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Visiting England a few years ago I got the opportunity to go up in the bell tower of a local Church during a bell ringing practice. At one point the Bell Captain handed me a book with the music. I said "show that to my Daughter as she is the musician in the family" The Bell captain replies it is not musical it is all mathematical.

The bell tower sways when the bells ring and the walls are about 3' thick at the point we were in the tower. I think they said the base bell was 2000 lbs. along with the other 7 bells there is a lot of weight swinging about.
The present Church has been there since 1349.

David
 
I had to have a statistics class for a graduate program. It was fortunately a one class. The other class members were also mathematically challenged and while the questions asked in one of the videos was really quite interesting, when it came to the math part - setting up equations and such - I noticed as I looked around the room, eyes glazed over, drool out the side of the mouth.
 
John Turney said:
Good thing you didn't have to take statistics.
Click to expand...

I didn't like the 2 such courses I took... and only years later came to fully appreciate that there ARE ways to teach it that can be fun.
 
Math should be taught by teachers who struggle with math themselves using real-life examples.
E.G. - "you're a gang member walking down a street when you come upon a rival gang. You turn and start running back to your own turf. It is 1/2 mile back to your turf and you are running at 8 mph. The gang chasing you is running at 10 mph. How long will it take you to reach safety - or will the gang catch you and beat you up?" It'll never happen. Not politically correct. Can anyone figure out the answer?
 
Forgot one thing. They are starting, say, 400 feet behind you when the running starts. Otherwise, it makes no sense. See what I mean?
 
You'll never make it in time. It will take you 3.75 mins to make the 1/2 mile... the bad guys will cover the 1/2 mile in 3 mins so they will overtake you. The worst thing you can do is to say something bad about their sister :devilgrin:
 
pdplot said:
Forgot one thing. They are starting, say, 400 feet behind you when the running starts. Otherwise, it makes no sense. See what I mean?
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I don't have to run faster than the bear. I just have to run faster than you. :grin:

Seriously now, when we moved to Florida in 2006 the very first week my daughter had the FCAT's - the state standardized tests - when it got to math, daughter (10 years old) puts up her hand and asks the teacher; "what's a foot?"
 
I spent a good hour on this, filled a whole sheet of paper with calculations and still couldn't figure it out. D=R x T. Converting MPH into FPM. Multiplying by 3600. Adding in the 400 feet. Difference of 2 mph...Gimme a formula and I can work it out - maybe.
OK - what's the formula?
 
How do you get 3.75 for 1/2 mile? 8 mph works out to 4 miles in 30 minutes, no? 10 mph works out to 5 miles in 30 minutes. Gang is starting 400 feet behind you but running faster, therefore they have to run 3040 feet all together over the full distance or 13.2% longer. You are going 80% (4/5) of their speed if my 7th grade math hasn't failed me. The trick is to put all this together so it makes sense. I learned that from flying. If you're plotting a course to fly northwest and your calculation come out to a true heading of 85 degrees, that doesn't make sense.
 
pdplot said:
Math should be taught by teachers who struggle with math themselves using real-life examples.
E.G. - "you're a gang member walking down a street when you come upon a rival gang. You turn and start running back to your own turf. It is 1/2 mile back to your turf and you are running at 8 mph. The gang chasing you is running at 10 mph. How long will it take you to reach safety - or will the gang catch you and beat you up?" It'll never happen. Not politically correct. Can anyone figure out the answer?
Click to expand...

Stand and Deliver. $2.99 rental for Amazon Prime members - best 2.99 you'll spend in January!
 
Don't know if this is taught anymore (because it was "natural" to most of us), but my kids had it in math... the ability to ESTIMATE (approximate or ball-park in one's head).
 
pdplot said:
How do you get 3.75 for 1/2 mile? 8 mph works out to 4 miles in 30 minutes, no? 10 mph works out to 5 miles in 30 minutes. Gang is starting 400 feet behind you but running faster, therefore they have to run 3040 feet all together over the full distance or 13.2% longer. You are going 80% (4/5) of their speed if my 7th grade math hasn't failed me. The trick is to put all this together so it makes sense. I learned that from flying. If you're plotting a course to fly northwest and your calculation come out to a true heading of 85 degrees, that doesn't make sense.
Click to expand...

3.75 mins = .0625 hour
D=RxT..... D=8mph x .0625 hour..... D=.5 mile

3 mins = .05 hour
D=RxT.... D=10mph x .05 hour..... D=.5 mile

I didn't bother to take into account the 400 ft since the gang running at 10mph would certainly overtake the gang running at 8 mph easily.
 
A guy I was in class with in college would do that with all the math problems. He would look at the problem then write down the answer.
No working always lost him marks but his answer was correct almost every time. He could not explain how he did it. Said the number just came to him.

This was before pocket calculators so he was not doing it that way. One of our classes was Computer. Had to walk the stack of punch cards down the hall to have them run on the Computer. I think it was Fortran.

David

Boink said:
Don't know if this is taught anymore (because it was "natural" to most of us), but my kids had it in math... the ability to ESTIMATE (approximate or ball-park in one's head).
Click to expand...
 
I'm betting it was Fortran, David. It, and Cobol were about all there was.
 
Ah, the good old days. I still have a deck of punch cards round here somewhere from my 70s college days. Like some with math for others, coding for me was one of those things where I just ā€œsawā€ what I needed and didnā€™t do diagrams or such, just sat and typed it up. And most of the time would have something that did the work the class required and was much shorter than what most of the rest put together. Always wanted to ask, ā€œwhy donā€™t you see how simple the requirements are??ā€ā€¦
 
I envy your ability, Mike. Efficient code writing is a tricky thing!

I realized early on I'd be bored to tears at it. Tried later to self-learn C++ and gave that up as well. Understand it? Yes, to a greater extent than most, having to contend with it from "the early days". Try to compact a routine into the most efficient space? Nope. Simple routines in BASIC were about as far as I would go with that. Even higher level stuff like HTML made me dizzy! :highly_amused:
 
Iā€™ve always told people that writing code is easy, you could teach a squirrel to write code. The hard part is figuring out what to write. And Iā€™ve always thought it was a bit funny that I took to it so easily all those years ago considering that being a country boy in the era before the net, games and PCs my only real exposure to computers was what we saw on TV in shows like Star Trek where it was just some magical thing with lots of flashing lightsā€¦
 
I loved ALGOL. Worked for a national time-sharing company for several years and our options were Fortran or Basic. Fortran was so illogical and cumbersome at the time that I wrote an Algol compiler for the company. Even installed it on a CDC7600 to be used by NASA engineers in the development of the shuttle for those also unhappy with Fortran.
 
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