As some already know Mrs. Graybeard and I live in central Illinois. I am an old retired guy but she still works. Her job requires her to be in far off and exotic places from time to time and for the few weeks preceding the cruise she will be in the exotic city of Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.
On the morning of May 10th. she will leave that fair city at 7:00AM. with the destination of St. Louis, Missouri being her immediate goal, a distance of 500 miles, she will be traveling at 70 miles per hour.
I will be traveling toward St. Louis on that same day, a distance of 172 miles at 70 miles per hour with the goal being to meet her there. Then we will travel together southward towards Ft.Lauderdale, Florida.
I need to know what time I should leave here to meet her in St. Louis as she arrives there.
I've been mulling this over for several days and cursing the inadequate public education I received but with the knowledge that when I learned about similar problems when I was in the 6th grade it was in another century and the problems given us always involved trains converging, not cars. If my wife and I were traveling on trains, I reckon I could do this as easy as pie.
We had cars in those days too, though I think they were called horse-less carriages but could they ever use cars as examples? Noooo. It had to be trains.
So if anybody reading this has a modern day 6th. grader handy, please present him/her with my problem but don't tell them about my abysmal education. Tell them instead that old Graybeard would solve it himself but he fell down yesterday and hurt his leg.
Hmmmmm.This one will require advanced new-new math. You are in luck because being the geek I am, I did my 5th grade science/math fair project on this very subject and that was back when geeks were not yet in vogue. If you don’t believe me about the “project” just ask BizzyBugz, she’s my mom and she had to rummage around in shops for two weeks to find the little ceramic tortoise and hare I needed for the visual on the project.
Anyway, I digress….. the solution involves an ancient equation devised after that epic race between above mentioned tortoise and hare. Now understand that even though they were traveling at different speeds (and one would think that would make it more difficult to calculate their equations as apposed to yours) there are actually many more variables involved with yours which makes it infinitely more difficult to solve. But I will have a go at it.
Uh, time = distance ÷ rate, minus frequent pit stops (assuming Mrs Graybeard is as old as you). Then factor in e=mc² which is iffy at most considering your e may not be as good as it used to be and god-only-knows what your m is these days! Then one must round off the total number of McDonalds (or Cracker Barrels for true southern travelers) or round up as the case may be. Then apply the D.O.T. algorithm which will cover construction work, accident backups and 18-wheelers and be sure and divide that number by the square root of the type of music you listen to on the car radio. So quickly doing the calculations for all that in my lightening quick mind……. you need to leave at 11: 29 a.m. unless you drive a Buick in which case I would say leave around 4 a.m. to be on the safe side.
But then there’s always Gödel's theorem which will blow all of the above away and which when applied to this problem will result in you both arriving in Albuquerque at midnight.
It will take her around 8 hours. It will take you a around two and a half hours. You can sleep late!