http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,368422,00.html
English Crop Circle's Mysterious Pattern Solved
Thursday, June 19, 2008
Another crop circle has appeared in the English countryside — and this
one's clearly been made by someone, or something, that understands
math.
At first glance, the strange ratcheted pattern, radiating out
clockwise, doesn't look like much — modern art, perhaps.
But an electrical engineer from North Carolina — described by the
London newspapers as a "retired astrophysicist" — figured out that it
was an abstract representation of pi, the number at the center of
Euclidean geometry.
The circle, one of hundreds that have sprung up overnight in the
English countryside over the past two decades, appeared in early June
near Wroughton, Wilt****re, just south of Swindon and about 80 miles
west of London.
It's about half a mile from Barbury Castle, a pre-Roman fortress
surrounded by long hillocks that may be the remnants of Iron Age
buildings or burial mounds.
Lucy Pringle, who has a Web site selling her photographs of crop
circles, took several aerial shots and posted them online.
http://www.lucypringle.co.uk/photos/2008/jun.shtml
Word quickly got around the crop-circle community, but the pattern
mystified everyone until Michael Reed of Timberlake, N.C., noticed on
June 5 that the radial lines corresponded to a grid dividing the
circle into 10 equal slices.
From there, it was child's play, or maybe extraterrestrial's play, to
deduce what the pattern meant.
"Take the pattern and draw radial lines from the center of the central
depression through each radial jump," Reed e-mailed the Earthfiles.com
Web site. [
http://www.earthfiles.com/news.php?ID=1434&category=Environment
]
"Take the smallest angle sector and call it one (1), then compare the
other 10 sectors contained angle to the smallest and pick the closest
single digit for the ratio. They come out as 3.141592654."
As any math geek knows, that's the first 10 digits of pi, the
irrational but extremely im****tant number that's defined as a circle's
cir***ference divided by its diameter.
Crop-circle enthusiasts claim that's just more proof that the barley
and wheat stalks have been stomped on by aliens who seem to have a
special affinity for southern England.
Most scientists, however, sniff at the suggestion, pointing out that
anyone with planks and rope can create crop circles in a couple of
hours.
Some dedicated Google Maps snooping by FOXNews.com revealed the grid
coordinates to be 51.488258 degrees north, 1.771964 west, [
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&geocode=&q=51.488695,-1.771926&ie=UTF8&ll=51.488692,-1.771932&spn=0.008711,0.018282&t=h&z=16&iwloc=addr
] for those inclined to that sort of thing, but unfortunately the crop
circle doesn't show up online yet.
Click here:
http://www.mailonsunday.co.uk/news/article-1027178/Easy-pi-Astrophysicist-solves-riddle-Britains-complex-crop-circle.html
Here:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/science/article4160477.ece
And here:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/2144652/Most-complex-crop-circle-ever-discovered-in-British-fields.html
to read more about this in the London papers.
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