Posted on 06/16/2012 11:10:38 PM PDT by nickcarraway
Now I REALLY feel stupid.
:(
Shows that the Princeton professors ain’t worth the money they get, if all they spend their time on is nonsense riddle questions that have no relevance to actual life. How about finding a way to teach physical chemistry so that everyone can understand it or something?
I’m safe, I have never been stupid enough to subscribe to the New Yorker.
I’ve got some educated liberals in my family tree. I’m not sure they have the sense to wipe themselves.
Just wow. Why did I read that? Not only did I read it, but I read it to my husband.
Luckily, I don’t think that’s grounds for divorce.
It DOES have pertinence to our situation today. It’s why smart people can believe the twaddle that is “global warming” or think that despite the repeated failure of socialism wherever it has been tried, it will work if only the right people are put in charge. It’s the failure to STOP and think before making a decision, the use of a “feeling” about an answer instead of actually checking the actual facts or doing the calculations yourself (hockey stick, anyone?), and the failure to use REAL scientific method to examine any question and be equally willing to toss out cherished, long held beliefs, as well as to accept the hard to swallow strange ideas that challenge them when the newly discovered FACTS require you to do so, and to not keep sweeping either under the rug!
In a lake, there is a patch of lily pads. Every day, the patch doubles in size. If it takes 48 days for the patch to cover the entire lake, how long would it take for the patch to cover half of the lake?That answer is only half correct. While it does take 47 days to cover one half the lake, it takes only one day to cover the second half. :=)Your first response is probably to take a shortcut, and to divide the final answer by half. That leads you to twenty-four days. But that’s wrong. The correct solution is forty-seven days.
One of my favorite college professors was a stocky old white haired bohunk who specialized in structural foundations of high rise buildings. He liked to say...
“Higher education is a curious thing. It is a process which professes to broaden the mind but in actuality does exactly the opposite. The human mind can only know so much. You are forced to specialize. You begin to learn more and more about less and less. Stay in academia long enough and eventually you will know absolutely everything there is to know...about absolutely nothing.”
I love the cartoon. Did you ever see such clueless-looking professors? The one on the right looks particularly doped-up.
I LOVE math riddles.
A=2
B+P+F=24
A+B=Z
Z+P=T
T+A=F
F+S=Q
Q-T=7
What are the values of Q & T?
no, that answer is not *only* half correct. that answer is 100% correct. The question is how long to cover half the lake. The answer for covering half the lake is the entire correct answer.
Did you answer that the ball was 10¢ or did you correctly calculate that the answer that the ball cost only 5¢? If the first, then this research has "actual life" relevance for you, personall!y
If you are in business, it means the majority of your "smart" employees would get the answer to a simple arithmetic problem WRONG! That's "relevance to real life!"
It's why the electorate of California continue to re-elect the same Democrats that have put them into this mess, election after election, hoping for a better result! That's relevance.
In business, you do not encounter such inane questions. Not even accountants and actuaries do; certainly shipping clerks do not. If you’re going to say that this is relevant to real life, please demonstrate how instead of being rhetorical.
I’ve encountered such things daily in calculating cost factors in the businesses I’ve run and STILL run. . . and the devil, and the profit, is in just such details. An approximate five percent error such as demonstrated by that simple example can BANKRUPT a firm, or cause a Martian probe to CRASH because someone made an unconscious error! Both of those are REAL WORLD examples of just such events. How about the one that required the Hubble Space Telescope to be fitted with “corrective lenses” at the cost of hundreds of millions of dollars, Oleg-hai? Smart people do make stupid mistakes because they don’t check their assumptions. . . or check things they “know!”
The wording of your “dollar more” problem would not exist in accounting, so errors would manifest in a different way. And please lay off the hyperbole (for the second time) . . .
Hyperbole occurs when someone claims “a second time” when the first has never occurred. I can give you many examples of similar problems but I won’t bother. You assume too much. I’m glad you don’t work for me. You would not for long.
Sorry; first time I said “rhetorical”. Scratch that and substitute “hyperbole”. And I am still waiting for a concrete example of where the “dollar more” problem actually manifests itself in accounting, in that form. BTW, this third reply of yours is not short on the hyperbole either, nor of rhetorical situations (e.g. where I would be your employe).
LOL I was qualified for and joined Mensa, but it was overwhelmingly a bunch of pink yappers getting together to find minutae to agree about, and when I was there, diss on Pres Reagan.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.