I was shocked - shocked! - that the winning team on last night's University Challenge can't do binary. St John's Oxford couldn't solve three simple binary sums, like 1100011 divided by 1001*, and express the answer in decimal.
Even stranger is that they were obviously using the same method I was using, except that I got it right: work out the value of each column with a 1 in it and add it all together. Not hard.
Even more shocking was learning that apparently I'm the only one in the family who could do this. This must be how my father felt when he learnt I can't do long division.
It's simplicity itself to work out a spreadsheet that will convert numbers into binary. However I can still remember Mr Turnbull's lesson on how to make a binary calculator with nothing more complicated than a pen, some paper, some Pritt and some scissors, in those long-ago days when no one had heard of spreadsheets and "do it in Excel" would have been meaningless. I may have to dust off this skill.
(* 11)
Showing posts with label maths. Show all posts
Showing posts with label maths. Show all posts
Tuesday, February 02, 2010
Wednesday, June 04, 2008
Only a child can do it
The account of a senior family member will differ on this – in fact it differs every time he recalls it – but he's welcome to start his own blog and post it there. The gist of it is:
His version: We were on holiday ...
Me: True
His version: ... in our new car ...
Me: We’d had it for at least a year
His version: ... and I wanted to work out the miles per gallon ...
Me: Not having done this in the previous year of ownership
His version: ... and even though he'd just done his exams ...
Me: A-levels. My last maths exam ever had been two years earlier.
His version: ... Ben couldn't work it out because HE CAN'T DO LONG DIVISION.
Me: Live with it.
No, I can't do long division. I never could. There's a crack in my brain that long division just falls through. It's a form of arithmetic that relies on guess work. How can you do sums where you have to guess part of the answer anyway?
Short division, no problem, along with addition, subtraction and multiplication. I can do pretty good mental arithmatic, I can handle different bases and percentages, I can even do sums (with a little thought) in Roman numerals. But long division never made any sense to me and still doesn’t, despite just seeing it explained in a video halfway down this page. It's why God invented calculators.
However, I'm sufficiently proud of my other achievements to agree fully with the tone of the piece, which is that ignorance in maths is nothing to be proud of, so why do we indulge those who boast about it rather than laugh and point a finger and jeer, "ooh, thicky!". I too squirm whenever I hear some TV celebrity proudly admitting to being useless at it. It explains why those people were only able to become TV celebrities rather than do something useful with their lives. I have never been academically accomplished at it (a C at O-level) but that's a long way away from being useless. But at the same time we're not all Carol Vorderman, you know.
Yes, I know Carol Vorderman is a TV celebrity. Go away.
Tom Lehrer never did a song on long division, but as division is basically subtraction repeated, here's one he did do.
His version: We were on holiday ...
Me: True
His version: ... in our new car ...
Me: We’d had it for at least a year
His version: ... and I wanted to work out the miles per gallon ...
Me: Not having done this in the previous year of ownership
His version: ... and even though he'd just done his exams ...
Me: A-levels. My last maths exam ever had been two years earlier.
His version: ... Ben couldn't work it out because HE CAN'T DO LONG DIVISION.
Me: Live with it.
No, I can't do long division. I never could. There's a crack in my brain that long division just falls through. It's a form of arithmetic that relies on guess work. How can you do sums where you have to guess part of the answer anyway?
Short division, no problem, along with addition, subtraction and multiplication. I can do pretty good mental arithmatic, I can handle different bases and percentages, I can even do sums (with a little thought) in Roman numerals. But long division never made any sense to me and still doesn’t, despite just seeing it explained in a video halfway down this page. It's why God invented calculators.
However, I'm sufficiently proud of my other achievements to agree fully with the tone of the piece, which is that ignorance in maths is nothing to be proud of, so why do we indulge those who boast about it rather than laugh and point a finger and jeer, "ooh, thicky!". I too squirm whenever I hear some TV celebrity proudly admitting to being useless at it. It explains why those people were only able to become TV celebrities rather than do something useful with their lives. I have never been academically accomplished at it (a C at O-level) but that's a long way away from being useless. But at the same time we're not all Carol Vorderman, you know.
Yes, I know Carol Vorderman is a TV celebrity. Go away.
Tom Lehrer never did a song on long division, but as division is basically subtraction repeated, here's one he did do.
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