Math innumeracy

A&W's burger joint serving the "Third pounder" was McDonald's competitor . The people who had the "third pounder" felt gypped that they were "overpriced for less meat." Really? Has Americans gotten that stupid? I think we really have. I say "we" because I have honestly done that once where i mistake something with a fraction of a value as less than it actually is. I think that it truly starts at the teachers. All teachers that teach in the american school system should have a math base so that the importance of  knowing how to do math in real life. Only math teachers should have a strong base in their subject material. Like they need to have passed the level of math that they are teaching with a college class for that level. But besides this level of intensity, it needs to be up to the teacher on how much they incorporate math into their classes. The math shouldn't be hard pre-calc stuff, but basic components such as the importance of fractions and their numerical values, should be taught in every classroom. Private schools that are nit-picky about the teachers they hire do not stress the importance of basic math. They assume that the students at this private school are there because they are smart enough to know that by heart and that the teachers are just to advance the students, not repeat basic math. Yes, there are some students that can multiply crazy large numbers in their heads and spit out the answer faster than their calculator, but those are only a select few. The rest of us are normal teens. We make mistakes and say things without thinking and let our math skills go to pot in public because we don't want to appear as "geek" or  "nerdy" or any of those nickname/insults that we learned in grade school. But I think that we should have a better base of mathematics because we will be ruling this world sooner than our parents would like. If we are stupid now, it's only gonna get worse as we get older. If kids have a good math base, as they get older, society won't be getting stupider. It'll just be continuing. But if the kids are stupid now and it gets worse as one gets older, we will be left with a stupid society. We pass the knowledge along to our kids. If there is not much to pass on, the future of this world will be in great trouble.

Big Numbers

Just recently I saw The Fault in Our Stars. It came out during the summer of 2014 and all my friends, family and coworkers went to see it. The all left the movie theatre, bawling their eyes out. I understand a good movie, but really? Well I watched it for an english project. Ok I admit that I bawled. But that is not the reason that I bring up this movie.

There was a line in the movie that I forgot who said it, but it goes: "Some infinities are bigger than others." See this does actually pertain to math... But if you think of infinity, it is a number bigger than what you can count. As little kids, anything past 100 was considered infinity. But as we get older that number increases. There is a math joke that goes: this 6 is a big number. Which is meant to be funny and it is. 1 is an infinity. There is 1.01, 1.011, 1.0111 and so on. And in between each .01 is a billion gazillion numbers. And even more in between each of those. Just because 1 is an infinity in itself, there are larger infinities. If you have 2 and repeat the process of finding all the numbers in between all the decimal points there is at least double the numbers because 2 is double one and therefore this infinity of numbers is even larger than the infinity of numbers that we discovered with one.

Some movie lines are paradoxes and some make absolutely no sense at all. This line about the infinities make no sense to people who don't understand math. But if you think about it...it makes perfect sense.