gmosx

Miscellanea

by gmosx, at 22 Apr 2010

I 'm not in the mood for a long post, so here are random thoughts in aggregate form:

f8

The new Facebook Social Plugins are FriendConnect done right. FriendConnect has so much potential yet the current implementation leaves a lot to be desired (to say the least). Moreover, the Graph/OpenGraph APIs are a bold step forward towards the machine readable Web (Web 3.0 / Semantic Web if you will). The 'Like' button is an obvious (yet powerful) idea that Google should have implemented a long time ago.

π is wrong

I always thought that 'π' should be the number known as '2π'. Then 'π' would be the perimeter of the unit circle, angle measurements would be more intuitive (90 degrees == π/4, 180 degrees == π/2, 360 degrees = π, ie a full 'cycle' is π radians) and a lot of formulas would be simplified:

p = πr, ie scale the unit perimeter by the radius,
sin(x+π) = sin(x), ie the period of the trigonometric functions is π,

etc. At the moment π is the sum of the angles in a triangle and the perimeter of a circle of with a diameter equal to 1 (doesn't this look awkward to you?). Read 'π is wrong' for a better treatment of the argument.

iPhoneOS TOS

The latest iPhoneOS TOS made a lot of developers angry. I don't agree. One of the problems in our profession is what I call a Babel situation: So many different languages and platforms hinder cooperation. Finding and integrating engineers into a software development team is a pain. Thus, having a single platform (iPhoneOS), a single system language (Objective C) and single scripting/application language (JavaScript) is refreshing.

3 Comments

by noiv, at 13 May 2010
Isn't e^iπ = -1 just right?
by George Moschovitis, at 13 May 2010
Yeah, euler's formula may be elegant, but still using 2pi for one circumference seems wrong.
by George Moschovitis, at 30 Jun 2010
A great discussion of the π topic: http://tauday.com/

Also discuss the euler equation and actually argues that using τ = 2 π provides a more elegant form.