TU-58

[Fred Cisin]

>> I tried measuring a whole bunch of circles, and I can't find any
>> rational reason why dividing the circumference by the diameter never
>> came out even! :-)
On Thu, 3 Dec 2015, Johnny Billquist wrote:
> You need to measure more of them! You've just been unlucky.

OK!
I started to wonder whether I needed more bits in my floating point.
They just wouldn't resolve in the 24 bits of single precision.

Using such a bizarre number is just plain irrational!

Seriously, though,
in the computer math class, I did make the students manually 
compute the some bit representations, including PI.
I found several students had encountered the same thing that I had run 
into, of some grade school teachers misinterpreting their textbook and 
declaring, "PI is about 3.1416 or EXACTLY 22/7"! (insertion of "EXACTLY" 
was theirs)
In fifth grade, I got into a lot of trouble for argueing with that teacher.


I think that "tire" is a good term; it implies some of the special issues 
that come up from compressing from only one side.  If you measure the 
distance from roadway to axle, and imagine a tire that is a perfect circle 
of that diameter, some of the rotations per mile issues clear up, although 
obviously not explaining the amount of force required for propulsion 
relative to what you would need with uncompressible round tire. 
("spherical chicken in a vacuum")

Tony mentioned selecting based on OD, and then remachining the ID.  With 
my extremely limited machinist skills, I'd be more inclined to look for a 
match of the ID, and then let elasticity take care of at least part 
of the OD discrepancy.   I've tried to machine rubber.  It obviously can 
be done.  But only by somebody more skilled than I.


--
Grumpy Ol' Fred     		cisin at xenosoft.com