Wednesday, December 23, 2009

Something Isn't Adding Up

Being that I am currently on summer vacation, I have decided I don’t want to do a whole lot of thinking, since I pretend to do that enough during the school year. So I have been avoiding any forms of intellectual activity, including reading, saying large words, and most of all math. Because I don’t like math. There are five things I hate in this world: Tim Tebow, PETA, the French, reality TV, Twitter, and math. Unfortunately, my mother is watching American Idol constantly and asking me to help my 10th-grade sister with her math homework, so I’m not doing a great job of avoiding these things. Of course I am unable to help my sister with her math because, as a Journalism major, I myself have not taken a meaningful math class in two years. Sure I had a college algebra class a year ago, but when the entire offensive line of the football team is in the row in front of you, you can safely assume the class isn’t going to be too challenging. Our professor was a young Indian woman who was constantly cheery, referred to parabolas as “smiley-faces” or “upside-down happy faces” (I’m not sure this woman knows what a frown is), and talked about her pet chicken “Bobo.”

But let’s take a look back at how math started in the first place. The first known signs of math trace back to our earliest ancestors, as this conversation between cavemen Oog and Wog show us:

Wog: Okay, so there are five of us living in the cave, and one mammoth can feed ten people for three weeks. So how many mammoths do we need to kill to eat for two months?

Oog: I say we just dig up roots.

Wog: Hey, how come we can speak English?

Eventually, the women in the cave solved this problem by just eating Wog and Oog (this tends to be a recurring theme among animals, primarily insects). So as we can see, not knowing math can be very dangerous. But math truly became refined by the ancient Greeks, who believed knowledge was power and went into battle, not brawn. This is probably why they had their butts whooped by the Romans, who didn’t waste time as kids learning math and learned to kill people instead.

So maybe math isn’t as important as it seemed at the beginning of that paragraph. Never-the-less, math is still an important part of your education curriculum (once again I use the word “your,” remember, I am a Journalism major). You are probably currently enrolled in a math class where everyone is learning the wonderful things that can be unlocked with math. Of course, when I say everyone, I mean everyone but you. You are currently sitting there with drool hanging out of your mouth and a blank stare in the direction of the chalkboard. Needless to say, the one other person who is also lost is the guy sitting right next t you, so they can’t help you, and the other people around you are always way smarter than you so they do not stoop to help cretins such as yourself. This leaves you no choice but to ask the teacher for help. Unfortunately, everyone will laugh because your question will probably something so darn obvious you might as well have asked what color cheese is. (Cheese is of course yellow, even though several people tried to debate this fact this semester. I won’t name names, but there is something wrong with people who think that grilled cheese is orange. Namely, they are women.)

Anyway, that’s how I remember math class. Now, I had no problems with math for most of grade school, and I freely applied the simple arithmetic I had learned while watching sports scores. Then in high school, they introduced algebra. For some weird reason, somebody tried to breed an English book and a math book and their retard child was algebra. As a result, my math problems now had letters in them, which clearly defies the laws of math. Yet my teacher was putting X, Y, log, and e into my equations, thus making them technically impossible.

So now, calculators also had to change. Calculators before were simple, peaceful little machines that did simple problems, thus freeing your mind for more important things, like trying to figure out what Earth, Wind, and Fire is saying in the really high pitched part of “September,” (as it turns out, they are saying “ba duda, ba duda, badu”; they just don’t write em like that anymore). But with the evolution of algebra, calculators have turned into expensive, complicated, hostile pieces of equipment with names like YHR-758b-8 Titanium Plus Version 2.0 with “blending” mode. I mean for crying out loud, the same button does three different things depending on the “second” or “alpha” mode plus the alignment of Saturn with Jupiter. With this remarkable calculator, you were able to put in complicated algebraic equations and deduce that the answer to the problem was: SYNTAX ERROR. At least that’s what I always got. I have one of these calculators, which I have named Nancy (I named it so I would feel a little less crazy when I talked and yelled at her when she didn’t work). While everybody else was able to do complex equations and write programs, all I managed to do was accidentally change the language to Spanish (which like math, I don’t understand).

Me: Come on Nancy, what’s 3454 times 5?

Nancy: ERR SINTAXIS

Me: Please?

Nancy: Mucho numero.

Eventually I would give up and start playing games instead (the only good thing about these new calculators). So forgive me if I harbor an extreme hatred for math. The age old question is “will I ever use this again in life?” Of course you will. One day your children will come home crying because they’re algebra equations now contain entire sentences and their calculators are more expensive than planes and harder to work. But I, in all my parental wisdom, will have the solution to all their problems: SYNTAX ERROR.

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