The Number Pi
Once again I'm dragging my ass as I prepare this Web page. Ah, deadlines. I've put up some of the discussion we had about pi. And Euler's Identity is here. More to come.
You can now listen to this program on the official WBAI Archive.
The next regular WBAI LSB meeting will be held on Wednesday April 8, 2026, at 7:00 PM. That meeting will be held on ZOOM, even though ZOOM compromises privacy and security. We had a LSB meeting this past Wednesday night March 11. We had a long report from the station's interim General Manager and the LSB members also spent 46 minutes talking about people wanting to break up the Public Comment section of the meeting for their own purposes. It would be a bad idea. I got to give a Treasurer's Report about the Pacifica National Finance Committee not meeting again.
Some years ago the WBAI LSB voted to hold its regular meetings on the second Wednesday night of every month, subject to change by the LSB, so we have the following schedule:
These meetings are set to begin at 7:00 PM.
WBAI has a program schedule up on its Web site. The site has gotten many of the individual program pages together to provide links and such, so check it out.
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Here is WBAI's current Internet stream. We can no longer tell if the stream is working without testing every possible stream. Good luck.
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WBAI is archiving the programs! WBAI has permanently switched to yet another new archive Web page! This one is more baffling than the previous one. For some time I was unable to post archive blurbs, then I could, and then I couldn't again. Now I can again and there are a whole bunch of archive blurbs up there now.
This is a link to the latest version of the official WBAI archive. The archiving software appears to have been at least partially fixed. To get to the archive of this program you can use the usual method: you'll have to click on the drop-down menu, which says Display,
and find Back of the Book on that menu. We're pretty early in the list, so it shouldn't be too difficult. Once you find the program name click GO
and you'll see only this Back of the Book program. Management has fixed some problems that we'd been having with the archives.
For programs before March 23, 2019, we're all out of luck. The changes that took place once WBAI Management took control of the WBAI archives seems to have wiped out all access to anything before that date in March. You'll have to click on the same drop-down menu as above, which says Display,
and find Specify Date
, it's the second choice from the top. You are then given a little pop-up calendar and you can choose the date of the program there. Then click GO
and you'll see a list of programs that aired on that date. For those previous programs you can get the audio, but nothing else, since I can't post anything to those pages anymore. Good luck.
Since the former General Manager banned Sidney Smith from WBAI he's not alternating with us on the air. As of November 2020, Back of the Book airs weekly.
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So today is March 14th, which can be written as 3.14 and it is called Pi Day.
The number pi is in everything. The Greek letter pi was first sued to represent that ratio of a circle's diameter to its circumference by the Welsh mathematician William Jones in 1706, but everyone knew that there was some number there that was important and people did look for it. Ancient Egyptians had it as 256/81, which comes out to about 3.16. In the old Testament the ratio of a circle to its diameter is given as just 3; so there's another thing that fundamentalists of the Abrahamic superstitions need to reconcile with their idea that every word of the Bible is absolutely and literally true. In elementary school I learned about pi in the fourth grade. We were given the ratio 22/7 which would result in a value of about 3.1428 which is pretty damned close to the first few digits. Later in life, when I got a calculator I would plug in 3.1415927 because that's as close as you can get with a basic calculator of the 1970s, that could only display eight digits. The early cultures that tried to come up with a value for pi usually used geometric means to get to a number. And of course numbers themselves were really unwieldy until the Hindus came up with the zero.
Pi is also a part of my favorite equation. The equation is called Euler's Identity and it looks like this: Euler's Identity eπi=-1.
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There are a lot of issues that are considered hazardous to talk about on the air at WBAI, even though the gag rule was lifted in 2002. However, there is the Internet! There are mailing lists which you can subscribe to and Web based message boards devoted to WBAI and Pacifica issues. Many controversial WBAI/Pacifica issues are discussed on these lists.
One open list that no longer exists was the WBAI-specific Goodlight
Web based message board. It was sometimes referred to on Back of the Book as the bleepin' blue board,
owing to the blue background that was used on its Web pages. This one had many people posting anonymously and there was also an ancillary WBAI people
board that was just totally out of hand.
In June 2012, I ended up having to salvage the bleepin' blue board, and so I was the moderator on it for its last seven years, until it got too expensive.
Sometimes we used to have live interaction with people posting on the Goodlight Board
during the program.
Our very own Uncle Sidney Smith, whose program Saturday Morning With the Radio On used to alternate with us, has a blog these days. You can reach his blog here.
There used to be a number of mailing lists related to Pacifica and WBAI. Unfortunately, they were all located on Yahoo! Groups. When Yahoo! Groups was totally shut down in December 2020, all of those mailing lists ceased to exist. One year earlier their file sections and archives of E-mails, had been excised leaving only the ability to send E-mails back and forth among the members. Now it's all gone. Older Back of the Book program Web pages tell a little more about those lists.
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The contents of this Web page are copyright © 2026, R. Paul Martin.
