Yesterday, when I was writing a very simple script to check whether a given number in a sequence was even or odd.

Also when I wanted to buy a sandwich and needed to know if I had £2.30 or £34,000 in change in my pocket.

No it couldn’t – it’s far more fundamental to the whole way maths works.

Yes, but it’s quite clearly designed to trip people up. Hence anybody with any sense at all would look at it quite carefully. The issue being people who don’t know the correct way to do it when they do think about it carefully (and then attempt to justify their incorrectness).

Ner, ner, ner – strawman alert, strawman alert.

ecce in pictura est puella. 😉

no.

in your pocket.

2 x £1 coins
0 x £2 coins.

how much cash do you have. a) £0 b) £2

there is a reason that we do it like this. 🙂

“As folk keep saying, people do this all the time with change and just don’t realise it.“

No. Absolutely irrelevant, and this is key to the whole discussion.

They do the maths, yes. They don’t write down an expression on paper. That’s one of my key points – the ability to do something is not the ability to read an expression of the act.

Take Prince as an example. Love or loathe his music, anyone who’s seen or heard him live should attest to the fact that he’s a musical genius – plays just about every instrument, each of them better than most people play one, and is one of the most prolific writers on the planet into the bargain. But allegedly can’t read standard musical notation. This does not make him incapable of “doing music”, though it would – by definition – make him illiterate in the context of standard notation. They’re quite different.

Picking coins out of your pocket and figuring out what you’ve got is the act of doing some maths, and is absolutely not the act of expressing the operation you performed in a specific notation, nor is it the act of reading an expression that someone has written to describe in atomic detail the process they performed in figuring out whether they could afford a sandwich.

“Going back a bit, you said an equation like y = c + mx is obvious because it doesn’t actually have a multiplication sign in it. Odd, but fair enough.“

It’s no more or less inherently obvious. It’s arguably more obvious to those who “do maths”, but by virtue of being more familiar.

“Ner, ner, ner – strawman alert, strawman alert. “

An arguably poor analogy, but not a straw man; since I’m not distorting the opposing argument, I’m merely seeking to test it against an alternative scenario.

FTFY 😛

You’re suggesting your alternative scenario is directly equivalent, hence strawman.

“You’re suggesting your alternative scenario is directly equivalent, hence strawman. “

Touché 🙂

My take on it that the question is poorly constructed. Its unusual to see a mathmatic expresion like that id say.

Using the money in the pocket/shop keeper example, would you pull out a handful of 2p and then go i have 2+2+2+2+2 etc= 48p or 24 x 2 = 48p. Fairly certain we would all count how many 2p we had, and do the multiplication.

Using algrebra, would you use a+a+a+a+a+a or 6a?

When i first looked at the question, i struggled to count the number of 2’s that appear in the question, always have done on a cumputer screen. My eyes just lose focus for some reason and i usually have to count them a few times to make sure im consistent.

“I know you’re right, but racking the ole grey matter as to where you have to be for it to work. Certainly not in this latitude. “

Start at any point 50 miles south of the equator.

I’m frankly disappointed that no-one has accused me of sustaining a devil’s advocate position purely to cover the fact that I’d forgotten something I learned 30 years ago. No wonder this forum’s rich pickings for trolls 🙂

“As I just said with my example, you might not need to write that down, but you do need to enter it into a calculator, which means you will use the multiply button and you will need to enter it in the right order“

But you presumably remember the days when we wrote (as we still do, of course) “sin 90 = 1” but calculator syntax was “90 sin = 1”?

People struggled a bit when they first used a calcuator for trig because they understood the operation perfectly well but they didn’t know the syntax. It wasn’t that the calculator’s syntax didn’t make sense, it’s just that people had never used it.

You can understand how to count your change without needing to understand arithmetic syntax.

I wonder how many people there are who (a) would struggle with working out “501 – 20 – 20 – 20 x 3” and (b) would calculate darts scores in a fraction of the time that any of us would. I would guess quite a few.

Tom has 5 apples, Dick and Harry each have 8 apples, they pool them together and divide them equally between them.

‘Normal people’ would correctly do the sum by adding 5 + 8 + 8 and then dividing by 3

I’m sure a fair percentage would not know that it should be written (5+8+8)/3

It doesn’t stop them being able to do the sum though.

“25 miles south west of the north pole“

South-east, surely? 😉

Oh hang on, I thought you were being cleverly facetious. There is no “south west of the north pole”. At the north pole, there is no west and no east – and, indeed, no north.

If you start 50 miles from the north pole (all such points being directly south of it) you can’t go 100 miles north. You can go 50 miles north and keep going on the same circumference for a further 50 miles, which takes you to 50 miles south of the pole on the opposite longitude. From there, 100 miles east takes you to some other point 50 miles south of the pole, and then you head 100 miles south. You’re now 150 miles from the pole and no amount of westerly travel will get you to your original point 50 miles south of the pole.

The only answer is “50 miles south of the equator”.

Tsk. Basic navigation. If I may hoist you by your own paraphrased petard, “Who says standards of navigation are slipping eh?” 😉

“one can still be south and west of it though“

No. You can never be to the east or west of either pole, only to the south of the north pole or north of the south pole, or standing on either.

(B)less (M)y (D)ear (A)unt (S)ally

Is how we were originally taught it at school to remember – no sign of O and M and D the other way round.

How come this is still going on?

It’s all about insecure types trying to assert themselves and prove that they are somehow superior to other people, by ridiculing and belittling others.

Many of them seem to lack any sense of perspective or even a sense of humour. One sad old perv even tried to get a young lass to take her clothes off. 🙁

It’s funny though, in a ‘watching a nerdy kid have a tantrum after you’ve thrown all his exercise books all over the classroom’ type of way. 😀

I’ve enjoyed it immensely. Coon’t actually give a fig about the original sum thing though really, I’ll be perfectly honest. It din’t matter before and it don’t matter now, xept in the minds of a few anally retentive socially inadequate types…