The laws of the universe

The thing about those calculators is that they are great for calculating 1,234 times 5,678, nobody should have to do that by hand, though I do believe they should be able to eyeball it and see that it’s not too different from 1x5, and add three zeros, and then add one more to account for the small change and you get 6 million which is pretty close. They shouldn’t be standing there without their calculator and having no idea what 7x8 is. Could be six million, could be two, they don’t have any idea because the only thing they know about arithmetic is that they enter one number, the ‘x’ button, the other number, and the ‘=’ number. To me this is just terrible.

That’s one thing that’s kind of odd, the way they teach math, the way at first you are just dealing with one digit numbers, than two, then three, then four, and there you are. poor kid with a little stub of a chewed up pencil, and you have to carry those ones, and if you are subtracting you have to go back to the front and decrease a number and take that all the way back changing numbers as you go and then finally sticking a one in front of the number on the top that was too small, and by then all the numbers are smudged and you can’t tell what is in what column and you’ve forgotten where you are at. And multiplying big numbers by big numbers and getting all those numbers lined up, each one advanced one digit from the one above it, and when you have run through all the numbers then you have to do addition on them, and worst of all is long division where you have to know which number goes into that funny looking little house and which number stands outside like a salesman knocking on the door, but more like the wolf knocking on the door of the three pigs’ house because when he is done with them there will only be a much smaller number standing quivering on the roof.

And division, part of the original sin of math, The Lord said that we could play with addition, and subtraction, and multiplication all we wanted, but when it came to division, don’t go there. Why? Because He said so. But of course we went there anyway and it didn’t seem like such a big deal. And then along came the serpent with its tail in its mouth, the zero, kind of sinister, but he seemed okay. How could we do something like five minus five without him? So we allowed him into the garden, though we suspected He would never approve. But He was off trying to figure out whether to put black holes into the middle of galaxies, and what He didn’t know wouldn’t hurt Him. And then we thought we would have our new pal knock on the door of that division house, that is divide some number by zero, and the garden just plain blew up and He is telling us that the party is over and now we are going to have to get jobs.

Shit. And six thousand, or maybe a hundred thousand, or four and a half billion, or maybe fifteen billion years later, depending on how you figure it, you are working on your stupid job and they give you a calculator, and when the boss isn’t looking you enter a number and then the division sign, and then the zero, thinking here will be some kind of cataclysm and maybe you will get the afternoon off. But when you hit the ‘=’ all that happens is you get some kind of error message.

Well, get me talking about math and you know what happens, especially if I can work in original sin.

But speaking of math, what is with trig? I barely remember it. Oh I know the theory with the right triangles and all, but still all those strange names, sine and cosine and tangents, and it seemed like all the numbers were really big, well not really big, they were less than one, I think, but went on for like ten places, there were tables of them in the back of the book, and then there were those odd identities where you had a long string of signs and cosines and squares and stuff all times each other, and you had to prove that it was equal to some other string of the same stuff, and I don’t know what any of that had to do with anything. I think I did well enough in the class, but I don’t think I ever really knew what I was doing, and I’ve never come across that stuff again in my life.

Too bad they didn’t have some kind of trig machine then, like a calculator, and Beagles could have become the forester he dreamed of. But then I think he would have had to work for the gummint, so maybe it is all for the best.

Oh Beagles I know you didn’t mean to say that hydrogen was consumed. That is one of the big laws of the universe. Nothing can ever be consumed. A particle can be converted to energy and that energy can be converted back to a particle, but nothing is lost, it still has the same mass. I think what you meant to say is that it is combined with oxygen to make water, and with two hydrogens for every water, in that sense it is consumed. Conservation of mass is a fundamental law of the universe, but now that I think of it I wonder why. Well, in all our experiments we have never seen it happen, but that doesn’t necessarily mean shit. I guess it has something to do with the math, most all of physics is explained with math, but you have to wonder, a few protons slipping away in a back alley of Peoria, who would notice? I have a suspicion that it has something to do with the old Greeks. They debated a lot on whether stuff could ever just disappear without a trace. And you know, a white lab coat with a few fancy pens in the front pocket can make you look pretty smart, but I guess nothing makes you look smarter than one of those robes.