Please renew my faith in humanity

[pgilliam1]

Can't help ya. Lost my faith in humanity with the Viet Nam war. Math is no reason to lose faith .

 

[sahtt]

Can't help ya. Lost my faith in humanity with the Viet Nam war. Math is no reason to lose faith .

Vietnam was bad and unlike you (potentially) I was not around during that time. The below link, however, puts the Vietnam war into context (IMO). I try to study these in my free time.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_and_anthropogenic_disasters_by_death_toll

Take a close look at the far right column. China has a "bad habit" of slaughtering ~5-10% of the world's population (all through civil wars mind you) about every 100 years. I think everyone in the western world should have an entire class dedicated to the horrors of world war II.

 

[pgilliam1]

I was in high school when the war in Vietnam started.

I wasn't trying to change the subject of this post. I was trying to bring the OP's request to restore his faith in humanity by answering a simple math equation into perspective.

The above list serves to support my loss of faith in humanity.

Man is a monster.

 

[Aaron94T]

13. But in the "real world" why would anyone need to know this?

+1, I'm not sure what understanding the order of operations gets you outside of the 3rd grade. I am not making the argument that most people are smart but I would say that useless information is just that...

 

[Tom239]

+1, I'm not sure what understanding the order of operations gets you outside of the 3rd grade. I am not making the argument that most people are smart but I would say that useless information is just that...

It is easy to refer to math without realizing you are doing it. In trying to make
sense of our experience, we all routinely make judgments as to whether events
are related. We make assertions like "That just couldn't be a coincidence."
Like it or not, such judgments entail math. Probability and statistics are
highly useful mathematics (and not widely enough taught in my opinion).

As to why it matters to know the order of operations, that is part of the language
of math, and math is involved in so many parts of life that you really have to be
incurious to not want to be able to read the language of mathematics.

In the 20th century, a guy you've heard of discovered a remarkable relationship
between mass and energy; we learned, for example, that a clock gets heavier
when you wind it. If you don't know the order of operations you don't know
how to read E=mc².

 

[NSX167]

It is easy to refer to math without realizing you are doing it. In trying to make
sense of our experience, we all routinely make judgments as to whether events
are related. We make assertions like "That just couldn't be a coincidence."
Like it or not, such judgments entail math. Probability and statistics are
highly useful mathematics (and not widely enough taught in my opinion).

As to why it matters to know the order of operations, that is part of the language
of math, and math is involved in so many parts of life that you really have to be
incurious to not want to be able to read the language of mathematics.

In the 20th century, a guy you've heard of discovered a remarkable relationship
between mass and energy; we learned, for example, that a clock gets heavier
when you wind it. If you don't know the order of operations you don't know
how to read E=mc².

Suppose we have two identical watches, one wound up tight, and the other completely unwound. Which one would be heavier? Which one would be harder to shake? The wound one, of course, because we put some extra energy in it by winding it up, and energy itself is what is heavy. Energy is the only thing that is hard to shake. Now what will be the final difference if we dissolve the two watches in equal beakers of acid? The one with the wound watch dissolved in it will be warmer. And this time the extra energy, the extra weight, will be the energy of motion. As seen by the batter a pitched baseball weighs more than an unpitched baseball.

 

[Axerjk]

What is important is when explained, you either understand, or remember quickly why the answer is what it is. Then you can go back to every day life , and completely forget again. :smile:

I agree. That's why I never understood why we were forced to take classes that had nothing to do with our careers, or lives for that matter. They justify it by saying, "you need to be well rounded." But taking a bunch of classes that I'm going to forget everything about the moment I walk out of that class is not what made me a well rounded person.

Chris

 

[enkrypt3d]

this is the latest one.

6-1x0+2 /(divideby) 2 = ?

I had almost 40 responses, and almost all of them are wrong.



To see if people who are voting can figure out the most basic math equation we all learned before the age of 10.

=1............