Posted on 10/04/2008 9:41:56 AM PDT by Justice Department
Another crop circle has appeared in the English countryside — and this one's clearly been made by someone, or something, that understands math.
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
An aerial view of the pi crop circle near Wroughton, Wiltshire, England.
At first glance, the strange ratcheted pattern, radiating out clockwise, doesn't look like much — modern art, perhaps.
But an electrical engineer from North Carolina — described by the London newspapers as a "retired astrophysicist" — figured out that it was an abstract representation of pi, the number at the center of Euclidean geometry.
I thought they proved it was just a bunch of farmers who had too much time on their hands.
“The circle, one of hundreds that have sprung up overnight in the English countryside over the past two decades, appeared in early June near Wroughton, Wiltshire, just south of Swindon and about 80 miles west of London.
It’s about half a mile from Barbury Castle, a pre-Roman fortress surrounded by long hillocks that may be the remnants of Iron Age buildings or burial mounds.”
Oh, right. Like aliens never heard of pi.
"Word quickly got around the crop-circle community, but the pattern mystified everyone until Michael Reed of Timberlake, N.C., noticed on June 5 that the radial lines corresponded to a grid dividing the circle into 10 equal slices.
From there, it was child's play, or maybe extraterrestrial's play, to deduce what the pattern meant.
"Take the pattern and draw radial lines from the center of the central depression through each radial jump," Reed e-mailed the Earthfiles.com Web site. "Take the smallest angle sector and call it one (1), then compare the other 10 sectors contained angle to the smallest and pick the closest single digit for the ratio. They come out as 3.141592654."
As any math geek knows, that's the first 10 digits of pi, the irrational but extremely important number that's defined as a circle's circumference divided by its diameter.
Say what you will, it’s beautiful work. Inspiring even.
I like these better than most of the public art that has appeared in my city over the past half century. I’ll take my hat off to anybody who knows how to farm and can create these works of art too!
The crop circles were not made by space monsters.
"Crop-circle enthusiasts claim that's just more proof that the barley and wheat stalks have been stomped on by aliens who seem to have a special affinity for southern England."
Why, of course. Aliens have nothing better to do than travel millions of light years to make patterns in English farmers' fields.
I'll take a slice of pecan or lemon, thanks.
Nice of ET to count in base ten for us.
now if it was phi...
http://skepdic.com/cropcirc.html
A crop “circle” is a geometric pattern, often very intricate and complex, appearing in fields, usually wheat fields and usually in England. Most, if not all, crop circles are probably due to pranksters. For example, Doug Bower and David Chorley admit to hoaxing approximately 250 circles over many years.
Some believe that the crop designs are messages from alien spacecraft. Some maintain that the aliens are trying to communicate with us using ancient Sumerian symbols or symbolic representations of alien DNA. Those who engage in such serious study and theorizing about crop circles are known as cerealogists (after Ceres, the Roman goddess of agriculture and fertility) or croppies.
Even scientifically minded people have been brought into this fray. They have wisely avoided the thesis that aliens have been carving out messages in crop fields. But they have stretched their imaginations to come up with theories of vortexes, ball lightning, plasma, and other less occult explanations involving natural forces such as wind, heat, or animals. Some think the designs are clearly the work of the U.S. Air Force and the RAF using a “military microwave cannon, piloted by computer,” and a design book.* However, when looking for an explanation of weird things we should never omit from our checklist the possibility that the phenomenon we are studying is a hoax.
The original was done at Longwood Warren, near Winchester in 1995. Some prefer the original.
Had crop circles existed in the thirteenth century, they would have been attributed to Satan, who was said to have been responsible for many weird happenings as well as for many unweird things, such as the construction of Stonehenge and Hadrian’s wall between England and Scotland. It was believed by many that the ancients could not possibly have accomplished such feats on their own. Today, Satan’s power as an explanation for weird or wondrous things has been usurped by aliens.
See also alien abduction, ancient astronauts, cattle mutilation, flying saucer, and UFO.
"Most scientists, however, sniff at the suggestion, pointing out that anyone with planks and rope can create crop circles in a couple of hours."
Still waiting for an Obama symbol as a crop circle. We all know that little green men are democrats.
Maybe they count in base pi and have been showing us the way to new revelations.
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