end and one end with a hole bored through near the top. We’ll just call this the stick, since the other became a pole.

16. Put the two loose ends of the rope through the hole in stick. Now tie a good big fat knot, however you want, in a way that makes sure those two ends of the rope are never going to come out of that hole again (unless you cut them, of course.)

17. You now have a rope (kind of a double-rope) stretching from the top of the pole to the stick in your hand. If you used a vine that’s long enough, you can now put the pointy of the stick in the ground, and it will be some distance or other from the pole - even when you stretch the rope as much as you can without bending the pole or breaking the rope. This is called “keeping the rope tight.”

18. Put just the point of the stick in the ground, a little ways in, but not pushing it deeper like you did the pole. Now, with both hands on the stick, keeping the point in the ground and stick standing up straight, move the stick slowly to the right while keep the rope tight. Do this for ten heartbeats.

19. If you did this right and the gods are not against you, you made a mark in the earth - a line, but a “curved” line. Just to be sure, it’s sort of like the bottom of a cup where the “inside” of the cup is in the direction of the pole.

20. Now: keep moving the stick like this in the earth, slowly, keeping the rope tight, until you go all the way around and the stick comes back to the beginning of the mark you started a couple of hours ago. Join them up neatly.  I understand this may be hard work, stooping over and going slow  and all, but if you share the task with others make sure they understand all about keeping the rope tight but not pulling too hard, keeping the stick upright, keeping the point in the dirt but not too deep, not going too fast, and what will happen to them if they screw up.

21. Okay. You now have a “Circle” in the ground. Don’t let anybody scuff it, or the kids run over it, for a while. Cut the stick off the rope and get it out of the way.

22. Go get a bunch of kweebltwos. Stretch them out end to end from the FAR side of the circle to the NEAR side of the circle. Have people hold them down and keep them stretched out tight and touching each other, end to end. On one end, the last kweebltwo will lay over the circle - that’s okay, because remember, you marked them off in brunks!. Count how many brunks it is from one side of the circle to the other. When the end of the distance (the place where it hits the near side of the circle) looks like its between two brunks, just call it the smaller of the two brunks (the one that’s still “inside” the circle) and add the words “and a half.” Keep track of the “and a halfs” along with the numbers you get. We’ll improve on this later.

23. Do the last part twenty more times. I mean, go to another part of the circle, pick out what you think is the farthest part away from where you stand at the circle, and make everybody do the whole kweebltwos thing over again. Just do it. You will get twenty different numbers, a lot of them close to each other, some of them the same. If one of them is REALLY bigger than all the others, do it ten more times to make sure that’s not real - then ignore it. From the other numbers, pick the biggest number. This is the “Diameter,” the largest possible distance from one side of the circle to another. Write it down, or carve it or whatever.

23a. If the Diameter has “and a half” at the end, which it will, do it All Over Again till you get that measure again. No cheating. This time, don’t throw the last brunk away; instead, get something small with a really, really tiny sharp point (shark’s tooth? shiny rock you found? I dunno) and mark on the brunk itself the EXACT PLACE where you hit the circle. Save that, with armed guards.

24. Now comes the fun part. Remember how I told you to use elastic, roll-up material like soft bark to make the kweebls? This means you can now count how many kweebltwos and brunks go AROUND the circle, too. Just lay down the kweebltwos along the circle itself, bending them into a curve to follow the shape. O, your bark won’t do this, chucko? Jeez. All right then:

25. Get lots of lengths of perfectly normal light string, I don’t care where from. Cut lengths of this string to be just as long as a kweebltwo. I assume you can handle that by now…. and lay the strings along the circle itself. When you get close to where the next string is going to go over the top of the first string, stop: count how many strings - which is the same as kweebl2s - you used so far. Mark the place you got to.

26. To count the rest of the way to the beginning of the first string, use the brunks. These are short enough you don’t have to worry about curving or bending them. Any idiot can see now you’ll wind up with how many brunks it is around the circle. If a brunk goes part way over the beginning of the string, DON’T bother with “and a halfs” this time - just mark the exact ending point on the brunk with the shark’s tooth or whatever. Put that in a second guarded sanctuary; don’t mix them up. Remember the number of total brunks before that brunk though - that’s the CIRCUMFERENCE.

