What's on your mind today?

[Magdalena]

How are so proficient in always posting the perfect GIF?

Maybe it comes from having no father.

[xSilverPhinx]

How are so proficient in always posting the perfect GIF?

Maybe it comes from having no father.

Nah, it comes from being the funny, creative person you are Absent fathers get no credit. 

[Magdalena]

How are so proficient in always posting the perfect GIF?

Maybe it comes from having no father.

Nah, it comes from being the funny, creative person you are Absent fathers get no credit. 

Okay.

[Bad Penny II]

This well paid manager guy (he's got some sort of fancy business qualification) comes into my office and asks me how many holiday days a guy that works three days a week is entitled to in a year, he finds the online government calculator difficult, he thinks he should get about 4.

Well you as a 5 day a week guy get 20 holiday days a year...
Lets divide 20 by five and we have ..... 4 that's how many holiday days you get for each day of the week you regularly work in a week.
You are entitled to 5 days times 4 = 20 glorious holiday days a year
Three day a week guy 3 x 4 = 12 glorious holiday days a year

He asked someone else accustomed to using the calculator ( which is cool and straightforward to use) and she came up with 84 hours, he works 7 hours a day, 84 hours divided by 7 days = 12 glorious holidays.

I find the innumerate weird, how can you trust them to do anything?

[Bad Penny II]

Does everywhere label their extreme climatic happenings 1 in a hundred years?

We do here.

I'm abandoning the tired old measure of age involving irrelevant circling of a sun and adapting it to take into account the number of 1 in a 100 year events I've experienced.

I'm 842, at least.

[xSilverPhinx]

This well paid manager guy (he's got some sort of fancy business qualification) comes into my office and asks me how many holiday days a guy that works three days a week is entitled to in a year, he finds the online government calculator difficult, he thinks he should get about 4.

Well you as a 5 day a week guy get 20 holiday days a year...
Lets divide 20 by five and we have ..... 4 that's how many holiday days you get for each day of the week you regularly work in a week.
You are entitled to 5 days times 4 = 20 glorious holiday days a year
Three day a week guy 3 x 4 = 12 glorious holiday days a year

He asked someone else accustomed to using the calculator ( which is cool and straightforward to use) and she came up with 84 hours, he works 7 hours a day, 84 hours divided by 7 days = 12 glorious holidays.

I find the innumerate weird, how can you trust them to do anything?

That looks like an elementary school maths problem. And this is how an elementary school student would solve it:

(Known as 'the rule of three')

5 workdays per week --> 20 days off
3 workdays per week --> x

5x=20x3
x=12 days off

Don't business schools teach basic accounting?

[billy rubin]

This well paid manager guy (he's got some sort of fancy business qualification) comes into my office and asks me how many holiday days a guy that works three days a week is entitled to in a year, he finds the online government calculator difficult, he thinks he should get about 4.

Well you as a 5 day a week guy get 20 holiday days a year...
Lets divide 20 by five and we have ..... 4 that's how many holiday days you get for each day of the week you regularly work in a week.
You are entitled to 5 days times 4 = 20 glorious holiday days a year
Three day a week guy 3 x 4 = 12 glorious holiday days a year

He asked someone else accustomed to using the calculator ( which is cool and straightforward to use) and she came up with 84 hours, he works 7 hours a day, 84 hours divided by 7 days = 12 glorious holidays.

I find the innumerate weird, how can you trust them to do anything?

here in america 10 days is a lot

[Dark Lightning]

I believe that I was getting 20 days paid vacation at the 25 year mark, which is when I retired from that company. We also got several days off, like Memorial Day, etc. I worked throughout uni and was either in class, working, or sleeping. I did manage to get married in that time span, though. When I graduated and found a position, I had weekends off. It took quite a bit of getting used to, after 6-1/2 years of uni.

[billy rubin]

i remember getting out of graduate school and walking into a book store, looking around, and realizing that i could buy a book and read it, just because i wanted to.

i hadn't had time to read a book just because i wanted to in years.

[Tank]

i remember getting out of graduate school and walking into a book store, looking around, and realizing that i could buy a book and read it, just because i wanted to.

i hadn't had time to read a book just because i wanted to in years.

Do you listen to audio books while you're driving?

