Biotech Values

[io_io]

'e'

I have a "clinical trial" story about 'e'.

When I first got a PC, it was one of the old Apples, perhaps the original Mac, or was there a "2e" model ?

Anyway, I wrote a program in Basic (or that other language with "Go To ...." etc), that simulated the question:

If I have a field of parallel lines, exactly 1 unit length apart, and I drop a "spinning" rod (=line segment, which lands at a random angle to the lines) measuring exactly 1 unit long, what is the probability of either an Overlap (=hit) result, or a complete Miss ?

The program used to run this say 10,000 times, using the Mac's random-number function as part of the program, and sure enough, the answer iterated perfectly to something like "1-1/e" as probability (of a Miss I think).

The point was that, even if the world never knew what a circle was, certain numbers like 'e' would turn up anyway.

This probably explains why PI showed up in an apparently "non-circular" event - the issuing of GOOG's shares (although I guess GOOG has more circles in there than most - symbol, valuation, etc)............ No ?