Obsolete Skills

[jeffnc]

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I once managed to spill all the little rectangles from the collecting box underneath. This was in a carpeted room. [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

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How did you ever get them all back in order again?

[jeffnc]

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1) cash register attendants: can't do simple arithmitic, i just feel bad for these people. It makes me realize how bad the education system is in our country.

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Bill is $5.61. They enter the cost and the amount you gave them ($10) and they see the result on the display ($4.39). You then proceed to hand them 11 cents. Watch with amusement at the resulting deer-in-headlights look and wisps of smoke curling out of their ears.

[jeffnc]

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Good penmanship.

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Very true. I'm frustrated writing much of anything nowadays, as it looks pretty pathetic.

[TheMetetron]

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Remembering which positions the TV antenna should be for every station. Oh wait... my parents still do this lol.

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Hot damn I remember doing this and I now feel very old. Or maybe it was just that my ass was poor as a chid. We used to use a rooftop antenna for the main tv and I had [censored] bunny ears in my room. I hated having to fight for the big tv in order to watch certain channels (lol there were like 5 channels).

The day we got cable (illegal ldo) was the best day of my life.

[TheMetetron]

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People are getting really bad at using GPS as a crutch while driving.

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On this note: reading maps.

Even if you don't have GPS, mapquest has forever ruined people. It amazes me the amount of people I know that can't read a map for [censored].

[TiK]

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hm, ive never thought about math as an art form before. i dont think i agree though.

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Quick math estimations is an art form.

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Agreed. Being able to manipulate numbers to make calculations quicker and easier definitely is an art form. If any of you have a copy of the book Surely You Must be Joking Mr. Feynman, there's a great chapter entitled "Lucky Numbers," that discusses this. I've managed to find a bit of it here. If you want to bother searching from it, you can find it also through Amazon.com's search in this book function.

[TheMetetron]

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1) cash register attendants: can't do simple arithmitic, i just feel bad for these people. It makes me realize how bad the education system is in our country.

[/ QUOTE ]

Bill is $5.61. They enter the cost and the amount you gave them ($10) and they see the result on the display ($4.39). You then proceed to hand them 11 cents. Watch with amusement at the resulting deer-in-headlights look and wisps of smoke curling out of their ears.

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I'm not sure why but this routinely [censored] up the workers in the USA, but in Argentina they seem to be totally on the ball with this even with weird [censored] like me giving them change to get back a 2 peso bill (1 peso is a coin) and other curveballs. I'm not sure why, but somehow these people getting paid $2/hr at McDonald's have better math skills than workers in the USA. Maybe it's because we don't realistically use another under 5 centavos and usually not even under 25 centavos. I admit 11 cents makes things ever so marginally harder for retards.

[Borodog]

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hm, ive never thought about math as an art form before. i dont think i agree though.

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Quick math estimations is an art form.

[/ QUOTE ]

Agreed. Being able to manipulate numbers to make calculations quicker and easier definitely is an art form. If any of you have a copy of the book Surely You Must be Joking Mr. Feynman, there's a great chapter entitled "Lucky Numbers," that discusses this. I've managed to find a bit of it here. If you want to bother searching from it, you can find it also through Amazon.com's search in this book function.

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That Feynman story is great.

[Borodog]

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%.

[TiK]

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That Feynman story is great.

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Yeah, I love his stories. It is amazing to be able to glimpse into a brilliant person's mind to see their though processes and how exactly they work, especially because the brilliance usually isn't limited to their areas of expertise