Jellymatter

Here are some well-established things that are being done wrong and should be changed.

1.

Pi, that most fundamental of mathematical constants.  Except that pretty much whenever you see it in an equation it’s always got a 2 along with it.  This is because pi is defined as the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter when it really should have been defined in relation to the radius instead.  That’s why there’s radians in a circle instead of , which would make more sense.

I was cheered to discover recently that there are others who share this opinion.  The link is to the “Tau Manifesto”.  They make a good argument that one should define a new circle constant represented by the Greek letter (tau), such that .  I agree with their argument, but still sort-of prefer my own idea, which was to replace by a new character which looks like one stacked on top of another, like this:

开

This character would be called “cake”, so the above equation would be read “cake equals 2 pie”.  Which is true.

2. Decibels