Obsolete Skills

[keikiwai]

there is a thin line between obsolete and lost

most people would say that being a nematode expert is an obsolete skill...... until they need to identify a strange parasite or die

this example isn't completely random; in biology the art of using phenotypes (as opposed to genotypes) to id species is dieing...... while there are many more people who can run dna tests etc. there are fewer and fewer people who can look at a nematode.... or sponge.......... or nudibranch, and identify it using it's phenotype

most of this loss is meaningless.... no one needs those skills usually........ but every now and then you run into a problem where you suddenly need a spot on, eyeball species id, and you can only turn to 70+ year old people, and what will happen when they're gone?

[ZeeJustin]

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You guys all know how to tell if a number is divisible by 3 right? Add up the digits and see if that is divisible by 3. IE - 2763 = 18 = YES!

I had an offbeat math class in 7th grade that taught us all kinds of little tricks like this, how to do square roots manually, etc. The 3x thing is probably the only one I remember.

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Wait this kind of stuff counts? Most childhood nerds know these tricks...

Like your divisible by 3 rule, there's others. I thought ppl knew these? [img]/images/graemlins/tongue.gif[/img]

6: If the initial number is even AND the sum of the digits is divisible by 3, the number is divisible by 6.

9: If the sum of the digits are divisible by 9, the number is divisible by 9.

5: If the number ends in 5 or 0, obv.

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8: If the last two digits are divisible by 8, then the whole number is.

[SlowHabit]

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You guys all know how to tell if a number is divisible by 3 right? Add up the digits and see if that is divisible by 3. IE - 2763 = 18 = YES!

I had an offbeat math class in 7th grade that taught us all kinds of little tricks like this, how to do square roots manually, etc. The 3x thing is probably the only one I remember.

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Wait this kind of stuff counts? Most childhood nerds know these tricks...

Like your divisible by 3 rule, there's others. I thought ppl knew these? [img]/images/graemlins/tongue.gif[/img]

6: If the initial number is even AND the sum of the digits is divisible by 3, the number is divisible by 6.

9: If the sum of the digits are divisible by 9, the number is divisible by 9.

5: If the number ends in 5 or 0, obv.

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8: If the last two digits are divisible by 8, then the whole number is.

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If the sum of the digits are divisible by 0, then you got a pretty bad teacher.

[Dids]

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. . . and sooner or later home cooking will be obsolete because there just arent enough people that are in to it.

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I strongly doubt that, but I guess we'll see.

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Yeah, this is nonsense.

Look at the growth in food programming. There's a huge market aimed at the home cook. I don't see this ever going away.

[TiK]

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8: If the last two digits are divisible by 8, then the whole number is.

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I just tried it and it doesn't work. I tried 1356 and 148. I assume last two digits, as in the "56" in 1356 or the "48" in 148. (56 = 8*7, 48 = 8*6)

[ZeeJustin]

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8: If the last two digits are divisible by 8, then the whole number is.

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I just tried it and it doesn't work. I tried 1356 and 148. I assume last two digits, as in the "56" in 1356 or the "48" in 148. (56 = 8*7, 48 = 8*6)

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Oh crap. It's the last 3 digits actually. Because 1,000 is divisible by 8, but 100 isn't.

[punkass]

Multiplying 2 digit number by 11.

Add the two digits, and put in between the original digits for the answer. So 36x11 = 396. If the sum of the two digits is more than 9, then obviously add one to the hundreds. So 58x11 = 638.

[guids]

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. . . and sooner or later home cooking will be obsolete because there just arent enough people that are in to it.

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I strongly doubt that, but I guess we'll see.

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Yeah, this is nonsense.

Look at the growth in food programming. There's a huge market aimed at the home cook. I don't see this ever going away.

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how many girls do you know can cook?

how many people who watch the food channel actually cook more than once a week?

not many imo.


to most people, food programming is nothing more than porn, its like the real thing, but you arent actually doing much.

[RoundTower]

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Another obscure mathematical curiosity that I discovered (and since have found out is of course very well known, but I had never known it before and so constructed it myself) is that pi ~ 355/113. This might not seem impressive, but it's accurate to 8.5 millionths of 1%.

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One of the simple expansions of pi converges to 3, 22/7, and this, in the first 3 or four terms. I think just a few more terms of that expansion (I wish I could remember what it was) can give you dozens of digits.

[TiK]

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. . . and sooner or later home cooking will be obsolete because there just arent enough people that are in to it.

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I strongly doubt that, but I guess we'll see.

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Yeah, this is nonsense.

Look at the growth in food programming. There's a huge market aimed at the home cook. I don't see this ever going away.

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The way things are going now in the US, cooking will be obsolete soon, but not quite yet, say for another two generations or so. But things are definitely trending toward that. Every year the amount of money spent eating out grows while the amount of money spent cooking food at home shrinks. Though it won't become obsolete anytime soon, it's definitely on the way there.