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It is the 120th anniversary of the passing of a bill by the House of Congress of Indiana to change the value of pi to 3.2! [Errors in the original are copied here verbatim. -Ed]
Weird as it sounds, in effect the House voted 67-0 on H.B. 246 "Introducing a new mathematical truth" on February 5th, 1897 and referred to the Senate of Indiana.
On February 2, 1897 Representative S. E. Nicholson, of Howard County, chairman of the Committee on Education, reported to the House:
"Your Committee on Education, to which was referred House Bill No. 246, entitled a bill for an act entitled an act introducing a new mathematical truth, has had same under consideration, and begs leave to report the same back to the House with the recommendation that said bill do pass."
The bill was duly passed to the Senate on February 10th and read on the 11th, then referred to the Temperance Committee. On February 12 Senator Harry S. New, of Marion County, Chairman of the Committee on Temperance made the following report to the Senate:
"Your Committee on Temperance, to which was referred House Bill No. 246, introduced by Mr. Record, has had the same under consideration. and begs leave to report the same back to the Senate with the recommendation that said bill do pass."
On the afternoon of February 12 "Senator Bozeman called up House Bill No. 246. The bill was read a second time by title. Senator Hogate moved to amend the bill by striking out the enacting clause. The motion was lost. Senator Hubbell moved to postpone the further consideration of this bill indefinitely. Which motion prevailed."
The bill was never voted on, it was simply postponed following ridicule from the press. "Senator Hubbell characterized the bill as utter folly. The Senate might as well try to legislate water to run up hill as to establish mathematical truth by law. Leading papers all over the country, he said, were ridiculing the Indiana Legislature. It was outrageous that the State of Indiana should pay $250 a day to have time wasted on such frivolous matters."
A very interesting story by Will E. Edington then at DePauw University, published by the Proceedings of the Indiana Academy of Science. Sorry PDF only.
(Score: 3, Informative) by TheRaven on Wednesday February 15 2017, @11:22AM
Isn't pdf basically compressed postscript?
Nope, not even close. PostScript is a stack-based Turing-complete language with a lot of primitives provided for drawing. PDF is a format that contains a set of objects and an index into those objects. These objects can contain drawing commands in a format that began as a subset of PostScript (removing the flow control primitives and leaving the drawing commands) but then grew to support more things than the PostScript drawing model. They can contain binary data (e.g. images and fonts), text (for searching), and even JavaScript. The dictionary format in PDF allows you to do non-destructive editing of PDFs by appending new objects and then appending a new dictionary that adds the new objects (with a new version number) and linking back to the previous dictionary. Individual objects in PDF can be compressed, so long drawing sequences (or image data) can be stored as compressed binary objects if you're optimising for file size. For faster load, there's also a variant that inserts a copy of the dictionary in the header of the file as well as at the end, so you can start drawing pages as soon as they're loaded.
Oh, the concept of pages as a searchable construct also differentiates PDF from PostScript. In PDF, each page is an object that refers to other objects for drawing. It can have a stored thumbnail, ToC entries, and so on. In PostScript, pages are drawn sequentially and then flushed to the output device. This is fine for printing, but if you want to go to page 300 in a PostScript document then you must run the entire program until the 300th showpage command. You could also have fun sending PostScript documents with infinite loops to printers - a lot of them had no timeout in the renderer and required a hard reboot to recover.
sudo mod me up