MATH!!!!!! My worse subject!

I am so happy to see you back with us Professor... *makes sure she has her very dark glasses on...

V.

Sign up for remedial classes. I'll drill it into ya.

Lost cause! I'm lucky to be able to do basic counting on my fingers. Now then - give me something mechanical and watch me shine.

V.

Ever heard of a Curta?

never have... is it a calculator? (kidding with the calculator thing)

V.

Yup, a mechanical calculator; you used sliders to put in numbers, and turned a crank.

From the wikipedia article about them:

"The Curta was also favored by both commercial and general-aviation pilots, before the advent of electronic calculators, because of both its precision and the user's ability to confirm the accuracy of his or her manipulations via the revolution counter. Because calculations such as weight and balance are critical for safe flight, precise results free of pilot error are essential."

way cool... my father had a finance company and I used to love playing with his calculator which was a big mechanical deal where you pushed the buttons in and then pulled a large crank handle. It would make a cool crunching sound as the number bars came up and then hammered down on the small piece of tally paper. The thing had to weigh twenty pounds. My father also bought one of the very first hand held calculators called the Bomar Brain. (1960's) I still have the box, just not the calculator.

V.

|i|<3 math!
(And yes, the above is a true statement.)

Some people (including me!) do like it quite a bit.

Yay, math! Math could probably simplify my life greatly for the Markov Chain systems I'm building tonight, but I've instead chosen to go for a more object oriented node based approach instead. The pain was worthwhile though, as muddling through them has forced me to realize just how versatile Markov Chains can be. The one I thought I'd be building at first was going to keep each letter node unique, but then I went and accidentally built one with multiple nodes representing the same character, but attached to entirely different paths, preserving part of the ordering information inside of the random paths chosen - but one could probably group the paths as well... and that prospect gives me goosebumps of joy :D.Still, I'm pretty happy with the order preserving Markov chain that I have and I'm actually more displeased at the availability of readily consumable csv data... wait. How did I get on this topic again. Oh yeah. Math. If you do a lot of math, it will eventually give you something close to super-powers. That is all. O_o.

I'm sort of curious about what you were doing, but...I'm on vacation.

That was a unique take on the subject!

Wow, I never thought about don't something about that. Quite refreshing and entertaining.

I'm glad to see someone found it refreshing...about halfway through I starting thinking "Wow, this is too bizarre". :>

Division in general is just...harder.

Um, ok, great. It's always a good feeling to walk out of math class without any homework.

comes gliding after you from the second story window with a book in his beak

Ah, I laughed so hard. I even went to find out the equations for a cardioid, so that I could appreciate this more. Yeah, I have an appreciation for mathematics as well... and geometry can be appreciated even by a layman, because the geometrical creatures can be drawn.

Excellent little piece. This amused and entertained me greatly. Very enjoyable.