http://verizonmath.blogspot.com/2007/08 ... tomer.html

Oh god my sides hurt, how'd I miss this.

You missed it for a long time.

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Ask a person in a drive-thru (preferably McDonalds) what 2 x 2 is and he or she wouldn't get it.

It can happen.

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The plastic tips at the ends of shoelaces are called "agglets". Their true purpose is sinister.

Wow, first I've seen this.

That's from 2006? I could do better math when I was in Elementary. I'd say it's hard to believe adults could be that stupid, but this just proves that they can.

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ther ar difrance batwin cent an dolar?/

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i also have seen this before, of course, but while i agree that they are dumb, i feel like he should have explained in progressing amounts the difference, and used the words "cents and dollars are different units" more and more, explaining the basic concept over and over

rather than this, he seems to be continually insisting the difference and citing the figure ".002". most of his efforts should have been on conveying the difference between the units, not circling around the figure that pertained to his situation, which was what was confusing the poor stupid people. :P

if he had been like "1 dollar is 100 cents" and made a direct link that way, rather than trying to insist on saying "1 dollar and 1 cent are different", and derivatives of that comparison, he might have been able to make them understand easier.

I COULD BE WRONG, they do seem pretty dumb! but he never does do that one way of explaining the circumstances. :X

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This reminds me of how News Networks handle numbers...

Group X annual earnings: 129 Million
Group Y annual earnings: 108 Billion

See? They are so alike!

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Alright, I'll be the stupid one.

I understand that .002 dollars and .002 cents are different. That's about all I understood.

I am terrible at math, and I don't think it's a product of our educational system, I'm just fucking bad at math. I wish I had a math brain.

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Motherfucker, I used to be somebody.

The above post is a product of our educational system.

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Pretty sure you meant your own post Ruffdraft.

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Escape will make me God.

When it comes to gas money, I don't understand shit like this. Then again, it's gas money; our education STINKS!

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The plastic tips at the ends of shoelaces are called "agglets". Their true purpose is sinister.

1 cent = 0.01 dollars

1 cent / 100 = 0.01 dollars / 100

0.01 cents = 0.0001 dollars

0.01 = (0.0001 dollars/1 cent) = 0.01(0.01 dollars/1 cent)

1 = (0.01 dollars/1 cent) = (1 dollar/100 cents)

Sorry, I doubt I am helping, but it's beyond me how it should be explained.

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Don't know if this is accurate but fractions are a better illustration I think.

1 cent = 1/100 of a dollar

.001 cent = 1/10000 of a dollar

See, both Jay and Sentios made that more accessible for me. I am the type of person who has to have stuff broken down in that way. That video was just repetition of the same information over and over. If I had been the customer service representative, I would have been overwhelmed, too.

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Motherfucker, I used to be somebody.

that's what i'm super saiyan, he was not being a very effective teacher. :X

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Bleedcomics Staff Writer/Editor, , and Keeper of the Jar Brain of Secret President. RIP Ku Ku Ku \(-^.^-)/ U Wuz A REAL N***A!!!!!!!
"We're quite aware of this. BR is no happy rainbow face man. He is simply our neighborhood best fucking poster." ~ Warbear
Puff Most Epic.

The thread title shows English literacy at its finest.

Hmm?

Oh it's.

English is different from math. Language evolves over time into new language. Math is the fucking same for all eternity. Don't be a fine example of a pedant.

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"We're quite aware of this. BR is no happy rainbow face man. He is simply our neighborhood best fucking poster." ~ Warbear
Puff Most Epic.

To be fair, conventions for mathematic notations certainly have changed.

That said, considering how math is rarely used for interpersonal communication (compared to language), it's not a surprise how regional variations in convention hasn't really become very pronounced or common.

Not to mention, you can misuse grammar in language and more or less still get across your point (after all, even if you misuse grammar you're still intelligible, usually, and things like punctuation conventions don't even happen in spoken language!) but the same couldn't really be said of math. If you fuck up, say, the formatting in 6*(8+3) as 6*8+3, you get a pretty fucking different result.

Language has its caveats of meaning changing too, but you can usually figure it out from context anyways! Math? Much less contextual.

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You are right, I am not very contextual. :)

Pfft. Calling someone out on spelling mistakes is proud snafu section tradition. In 2005 a guy had a sig specifically mocking me for mixing up "effort" with "afford", he had it for like 3-4 months, and I took it just fine.

I think Math(as in Mathias) is more than entitled to point out mixing up "its" with "it's". It's not like he's mocking, and Sentios has a sense of humour so I doubt he took it badly at all.

It is very on-topic, and it does show the double standard so many people have, that if a person lacks a basic understanding in a branch of knowledge you're great at(Sentios is very good at Math and Physics, if I recall correctly) then that person is a complete moron, but if you personally make a mistake in a different branch of knowledge, people are supposed to cut you some slack.

And yes, language evolves, but a mistake by current rules is still a mistake. We can't just excuse a mistake because we arbitrarily feel in 50 years it'll be the "correct" way to write. Besides it takes more than a few million people making a language mistake for a word to change. Especially, in the case of "its", a lot of instruction guides and manuals would be very annoying to read, if you had to rely only on context to decide whether it's(lol) a possessive pronoun or not. If "its" became "it's" you'd likely have to forbid contraction of "it is" and "it has", which people would complain about even more.

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You're right that I don't really mind but there's no double standard as I acknowledge and more importantly understand the mistake that was pointed out, even if I don't care about it. The original topic was about people who couldn't understand a concept even when it was explained. There's a large difference between that and one of the 10 most common grammar mistakes/typos.

Yeah I actually ended up trying too squeeze to much into that sentence. The double standard I meant was the implicaton that Math mistakes are a bigger deal than language mistakes, suggested in BeeAre's "English is different from math. Language evolves over time into new language" line. But since I mentioned you in the brackets, my post reads like I'm accusing you of the double standard.

That wasn't my intention, I just mentioned you, because you were the one to make the spelling mistake and because you're well versed in fields BeeAre holds in high-esteem(I do too, but I think language is equally important).

But the more I think about it, BeeAre likely doesn't even know you're great in Physics, you guys don't really post in the same forum sections. I just made a shortcut in my thought process. My bad.

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Based on what I see, people don't really care if you aren't a "math" person. People view math as something you either get or don't get, not as a measure of intelligence or effort. Which is obviously not the case in terms of effort, but throughout my educational experience that's been what I've seen. People give up on math and science more easily, which is why people feel like it's okay to say they sucked in math, like it wasn't their fault.

The problem with math education specifically is that it's still not been separated from calculating. More on that can be found here.

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/conrad ... uters.html