Excellent perspective - missed most often by talking heads

People (like.. the general population and especially bizness majors) are not at all comfortable with exponentials / their simplest-possible in-head arithmetic.

I regularly run into folk who cannot actually express the 'difference' twixt million, billion etc. (never mind the Brits' 'milliards'.)
Simply -it seems- they cannot add the three zeroes and make any Sense of the scale of things.

And [6.023 E+23] would be utterly meaningless. Any guess on the current %pop who would also recognize that rather important number? I say: 2%. Tops.
(Though in my day, HS students bloody well Did grok the notation And the number. Yours, too, I bet.)

{Dumbth} about elementary stuff can kill us all, especially when calculating yield of the purloined fissionable material in some Pakistani cellar, while trying to make a gun-device out of Pu..

One Hopes that the Econ-class does better than the MBA-mills, the avge. politician and the rest.
But One can never be Sure of that..

Was the 'peanut farmer' our last (or.. Only) scientifically literate Pres?

Post #300,613 by Ashton 12/3/08 10:13:50 PM Reply	Excellent perspective - missed most often by talking heads People (like.. the general population and especially bizness majors) are not at all comfortable with exponentials / their simplest-possible in-head arithmetic. I regularly run into folk who cannot actually express the 'difference' twixt million, billion etc. (never mind the Brits' 'milliards'.) Simply -it seems- they cannot add the three zeroes and make any Sense of the scale of things. And [6.023 E+23] would be utterly meaningless. Any guess on the current %pop who would also recognize that rather important number? I say: 2%. Tops. (Though in my day, HS students bloody well Did grok the notation And the number. Yours, too, I bet.) {Dumbth} about elementary stuff can kill us all, especially when calculating yield of the purloined fissionable material in some Pakistani cellar, while trying to make a gun-device out of Pu.. One Hopes that the Econ-class does better than the MBA-mills, the avge. politician and the rest. But One can never be Sure of that.. Was the 'peanut farmer' our last (or.. Only) scientifically literate Pres?
Post #300,643 by crazy 12/4/08 2:11:48 PM Reply	Particles per mole?
Post #300,663 by Ashton 12/4/08 5:36:04 PM Reply	Yup.. Mr. Avogadro gets the credit.. The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary. -- H.L. Mencken
Post #300,691 by mhuber 12/4/08 11:11:54 PM Reply	Avocado's Number 6.02 x 10^23 Hey, high school wasn't a complete waste of time. I also remember y = mx + b, which would be handy if there were any such thing as linear in the real universe. That's about it. There was some social stuff, and how to use flash cards to memorize piles of data, and the historical connection: I dropped out of the same school Ronald Reagan graduated from. Also, I got to play politics (a huge learning experience) with the Dixon High School Law Club (I was co-founder, and it was still going strong last I checked a decade later (that was a long time ago) and still not recognized by admin) getting a bridge named after him. Otherwise, complete waste of time. Glad I only wasted a couple of years.

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