Wednesday, June 11, 2003

Courtesy of Annie Modesitt's blog, here is a great article on Maths and knitting.

Two things about the article I love:
1. I nodded in agreement and understanding to the part about the applied nature of "real world math" and people who claim they 'can't do math' because it's "hard". (I had a friend who taught at a girls' school - she said she got lots of blank stares and complaints about percentages until she brought it up as a "shopping problem" - i.e., "you see a red silk blouse that was originally $64 and now it is 40% off, how much is it?"). One of the reasons I like statistics is that they are very applied - I can usually see what I need to do and how I need to do it. I liked geometry for similar reasons.

2. The line: "Oh for pity’s sake lad, all you’re doing is turning a heel on a bleddy sock." in response to someone discussing the pipe-lagging* problem. (I have my own, less impressive instance of this: in my junior high woods-shop class, lots of my fellow students were intimidated by the jigsaw. I looked at it and thought "hmph, it's just like a sewing machine, only it cuts things apart instead of joining them together" and had no worries in working it.)

*(I'm not quite sure what pipe-lagging is)

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