Dude I meant farmer's market, my bad dear!
Got blood oranges and avocados. A necklace and lots of snacks!
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
What’s on your mind?
- Thread starter Gutwrench
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
Got blood oranges and avocados. A necklace and lots of snacks!
Don't eat the necklace unless it's made of candy.
Yeah, it is just a stainless steel necklace... it is for me to wear!
Late 70’s. His Mother had Alzheimer’s which I suppose doesn’t bode well for me. Fortunately I’ll not need to worry too much about that. Mrs AFB will take care of me with a pillow one night if I start showing symptoms!Sorry, how old is dad?
My mom had dementia at age 79, transitioned to Alzheimer’s age 81, she passed age 83 in 2021. We never told her she had Alzheimer’s, her younger sister did have it also 6 years before my mom showed signs, my mom was so afraid of getting it after seeing and supporting her younger sister.
Moms 9 of 10 grandkids at annual Alzheimer’s walk.
Well, last I checked QuarkXPress, Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign were not requiring me to use algebraic equations in order to lay out golf scorecards and yardage books.
And so far as I can tell, no algebra was involved in 18+ years of laying out newspaper ads and newspapers.
As to the rest, while that's where copy and paste of dimensions, coordinates and the use of onscreen guides comes in to play. You can also tell the program to add, divide, subtract or multiply and by how much. But the program is calculating that, not me. So when I sit down to work, I'm not following an equation, I'm laying stuff down on the page according to how my eye thinks it looks.
And failing any of that, the MacOS has a calculator app, which I use every day. It also does the math for me, so I don't have to.
If none of that is working?
Percentage Calculator
This free percentage calculator computes a number of values involving percentages, including the percentage difference between two given values.
www.calculator.net
Again, something else handles it for me. Math and I keep our separation.
My view, as somebody who has no innate feel for mathematics, is that even though I don't directly use most of the mathematics I've studied—calculating the water flow over specific spots on a piece of wire in a stream or optimizing the routes taken by 25 UPS trucks in a city don't enter my daily life much, ha ha—knowing the underpinnings of the mathematics involved in stuff I do is a good thing. Having an intuitive sense that a "statistic" offered up by somebody can't be right or for making everything fit in my car trunk after shopping at Costco is the result of having been forced to take math courses.
In order to graduate high school it was necessary that I pass an Algebra and Geometry course. These are two courses that have no direct bearing on my daily life.
My ill feelings towards math are because the higher levels represent my mental limitations. If it is absolutely necessary, I can process these things, but it is quite difficult for me. My brain is not wired in this way, it is wired more towards art, whether that is art, music, etc. I think visually, not analytically. Although critical thinking was a necessary survival skill in my youth.
My other problem with math is that I have a hard time accepting things that others take for granted. Someone, somewhere in the past, decided for everyone that X was equal to whatever it is they say it is. And people accept that as gospel, as some 'law' or 'rule' of math. And they willingly agree to be governed by it! Who was this person, what are their credentials, who vetted their work? And I am supposed to simply accept the word of some ancient person? In a period of time where 'experts' are few and far between to check this person? Yeah, I had a problem with that.
I only got through Algebra because I was forced to accept that certain values were predetermined. WHY they were predetermined, WHY people accepted that on faith, no one had an answer for me.
Likewise, this also applied to a lot of aspects of science. Fortunately with science, a lot of that could physically be shown to me and I was able to accept it. A math book generally has few pictures or real world examples. Or at least the ones in my classes in the late 1980s did not. I had to take a lot on faith.
Me: "Why is that the value for X"
Teacher: "It's just accepted!"
Me: "By whom? Who are they? Why? Where did they get the value from? How did they figure this out? Is it correct, or is it possible they made an error?"
Teacher: "You'll just have to trust me on this one."
I probably could have benefitted from a 'History of Math' course or something, explaining who these people were and why they got the results they got. It would have gone a long way towards my difficulty in accepting things everyone just took as fact without question. No idea if anything like that exists, but if so, it sure wasn't offered at my school.
Last edited:
I used to think that algebra didn't apply to real life, but when you go shopping and something is 3 for $4.99, how much is 1? That's algebra.
