Of Coffee With Pi

If you were having coffee with me I would be super glad to have you visit and say happy PI day to you? The 14^th of March is National Pi day in celebration of the first 3 digits of pi 3.14… It’s a perfect day to have coffee with Pi, but don’t eat too much of it, as you may end up with a big circumference. How about some fun with Pi 😂

A Pizza with:

• radius of z
• height of a
• Has volume of πr²a = pi*z*z*a

Pizzas are weird though, I have always pondered over how they are round in shape, yet packaged in square boxes and then served in triangular wedges 🍕 …. By the by what do you think of pineapple on pizza?

If you were having coffee with me I would tell you a fascinating thing about Pi (π) it’s the number you get when you divide the radius of any circle with its diameter and the value is an irrational number which goes on and on without repeating..

 If you wanted to remember the value of π to 8 decimal places you could use this mnemonic (where you count the number of letters in each word):

“May I have a large container of coffee”

“May(3) I(1) have(4) a(1) large(5) container(9) of(2) coffee(6)?”

I wish I had known all this when I was still in school, maybe I might have found math interesting. For example, did you know that 3.14% of sailors are pirates 😂 Speaking of pirates, our black market forex parallel market keeps “thriving” as the Zimbabwean dollar continues to lose in value. Local supermarkets are offering “discount” for those who buy in hard currency which translates to their in-store rate practically matching the black market rate. For the conscientious buyer, it makes sense to simply make your purchase in forex than to try and change it first.

If you were having coffee with I would try and answer a question on why we seem fixated on using the United States Dollar as a currency than being in favour of our local currency. We had a moment in our not too distant past when inflation was so crazy that everyone was a trillionaire and it became so meaningless that we stopped using the local currency totally and adopted the USD as a surrogate currency.

But of course, its unhealthy for a country to not have a domestic currency, so the government alongside the Ministry of Finance and the Reserve Bank has been trying to get the Zimbabwean dollar back as the preferred local transaction medium. Believe it or not we went through a phase were they (re)introduced the Zimbabwean dollar as a Bond Surrogate currency which was 1:1 with the United States Dollar.. At the current official rate, the Zimbabwean dollar is at 1 : 130.1567 to the USD.

Even the City Fathers seem to find a certain stability in pegging prices in the United States Dollar as unpaid bills are losing value daily. If the city council is feeling the effects of the money losing value what more of us ordinary citizens, you can see why some workers unions are pushing for people to get paid in United States Dollars.

If you were having coffee with me I would tell you that we have a population census coming up and looks like the government decided to solve the pandemic of the high rate of unemployment by playing around with the requirements for one to be classified as unemployed. Zimstat will be adopting ILO’s definition of employment and this will see Sex Workers classified as gainfully employed even though oddly enough prostitution is still regarded as criminal under the Zimbabwean law.

For someone to be considered unemployed they have to satisfy 3 conditions:

•Without work
•Seeking work
•Available for work and not finding it
-If you are not working but you are not actively seeking work then you are not classified as unemployed.

If you were having coffee with me I would tell you it looks like a great trick in curbing the employment rate figures and *boom* suddenly we are no longer unemployed. I wonder if criminal can also count as being gainfully employed if they do crime to feed their families… hmmm

What’s going on in your neck of the woods?

~B