27. Now go to the small clan or coven of witches, shamans or whatever who invented the number system. Tell them to “divide” the “circumference” by the “diameter” and tell you the resulting number. You will notice they take an unusual amount of time to respond, hours or days, with muttered head-scratching and arguments - but eventually to maintain their status they’ll tell you a number. They might just say, ‘three.’ Or if they’re compulsive or if you personally insist on a fraction, they might say ‘three and a tenth’ or ‘three and a quarter’ or anything somewhere in there.

28. At this point, if you want to, you have the right to stand up as tall as you can, spread your arms, grin hugely and shout, “THAT’S PI !!!!!” Don’t expect much reaction unless you personally have exceptional charisma. If you overhear one of the shamans say, quietly, “I knew that,” just ignore it.

29. I hope you read this far before you did anything. All through everything I said so far, do not, do not, do not let the shamans or witches or whatever know anything about the brunks with the shark’s tooth marks on them.

30. Now we get down to business. If this is ever going to be worth anything concrete to you or your distant descendants, you need a certain amount of accuracy. Next step - develop a secret police system. Spies, plants, listeners, paid informers.

31. Infiltrate the coven of shamans. Do this slowly and with care because they are both intelligent and naturally paranoid. One of them is much smarter than the others. For a while it may look like there are actually two who are much smarter, and they are always fighting. But in fact, one of them is only half-smart but talks better than the other one. Both of them are men. (It’s possible that the smartest is actually a woman, but since no one ever listens to her you’ll never find out.)

32. Learn to filter and interpret intelligence. This may take several generations and I may now be talking to the great-great-great-grandchild of tallest person. No matter; somewhere in the coven, this small group of privileged weirdos who eat and have sex without having to work, is the one Smart One they get all their supposed “wisdom” from.

33. ‘Disappear” the Smartest One; explain he’s been raptured to Heaven, or whatever. Keep him in a secure faraway location, and subject him to exquisite, disgusting tortures that break the spirit without affecting mental functioning or life span. You will have had time to think about this while devising a police state. When he is ready to do anything in the world for relief, show him the secret brunks and explain the whole story. (You’d better have done something to preserve those little bits of translucent bark, now I come to think of it, or this was all a waste of time.) Tell him you need the Exact fractions, the Exact C and D values, and the Most Exact Possible Value Of Pi that he can give you. 

34. It must have occurred to you by now that the “Smartest One of All” had secret access to gizmos of some sort, maybe even a renewable power source, for digital devices, that were supposed to have been wiped out of existence long ago - if so he revealed this in response to your gentle attentions and you got hold of them. He may not be able to add that much more accuracy to your eyeball calculation of brunks, but he can certainly recalculate pi to more digits…..and more……and more………

35. At some point, you will lose patience and demand a final answer. Crushed, no longer bothering to grovel, he will try to explain there is no “final” answer, realizing that the concept of an irrational number with infinitely extensive decimal places cannot be shaped to fit into your apelike brain. Quite rightly, you will send him on to his Gods as a reward for this ridiculous revelation. Your investigatory branch, recreating his final work, will report that the most potentially useful form of the answer you’ve been seeking for generations is 3.14159. This has seven elements (counting the decimal) and so is about right for a human brain to remember; also since your current renascent science has yet to deal with anything where a quantity smaller than “thousandths” might be of interest, it seems safe to everyone to assume that a figure with a huge, comfy additional cushion thrown on (fifty-nine “hundred-thousandths”) is enough for eternity.

 Extra Credit. Congratulations, you’ve got pi. What do you do with it? Did I tell you I was going to go into that at any point? Those are questions of applied math and engineering, which I know nothing about, and anyway I’ve been dead since long before the Cataclysm so you’re operatives can’t get at me. But I am assured constantly, especially on the “web” (never mind), that pi is useful in ….well, simply everything. So hang on to it for a few centuries, millennia or whatever, and you’ll be glad.

Meanwhile, since things must look pretty meaningless at this point, why not spend the long nights meditating on this: pi is the circle. The circle is pi. Anything round, is round, only because of pi. Everywhere you look you see round - your eyeball, the moon sometimes, that wheel thing they just invented but you don’t know what to do with yet - the only way something can be round, all the way around, is because it has that weird number built into it! How can that be? And if there is gonna be a number that something as universal as “round” depends on, wouldn’t you expect it to be a respectable, well-behaved number like, I dunno, three…or eleven…..first we find out it has fractions hanging off it, then that rotten little bastard may he burn eternally in hell comes along and says the fractional part is infinite, which you have no concept of and do not understand at all except that sometimes deep in your worst dreams you think you are approaching a picture of how something might…….

Nighty night, and enjoy your pi.