In fourth grade, they introduced us to story problems and they were confusing, but they were essentially teaching us that thinking would be important for higher math. During that same grade, our science teacher introduced us to the Periodic Table, and I was surprised in my high school chemistry class that I was the only one who knew about it.
In fourth grade, they introduced us to story problems and they were confusing, but they were essentially teaching us that thinking would be important for higher math. During that same grade, our science teacher introduced us to the Periodic Table, and I was surprised in my high school chemistry class that I was the only one who knew about it.
I am a skeptical and cynical person. So something I like about many mathematical and basic scientific concepts is that it often is not too hard to confirm the concepts myself, as opposed to concepts in the humanities and social sciences. For example, dropping a light and a heavy object from the same height and seeing if there is a difference in when the objects hit the ground or drawing a right triangle and measuring the sides to check up on Pythagoras is possible and pretty simple for most people. But in areas such as history, economics, psychology, or political science, only academics have easy access—or any access—to source documents and data or the capability to recreate studies and experiments.
My father was an electrical engineer in the aerospace industry. He knew trig and a bunch of other stuff real well. My mom has a masters degree in higher level math and was a school teacher. My sister, two years younger than me, got most of that from my parents.
Me? I was a 16-18 year old trying to do the minimum to finish high school while being regarded by my dad as a total screwup. I wasn't interested in testing math because I didn't want to learn it to begin with. I only did what was needed to get out of HS. I had a car and wanted to be any place other than school.
So science held interest, but math didn't.
It certainly is. Been together 29 years this summer, married 27.
Statistics -- understanding that when a politician says (as it happened) that "It is a shame that half our schools are below average. We must improve" is just embarrassing.
Trigonometry -- understanding that tides (mostly, depends on where you are) move according to a sine curve. Slowest at ebb and full tides and fastest in between. It can save your life when you are rock fishing.
Algebra -- understanding what exponential means. Especially when dealing with the spread of Covid | Bird Flu | Measles, etc, etc, etc.
These are a few of the real life situations where and understanding of the theory of maths is important, even if you need to look up a book to find out how to do it.
Even the brilliant Katherine Johnson had to look up a book to find out how to bring an astronaut back to earth, when she understood the theory of it.
Mathematics....my 10th grade geometry teacher made sure I went away with a sour view of the world of math.
I did very well on tests and homework assignments. Often my solutions for the questions were 100% correct, but my handwriting, while perfectly legible, was not esthetically pleasing for the teacher. My papers would be returned marked up with a lot of red lines and circles showing that my vertical strokes weren't perfectly parallel and that the shapes of some letters weren't consistent.....and so my grades suffered since he'd deduct points for annoying him with unpleasing penmanship.
I did very well on tests and homework assignments. Often my solutions for the questions were 100% correct, but my handwriting, while perfectly legible, was not esthetically pleasing for the teacher. My papers would be returned marked up with a lot of red lines and circles showing that my vertical strokes weren't perfectly parallel and that the shapes of some letters weren't consistent.....and so my grades suffered since he'd deduct points for annoying him with unpleasing penmanship.
Last edited:
That couldn't happen in many countries today with homework being generated electronically.
My handwriting is decent. I’ve seen a lot worse, and I’ve also seen a lot better. No one took off points though. I did not learn to write until I was like 10 though.
currently what would happen is that spellcheck would change whatever was typed for the answers and the result would be worse than losing 4 or 5 points for not having pretty handwriting
I don’t mind it. I’m pretty open-minded when it comes to music, there isn’t much I don’t like. I don’t make an effort to listen to country music though.
Uh oh.
That's like when the Girl Scouts kept asking me to buy cookies and they were driving me up the wall. I asked "Is that what happens to Girl Scouts when they're too old to be a Girl Scout? Do they make them into cookies?" and it became quiet as they were all thinking and the adult at the table was smirking at me. 😁
Now you got me thinking about that too.
I now also wonder if toilets on the other side of the world flush in mirror view of where I am.
Northern Hemisphere vs Southern Hemisphere swirl the opposite way.
When you see or smell something unpleasant, does your stomach turn differently in a different hemisphere?