Pi is well-defined, yes, and that's not going to change. But some notation is better than others. It would be better notation if we had a symbol that meant 2pi, and not necessarily any symbol that meant pi, because the number 2pi is just usually more relevant. There's all sorts of notation we have that is perfectly well-defined, purely mathematical, not dependent on any system of units, but is not optimal for making things intuitive and easy to read, write and generally process. The gamma function is another good example.

I really fail to see why metric vs. english units is much more serious; neither metric nor english units is particularly suggestive of anything these days. Neither is more natural. The quantities being measured with them aren't going to be nice clean numbers like pi/2, they're going to be messy no matter what system of units you measure them with.

e^(pi*i) = -1

Anything else: lame.

You may as well argue for base four arithmetic.

Huh. Would that actually be easier? I always figured ten fingers...

Has anybody else wished that the value of the symbol, pi, was doubled? It becomes far more intuitive this way--this may even affect uptake of trigonometry in school. This rates up with declaring the electron's charge as negative rather than positive.

More to the point, 1337 is the popular convention. If the numbers were not meant as a reference to the convention then they would be more silly than they already are.

Humor will be more relevant post-singularity

That is a significant claim. Not least because it implies that given that a singularity occurs it will be a singularity that doesn't suck. (Better as a goal than it is as a prediction.)

Voted down for spelling 1337 wrong in your username.

That's a fair question.

I know that a number of people here are programmers, for one thing. For another, I deliberately aimed very low with the anecdote about "clueless users", so that even LW readers who are not programmers would feel, with respect to someone that clueless, the same way I feel with respect to my dad, whose confusions about computers are quite a bit more sophisticated.

The implication isn't that the reader is a computer expert, but that they have some area of expertise in which they feel as clued in as I feel in computers, and I'm inviting them to identify with me when I tell the anecdote about my dad.

Would it make more sense for you if I amended the sentence starting "If you are a software developer", so that it read "I'm a software developer, so for me that tends to be..."

I'm curious--I was under the impression that lesswrong.com was a community dedicated to rationality. Some may be like your father--good at math, but bad at navigating computers. Why did you assume that people on this site are computer oriented?

Yeah, It will be recorded. I'll add a link to the post when the video is up.