“3.141592654The number occurs in nature. That’s what the big deal is. This isn’t something fucked up and uniquely a sign of intelligence. This is a natural number. Any circle, get it? All circles. It’s as natural a number as you can get.

“Some numbers are unnatural. Like One. And Everything in between. Or divisible by it. The whole numbers anyway. Very spooky. A man made thing.  Only Man gives a shit about the whole amout of things. Nature, just is. And that makes for very unclean, unround numbers. Like 3.141592654

“Other numbers are part of the landscape around us. That gets us to this discussion. Let me explain.

“Yesterday, my team was called in to investigate a crop circle. Two things were unusual about the circle, reports said. First: The Circle is a somewhat a-typical geographic representation of ‘pi’ to ten decimal places. Well, no shit, huh? Big fuckin’ deal. If that’s all it was, they’d never have got me out here to investigate.

“No, it’s the second feature that makes this crop circle worth watching. It’s in the middle of a fucking swamp in Louisiana. Nobody makes fucking crop circles in a swamp in Louisiana.  Pranksters and viral marketers use ropes and boards to smash out crop circles in barley fields in England because first, of all, it’s fucking boring in England, and second of all, no fucking alligators are likely to eat you while you’re dancing in little circles in a United Kingdom Barley field pretending you’re a druid and holding your pecker in one hand.

“Standing in the swamp, I had five guys with shotguns trained along the visual perimeter, and I still wasn’t positive I wouldn’t get my legs torn out from under me the first time I stepped off the muck and into the bayou.

“So, to your question, I respond this way: No. It’s not a fucking crop circle. It’s a bog circle. And No, I don’t think the fact that it’s supposed to represent the first ten digits of pie is significant. If someone or something wanted to show us how fucking smart they were, they’d fucking go to 100 decimal palaces, Or two hundred. Or a fucking thousand.  Or they would write words like, ‘I’m a fucking significant sign of extra-terrestrial intelligence, you dickwads.’

“So get the fuck out of here and let me work. And you can quote me on that.”

I leaned away from the podium and lit a cigarette with my brass Zippo. “Any other fucking questions,” I asked the assembled press corps.

They all started shouting the same goddamn questions at once. You just can’t fucking intimidate the press. They’re too fucking stupid.  The Louisiana Deputy Sherriff that had been assigned as my escort stepped up onto the dias and in between me and the microphone and said “That’ll be enough questions for today. Mr. Sandstone will not be taking any more questions.” He turned and put hands on my shoulder and tried to walk me away from the stage.

“You said you’d tone the language down,” he hissed and he hurried me behind the curtain and away from the public eye.

“I fucking did.” I said, exhaling. “You want me to tell them what’s really going on? Fuck you.”

http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/06/crop-circle-pra.html