Pi is roughly 5.
Comment on Virgin Physicists
ArcaneGadget@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Welcome to the field of engineering! Your first lesson will be; “Tolerances and you”!
nomecks@lemmy.wtf 1 day ago
I_Has_A_Hat@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Never, in any engineering field, have I EVER seen anyone simplify pi to 5. For that matter, I have never seen anyone simplify to 3. It is always 3.14. I feel like pi simplification is a weird meme that people think engineers do but is never practiced anywhere.
It’s like if there was a meme about chefs saying they always replace eggs with grapefruit. No they don’t, and it’s nonsense to think they do.
bus_factor@lemmy.world 1 day ago
There’s less and less reason to do it (and it’s never 5). On systems without floating point you might want to do round it a bit, but only if the specific thing you’re doing allows it, and even then you’re more likely to do a fixed-point approach by using e.g. 314 and dividing by 100 later, or adjusting that value a bit so you can divide by 128 via bitshift if you’re on a chip where division is expensive. However, in 2025 you almost certainly should have picked a chip with an FPU if you’re doing trigonometry.
And while rounding pi to 3 or 4 is certainly just a meme, there are other approximations which are used, like small-angle approximations, where things like
sin(x)
can be simplified to justx
for a sufficiently smallx
.qjkxbmwvz@startrek.website 1 day ago
For back-of-the-envelope or mental calculations, pi is often 3 or 10^(1/2).
The latter is better than 1% accurate, and has nice properties when doing order-of-magnitude/log space calculations in base 10.
Kaboom@reddthat.com 1 day ago
There’s a lot of weird stereotypes out there that make no sense. Like the whole “programmers wear thigh high socks” thing. Where did that even come from?
BananaIsABerry@lemmy.zip 1 day ago
Bet that one was started by all those dastardly programmers that wear knee high socks!
mrgoosmoos@lemmy.ca 1 day ago
you’ve never seen anybody simplify it to 3 when doing head calcs without a phone nearby?
it doesn’t happen often, in fact I’ve seen it once. in a decade.
I_Has_A_Hat@lemmy.world 1 day ago
The only time you should be doing head calcs as an engineer is to double check that you have a reasonable answer with the actual calcs on your actual calculator.
GreatAlbatross@feddit.uk 1 day ago
Second lesson: Pi is around 3.
lnxtx@feddit.nl 1 day ago
+/-15 %? Good enough!
rikudou@lemmings.world 1 day ago
If it fits, great! If it doesn’t, you didn’t use enough tape.
Fillicia@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
A failed inspection is just an invitation to use a different method until it passes.
squaresinger@lemmy.world 19 hours ago
pi == 3
TheTurner@lemmy.zip 23 hours ago
As a calibration technician, this makes me hurt. Lol.
Spacehooks@reddthat.com 20 hours ago
Cringes in Monte Carlo.