From Ted Hustead’s biography printed in the Harvard Business School Bulletin:
“When I started, my name was rabbit choker,” he says. “They told me, ‘You kids from South Dakota are so poor you can’t afford to buy shells for your gun. You have to run your rabbits down and choke ’em to death.’”
It happened in Indiana. Although the attempt to legislate pi was ultimately unsuccessful, it did come pretty close. In 1897 Representative T.I. Record of Posen county introduced House Bill #246 in the Indiana House of Representatives. The bill, based on the work of a physician and amateur mathematician named Edward J. Goodwin (Edwin in some accounts), suggests not one but three numbers for pi, among them 3.2, as we shall see. The punishment for unbelievers I have not been able to learn, but I place no credence in the rumor that you had to spend the rest of your natural life in Indiana.
Just as people today have a hard time accepting the idea that the speed of light is the speed limit of the universe, Goodwin and Record apparently couldn’t handle the fact that pi was not a rational number. “Since the rule in present use [presumably pi equals 3.14159…] fails to work …, it should be discarded as wholly wanting and misleading in the practical applications,” the bill declared. Instead, mathematically inclined Hoosiers could
Thanks Datafever-that made my day![(-D] I never would have dreamed that Ted Hustead was the source of 24 years of anxiety. Ironically, my wife worked at Wall Drug during college.[:)]
Maybe I should have mentioned - In his quote, when he says, “When I started,” - that refers to when he started working in Alaska!?! So ‘rabbit choker’ isn’t just a Wyoming name for SDers.
I was thinking that if you were a local driver, and did alot of unloading, you might want to wear something a little more substantial, but then my UPS driver showed, and yes he was wearing black tennis shoes.
In March 2004 Aliso Viejo (in Orange County, CA) almost banned dihydrogen monoxide because it is a dangerous chemical used in manufacturing which can kill you if inhaled, is used in nuclear plants and in pesticides, and is freely dumped in rivers and streams. The worst part is if you get any on you you cannot wash it off!
Unfortunately, their prodgeny still exist in the statehouse. Witness the botched attempt to get the state of Indiana to observe Daylight Savings Time so the state will be on one time zone. We still have two because some up near Chicago are on Central just like before. Some counties are in the process of switching because they didn’t like the changes which put some schools in two time zones (because their area crosses a county line). Now the only people confused about what time it is, is the citizens of Indiana. What the legislators failed to consider is that since Indiana is more than 15 degrees west of NYC, the entire state could have (should have) placed in the Central Time Zone. Because most of the state was placed in Eastern, it’s like we observe Daylight Savings Time already with the added benefit of not having to screw with our clocks twice a year.