[billy rubin]

no. i sometimes have a radio, so ill listen to news if its on. i can get the BBC world service for an hour or two midday GMT.

the rest of the time i'm mostly in my head. i try to figure out things i don't understand, or consolidate information about things ive recently learned and try to see whether are useful patterns that come out of it. motor design, or honeybee ontology, or the fastest lines through a corner under different conditions. or ill memorize poetry that i think is interesting. took me years to really understand seasons and the phases of the moon. still don't understand ocean tides. my head's a mess of clutter inside, so i spend time trying to sort it out

i do need to brush up on my spanish, so that would be a good use of some electronic connection. and every spring i play recordings of frog calls so i can recognize them as they come out of hibernation.

truck driving is really a meditative environment. you can't do anything with your hands without getting fired for it (that woul dbe me, last month) so its all about whats inside you.

[Icarus]

Billy. try to figure out the fastest way out of the corner.  That usually means using the late apex technique.  You cannot always do that maneuver if competitors are in the way.  When done correctly you can accelerate down the straight sooner than the other guys. That is to say that you can feed in some throttle sooner. ......But what the hell, I suspect that you already know about that stuff.
...
And as for the innumerate wizard in BPs' place, the math is too easy.  5 days compared to 3 days makes a three to five ratio.  Divide 3 by 5 to get the decimal 0.6  Multiply 20 days by 0.6 to get 12 days. BP probably did that in his head almost instantly.

Why are so many people put off by simple math exercises?  Math is fun.  OK so I may be a nut case but I use mentalmath to help me offset occasional insomnia. When you choose a random number and then try to mentally extract the cube root, whatever the previous problem might have been on you mind, is pushed aside.  Works better than counting sheep.

[Dark Lightning]

My 2nd son was on the swim and water polo teams in high school. He used to do his calculus homework in his head when doing the back stroke, because it's mostly pretty boring and he wanted to occupy his mind. He's quite intelligent. I wish he had applied himself more at the universit(ies) he attended. He got the male side of the family's propensity for alcohol-laden partying, and after about 6 years of it, only has an A Sc in some sort of mechanical field to show for it...and works mixing paint at a local Lowe's store.

[xSilverPhinx]

My 2nd son was on the swim and water polo teams in high school. He used to do his calculus homework in his head when doing the back stroke, because it's mostly pretty boring and he wanted to occupy his mind. He's quite intelligent. I wish he had applied himself more at the universit(ies) he attended. He got the male side of the family's propensity for alcohol-laden partying, and after about 6 years of it, only has an A Sc in some sort of mechanical field to show for it...and works mixing paint at a local Lowe's store.

Reminds me of my brother a bit. He was way ahead of the curve in maths class when he was around 8 and the teacher called in my parents to tell them that she was sure he was cheating just because he did the sums in his head. Severe depression and other life events put him behind though, and he graduated from High School at the age of 23. That's as far as he got, education-wise. He's well off though, with that logical mind and good working memory of his he became a professional poker player.

[Dark Lightning]

My 2nd son was on the swim and water polo teams in high school. He used to do his calculus homework in his head when doing the back stroke, because it's mostly pretty boring and he wanted to occupy his mind. He's quite intelligent. I wish he had applied himself more at the universit(ies) he attended. He got the male side of the family's propensity for alcohol-laden partying, and after about 6 years of it, only has an A Sc in some sort of mechanical field to show for it...and works mixing paint at a local Lowe's store.

Reminds me of my brother a bit. He was way ahead of the curve in maths class when he was around 8 and the teacher called in my parents to tell them that she was sure he was cheating just because he did the sums in his head. Severe depression and other life events put him behind though, and he graduated from High School at the age of 23. That's as far as he got, education-wise. He's well off though, with that logical mind and good working memory of his he became a professional poker player.

That's another thing. He wrote a paper in 9th grade English class that the teacher claimed he had to have plagiarized from somewhere due to the quality of that paper. He gets that from me. I could scribble out an essay before breakfast, work it over on the bus going to school, and then re-transcribe it for turning in in homeroom, before English class. The version from the bus was fine except that the penmanship suffered quite a bit from the bumpy bus ride.

If I hadn't been so small as a kid, I would have been bumped from 3rd to 4th grade. I learned this many years later, from my mother. The concern was that my small size would lead to abuse from my classmates. I didn't complete growing physically until I was over 20 YO.