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Is that in High Definition Graham? It looks like it....
Can someone tell me WTF this thread is about so that I might express a view on matters and clear this up for everybody.
I individually count how many I have.
So if you have five £1 coins you have to go: "£1, £2, £3, £4, £5"?
Okay. What if you empty your piggy bank and you have 142 x 20p coins?
Please tell me you don't have to count them up individually? 😯
Okay. What if you empty your piggy bank and you have 142 x 20p coins?
Some money.
The Smugnificence:
a level of enlightenment most will never experience, and can only ever dream of.
_tom_ - Member
5 x £1 + 4 x 20p
What normal person thinks in equations like this when sorting their coins though? I just sort my coins into individual piles and add them up. Maybe I'm just thick though
I think that's the point. "maths" isn't some impenetrable, meaningless thing to be scared of or to be smug about, it's something we do every day, and if you understand that five fivers and four twenty pees is £25.80, then you've "got" the point of BODMAS. Not that it's an arbitrary set of rules that's there for the sake of it, but a description of how things work.
Fortunately there are millions of eager Chinese and Indian graduates who all know exactly how to do this.
So in the future, when people want anything done that's above the level of peasant farming, we'll be able to turn to those nations. We won't need to worry that only a tiny minority in this country have the first idea about maths, and the remainder - like that idiot elfin - are actually proud of their ignorance.
EDIT: obligatory smiley 🙂
if you understand that five fivers and four twenty pees is £25.80, then you've "got" the point of BODMAS.
Thank Gödel someone else gets it. 😀
and the remainder - like that idiot elfin - are actually proud of their ignorance.
😀
Do you feel better now you've said that? Does it feel good to get it off yer chest?
I never thought I'd see such anger and virtriol from maffs geeks. Must be all that bullying they suffered as kids. 🙁
if you understand that five fivers and four twenty pees is £25.80, then you've "got" the point of BODMAS
Yeah but I fort the sum was 5x£1+4x20p? 😕
Or does the pound suddently turn itself into a fiver because of some invisible bracket?
I think what it is, they can't admit there's different ways of doing stuff
There aren't, though. The rules of doing maths are simply that - rules. If you try breaking them, you end up with illogical nonsense.
Well we do live in a world of mediocrity. I got told by a recruiter once, that she wanted to see despite my obvious spelling mistake in my e-mail, as she though curricula vitae was wrong. I kind of lost it and put her back where she belong.
[pedant]
juan... unless there was more than one CV, then it's curriculum, not curricula...
[/pedant]
Erm I'm not a Latin geek but I'm pretty sure curricula is just as correct.
Courses of life versus course of life.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curriculum_vitae
she though curricula vitae was wrong
It is, it should be Vitæ.
Question: why do you maffs geeks find it so important to be 'right' on this,
Worried about your monopoly?
I did a diffrunt sum Elfin. cos five fives is just that little bit tricker, as it desn't have a 1 in it. How did you get on? 😕
Do you feel better now you've said that? Does it feel good to get it off yer chest?
I look at how hard it is to recruit people for a technical job in this country, and I look at how many people from abroad we hire, and I find it quite depressing.
I never thought I'd see such anger and virtriol from maffs geeks. Must be all that bullying they suffered as kids.
CBA to answer that.
Curricula is correct as the plural of curriculum...
Now, as to whether you could argue that a single document containing all the different parts of ones life should be 'courses' and not 'course' is another matter!
There aren't, though. The rules of doing maths are simply that - rules. If you try breaking them, you end up with illogical nonsense.
Like neutrinos going faster than the speed of light and non-euclidian geometry?
maffs geeks. Must be all that bullying they suffered as kids.
I'll have you know I started a maths club at school! We had 100 members! But that's binary, so 4...
- Paul Kerensa.
Neutrinos regularly travel at faster than the local speed of light, so maybe they have just discovered that what we think of as 'the speed of light' is just another localise speed... 😀
Non-euclidian geometry isn't ignoring the rules... it's another set of rules entirely. All of Euclid's theorems are true for well, flat space I guess you could call it, which is a good local approximation to the real world.
looks in.....WTF..
wanders out again.
How can it be another set of rules if it isn't disregarding/breaking/ rewriting rules? 🙂
Simple, Euclidean geometry works for flat space, but does not work for curved space. So it works within the bounds of it's own rule set...
Now, just because it was thought the rules for Euclidean geometry were thought to be universal for a while, which was then proved to be false, does not invalidate the rules, it just gives a more precise definition of them...
😀
fair enough! ta!
Okay. What if you empty your piggy bank and you have 142 x 20p coins?
Please tell me you don't have to count them up individually?
Take it to the coinstar machine and let that work it out for me to save the effort 😆 Again though it's not something that I would come across in day to day life, I don't keep that many coins around.
F*** me. I give up. 🙄
I guess to some people it will remain a complete mystery why their calculator, spreadsheet, phone, google, wolfram, and their 9 year old all insist that 2 + 2 x 3 is 8, when it is [i]clearly[/i] 12.
But luckily normal people never need to multiply in real life 😀
I guess to some people it will remain a complete mystery why their calculator, spreadsheet, phone, google, wolfram, and their 9 year old all insist that [b]2+2 x 3[/b] is 8, when it is clearly 12.
FTFY 😉
Elves are quite similar to gnomes, don't you know. Practically the same in fact...
It's the children I fear for. 😀
Trolling is easier than I thought 🙂
I see where Graham's going with that, but it does not in any way justify or back up his claims for twenty six as opposed to zero
if you have 2 x 50p and no pound coins in your pocket is their a pound? or no money?
