And the Lord spake, saying, ''First shalt thou take out the Holy Pin. Then shalt thou count to three, no more, no less. Three shall be the number thou shalt count, and the number of the counting shall be three. Four shalt thou not count, neither count thou two, excepting that thou then proceed to three. Five is right out. Once the number three, being the third number, be reached, then lobbest thou thy Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch towards thy foe, who, being naughty in My sight, shall snuff it.'
The only thing I can think of is that they wanted the math to be easy, and somehow thought 3 was easier than 5. But, that's hard to believe because the only other numbers used were all 10s, so it's 3*10*10*10 vs. 5*10*10*10.
So? You think you'll get the correct result by using 3? Or 3.14? Not quite. You can only get infinitesimally close to the correct result by increasing digits of pi.
And of course, if you really need that circumference for something critical, guess what? You use the things people developed for this very problem, software packages, and so on. And of course, you get it double checked, triple checked.
If it's assume pi is 5, it's not misinformation. If they point guns at kids and say it's 5 for real, then yes.
Of course. They already use it like it's some kind of hack. Make it official. Teach them the ins and outs of Wolfram. Better than memorising and regurgitating information, no?
You would probably begin by having the police break into canneries and tyre factories to beat dents into any round objects they produce, then end up having to concentrate enough mass in neighbouring states to distort spacetime to the point where π, as measured on a non-Euclidean circle with locally Euclidean constant curvature or radius or something, does in fact equal the number you said it is.
My math teacher back in school blew my mind once with this:
"If you ever get a funny number like 6.28318530717958647 just divide that by π and see if that fixes it. It equals 2, so the answer isn't 6.283... it's just 2π and that's how you should write your answer. Sometimes you get 1.0471975 well guess what? π/3. Simple. Pi isn't a variable, it is a number and you can just leave it in that form for your answers."