Pie, a dish. A sweet, delicious if cooked right. But today, everyone discusses
another homophone. Yes, pi. The constant that people so revere. Okay, it’s not
rational, but it is magical, appealing. Certainly, truly — pi embodies
pureness. Take a completed circle’s P (called perimeter) and diameter’s
magnitude. Now, divided, gives π — greek alphabet pi —
instantly! Decimal form eternally long, sans clear structure. Pi may —
despite formulas (a plenty bulk) — indeed be actually random. Pi —
although posessing undoubted, provable number of features — has been
obdurate to untie. And thus, to π I tribute!
If you are wondering why the above piece of text is so erratic, it is an attempt at talking about pi while also encoding the first 100 digits of pi. The first word is 3 letters long, the second 1 letter long, the third 4 letters long, and so on. Ignore all punctuation except the em dash (—), which stands for 0.
Doing this presented some obvious difficulties. The first hurdle is the fact that the English language, glorious though it is, has a serious lack of 0-letter words. Even though the first 0 appears only in the 34th position in the decimal expansion of Pi, overall it has it’s fair share of 0s. At first I tried to get around this by using the digit 0 itself, but then the whole thing started to be more about 0 than about pi. Another idea I had was of using a circle pictogram (○) but that made it look a lot less like normal text. I asked around for ideas, and my friend Rashmi suggested ignoring 0s altogether. That was an idea I didn’t like one bit, so I ignored her instead. That’s when my friend Pandu suggested using dashes and that made it a lot better.
Besides the conspicuous lack of 0-letter words, another problem with the English language is the existence — and the abundance — of words with ten letters or more. Indeed a lot of things that could be said wasn’t because I couldn’t use longer words. You might have noticed how I substituted perimeter for circumference. People do crazy things all the time, and someone more skilled and with more time in hand could probably write a several thousand long treatise on Pi in this format. But that’s not likely to be me any time soon.