2 x 0.5 + 0 x 1 = ?
F*** me. I give up.
We've broken him! 😀
Some of them are [i]sooo[/i] angry, aren't they Tom? 😮
Not the same. Very different in fact. Like saying wombats and spider monkeys are 'practically the same' because they're furry.
I like Elfin's notion that you can get more money in your pocket if you count it up in a different way. I think I'll see if I can convince my bank manager to see things that way too. (If I lard my speech with enough silly affectations I'm sure it will be just as convincing as Elf. )
Calm down dears, its only a forum.
For those who remember maths from school and understand that the application of maths is about following the rules like BODMAS then you can rest easy in your knowledge.
For those who are sitting in their middle class 2 up 2 down house, wearing their generic outfit from GAP, sipping on their skinny chai latte from the local costa whilst trying to maintain their online hardman persona of STILL being too cool for school, growing up in da hood an not givin a damn, you are the reason your fine nation is going down the pan. 😉
The result is 26.
"Son, we live in a world that has parentheses, and those parentheses have to be guarded by men with an eye for clarity. Who's gonna do it? You?"
Sorry, but: no parentheses, no answer. The question is deliberately vague; the answer is wholly dependent on context, just as it would be possible to construct a perfectly valid sentence whose meaning would be wholly dependent on context.
And FWIW I'm mostly a software developer, but one more interested in people writing clear code than just technically correct code. Write something like that and you'd get told to do it again.
Some of them are sooo angry, aren't they Tom?
Not angry, just disappointed and a little despairing.
Sorry, but: no parentheses, no answer.
Why is it people are quite happy with the notion of doing the brackets first, but struggle with the fact that there is an order after that.
Quick test, presumably you would say that:
[code]2 + 3 x 3[/code]
"is deliberately vague" yes? So how about:
[code]2 + 3²[/code]
That's exactly the same sum. Still vague?
Sorry, but: no parentheses, no answer. The question is deliberately vague; the answer is wholly dependent on context,
It's not vague in the slightest, it is very, very specific. Whether it is the problem that was [i]meant[/i] to be set is another matter entirely. Parentheses are only added when necessary and that is not always the case, although I can see an arguement for including them in software coding from a QA persepctive, provided it doesn't change the problem.
Elf - did you get beaten up by the chess club when you were at school or sumfink?
[pedant]juan... unless there was more than one CV, then it's curriculum, not curricula...
[/pedant]
Well she did received two documents, one in French and one in English. But she did fail to understand my point, it's not curriculums vitaes but curricula vitae. And then she couldn't understand why I did not put a plural on vitae as well...
But back to the point, they are rules for maths, you can choose to ignore them and become very offensive when confronted with your ignorance/denial, but they exist. Nothing you can do about it. Would you ignore the rules set in the highway code as well? Regardless of consequences? And as for not remembering EVERYTHING from school I find it to be wrong. Until you turn lets say 16 you have nothing else to do than study, it's your main occupation, I would go as far as saying it's your job. So you might as well do it properly. I bet you thin it's ok to misspell and use text spelling. To be fair I am very upset by this "it's cool to be a moron" culture. No it's not cool to be uneducated, I find it to be rather sad or pathetic depending wether or not you had change in life.
What a fantastic thread.
A little reminder of BODMAS.
...[i]wait before you do the calculation[/i]...
+1=400
But back to the point, they are rules for maths, you can choose to ignore them and become very offensive when confronted with your ignorance/denial, but they exist. Nothing you can do about it.
+1+1x0 😉
Mathematics [i]is[/i] a set of rules and conventions and it allows abstractions to be made about the physical world: no rules = no maths, no maths = no science/engineering, no science/emgineering = no shiny toys to plug into.......
Oh yes i and hate the excuse, I am not a scientist therefore I don't know anything about maths. Math are not science at all. Math are in my opinion the language used by scientists to understand each other. Nothing to do with science.
Well played there Don.
Although you could've done something like +0.1x10-10*1...
"[i]That's exactly the same sum. Still vague? [/i]"
No, because expressed in a way that's not vague. Vagueness is about the way something is expressed, not the result.
Anyhoo...
I probably need to take back my point about it being vague. I think it is deliberately designed to trip people up, but vague is the wrong word. Having now played with a calculator whilst stuck in traffic it seems I probably can't think of a context where the result is zero.
But one thing worth noting, IMO, is that it's something you never need know, simply because there aren't any expressions like that in the real world. I'm probably setting myself up for a fall, but I don't recall from GCSE, AO-level, A-level, further A-Level, a masters engineering degree, some time of fluid dynamics research, and 14 years of software development, ever having seen an expression like that - simply because no-one would write such an expression without collapsing it. The only time any of those operators would remain would be if any of the operands were variables; and even then the last term would be "2n" or absent, not "2 x n". The multiplication sign (other than for vector cross product) is, AFAICR, something that's only used in pre-GCSE education (my memory if GCSE is over 20 years old now so it's probably wrong and/or GCSEs have changed).
Point is that I've done more maths than most in my time and (apart from when reviewing other people's source code) I don't think I've [i]ever[/i] needed to remember operator precedence.
So you're right, it's not vague. But as a question it's designed to highlight a certain piece of knowledge which you get taught right at the beginning of your maths education and which you will never, ever need in real life - even if your career involves a pile of maths. So it seems a little unfair to berate people for having fogotten it 🙂