So apparently technical support agents don't understand basic math. I guess this isn't a huge shock but HOLY CRAP is our education system really so woefully horrible? Or is it just that these people are willfully making themselves sound like idiots because they'd rather do that than be responsible for losing Verizon $70? Meanwhile, thank you Ms. Simon for teaching this to me by moving all the desks to the edges of the room and explaining 1's, 10's and 100's by the cunning use of the floor tiles. And then making us walk through the hall chanting "Ones! Tens! Hundreds!" like some kind of math mob.
But the real reason that math is dead, much like sting, is that my favorite graffiti in all of new york is gone. On a concrete “jersey” barrier on west 4th between Lafayette and the Bowery, where some construction has been going on for some time now, someone had spray painted the quadratic equation. It's possible it has simply moved, as it has been spotted elsewhere before. However, there are still concrete barriers there and they look freshly painted, so I'm afraid that we will never know which of the two values x turned out to be.
frankly, until i looked at the last pic, i couldn't remember what the quadratic equation was. i thought it was that FOIL thing, which after i looked, i realized i was thinking of FOIL. when did one use the quadratic equation? man, i've forgotten SO much maths! let's refer to it as maths. i like using the british plural.
ReplyDeletepart of the problem is that what i called the quadratic equation is more properly referred to as the quadratic formula. It's actually used in a capacity related to FOIL, or more specifically as the opposite of FOIL, factoring. It's a closed method for finding the solution to a quadratic equation. Given an equation:
ReplyDeletex^2 + 5x + 6 == 0
The first way I learned to solve this was to ask "what 2 numbers when added together make 5 and when multiplied make 6?" If we can figure that out, it factors into:
(x+3)(x+2) == 0 at which point we know that either x==-3 or x==-2. However, given something a little kookier:
x^2 + 7x + 5 == 0
How would you factor that? What 2 numbers added together make 7 but multiplied make 5? To find this, we use the quadratic formula. Plug and chug, we get that
x = (-7 ± sqrt(29)) / 2.
Personally my favorite tag is the picture of a platypus with the name "platy" followed by the greek letter pi. Currently that is near the start of the pedestrian crossing of the Manhattan Bridge (Brooklyn Side).
ReplyDeletethats one of my favorite graffiti too... i hate being not in ny to monitor these things
ReplyDelete