wednesday math

 Let me interrupt this math lesson to bring you an observation.  I was watching tv when this familiar story came up, seems like you see a story like it at least once every day.  A young woman with wonderful kids and wonderful hubby, and well employed, and well loved, and a wonderful life ahead of her and now dead as a doornail.  Another one of those vax deniers.  But not one of those fanatics with a MAGA hat and fantastical theories, just a surgical nurse who vaguely thought it wasn't tested long enough or maybe that she was young and healthy, or maybe something some celeb had said.

But wait a minute, surgical nurse?  Don't you have to go to school for that?  Don't you have to learn about medical science and viruses and all that stuff?  

But then I remembered when I was going to edukashun skool. and the lecturer would drone on and the pens would glide across the notebooks, and nary a hand in the air, nary a question.  And then one day the lecturer went on about Gardner's Theory of Multiple Intelligences, which is just a heaping poop pile of unwarranted assumptions, just the mutterings of some guy sitting in an overstuffed chair sipping brandy and smoking a cigar, which is not common sense and which no research has ever verified.  You can look it up here if you are of a mood.    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_multiple_intelligences

Anyway the point is my hand was the only one that shot up into the air.  The students listened to my sputtering with mild amusement but no pen met paper.  Nothing to write down here, nothing that would be on the test.  They were here to put in whatever was needed to get their teaching certificate and begin their careers of educating America's youth, not necessarily to learn anything.  

I have often wondered how so many medical people could be so ignorant, and now I am guessing that they were just like those education students, not necessarily learning anything, just getting their certificate.  

Just getting that off my mind.

Meanwhile as western civ was rolling along things were doing fine.  We had addition where you add one natural number (the number of sheep in this valley) to another (the number of sheep in that valley) to find out how many sheep you had altogether and the answer was always a natural number.  And we had another operation, multiplication (if you have herds of sheep numbering twenty each in four different valleys, how many sheep do you have altogether?) and the answer to that was also a natural number.  So everything was hunky dory.

But what if a wolf got four of your sheep from your herd of twenty?  How many sheep did you have now?  Well since to add numbers you just put up as many fingers as the first number and then count out the second number, then count all your fingers and you have it.  What you could do for, let's call it subtraction, you could put up as many fingers as you had sheep before and count off as many as the wolf got and then count the remaining fingers and there you are.  Still hunky dory.

But there is an odd thing here, a break in symmetry.  7 + 8 = 8 + 7, obviously.   But 8 - 7 does not equal 7 - 8, what is with that?  And worse, what the hell does 7 - 8 equal?  How can you have a negative sheep?  

We will continue down this road tomorrow.