Losing Our Minds

There are so many stories/studies telling us how the internet (and your smartphone) is changing the way we think.

How many phone numbers of your friends can you list off right now, without looking?  Annie (my partna') doesn't know mine, though it has been the same since we started dating 8 years ago.  (I know hers, because I like to memorize things.)  I have to go back to my middle school days to remember a time where I knew all of my friends' house phone numbers.  (I remember not having to differentiate between cell phones and land lines.)  For some reason, I feel like I even knew my closest friends' addresses.  That is certainly not the case anymore.

My aunt just moved from IL to FL.  When I called her during her long driving trip, I realized her home phone number is going to change.  I've had her house phone memorized for as long as I can remember.  It might have been the first number that I memorized.  Will I have the next one memorized at all?  Or will it just be a number stored in my phone that I reference on occasion?  I have to look up my mom's address every time I mail her something (she's moved since I lived with her, but she's been in the same spot for a while).

I used to memorize license plate numbers for all of the employees at Walmart when I was in the parking lot pushing carts.  It kept me busy, and it was fun to practice memorizing things.  I knew all of my credit cards, too.  Now I couldn't tell you my own license plate number, nor could I list off my drivers license number (though it has half as many characters as the one in MI that I can still recite).  I don't think I'm old enough to start claiming memory loss, but I do feel like my memorization has lost its edge.

Also, due to my persuasive skills, I used to be an amazing argue-er.  I was a great person to have on your side at the bar.  Between my breadth of random knowledge, my book knowledge, and my mad bullshit skills, I was fairly good at convincing people I was right in the midst of most arguments.  Now, arguments are settled almost instantly by googling.  How can I argue against an immediate, definitive answer?

It's hard to defend memorizing multiplication tables to kids when they'll have access to the answer at their fingertips for the rest of their lives.  There used to be a debate on when calculators should be introduced into a math curriculum for young students, but isn't that point moot now?  We should teach them how to use technology immediately, since there's not much need for memorization.  Heck, WolframAlpha can lead you through the steps to do some of the complex math (like trigonometric integrals) that I have trouble remembering from high school calculus.

Is this good or bad?  Will it matter in the future?  Regardless of the pros and cons, do we really have any power to change it?  Will the smart kids lose their advantage in life?  Will the more creative or the more risk-taking members of society become the leaders?

Or, am I just losing my mind?

Trying not to lose his mind,
~RoB

All the Math in the World...

I have a minor in applied mathematics, which I received along with my bachelor's in Nuclear Engineering at Michigan.  Since then, I've taken more math classes.  I like math.  I'm good at math, and I feel like I've taken most (if not all) of the applicable math courses that I should need to solve all the problems I'll run into in the future.

Apparently not!


First evidence of this: last week's puzzler on Car Talk (I podcast it).

The problem: 'how far apart are two 100' tall telephone poles if the 150' line between their tops droops down to 25' above the ground?'

My answer:  I used hyperbolic trigonometry to prove 126' apart.  I've known for a long time that hyperbolic cosine defines how telephone/electric wires droop (it's one of the few real-world applications), and this was the first time that I looked up the equations to figure out how.  It wasn't too hard, and I felt really accomplished as I submitted it to the Car Talk website with the full mathematical explanation.

The real answer: They'd have to be touching.  75' is half the length of the line, and the line has to droop 75'.  Math clouded up my ability to see the trick in the question.


Second evidence of this: trying to form the schedule for Easter games.

The problem: There are 10 teams.  There are 4 games.  One game requires 4 teams, the other 3 games require 2 teams.  Design a schedule so that all teams get to play all games, but they have to play the game that requires 4 teams twice (so 5 total rounds).  Also, no two teams play with or against each other more than once.  (You may have seen this on facebook if you are friends with me.)

My answer:  Hours upon hours of spreadsheets, drawing scenarios on paper, and even chopping up a bunch of pieces of paper and moving things around on my coffee table lead to no solution.  I would not accept that it wasn't possible.  There seemed to be too many combinations for this not to be possible.  At the last minute I was able to make it so that nobody played the same team twice in the 3 games that require 2 teams, but there were some of the same matchups in the 4-team game.  At one point, Annie caught me writing out ratios of factorials to try and determine the number of permutations of this scenario (which I failed to find since not all of the permutations were the same length).

The real answer:  It's not possible.  I still can't prove this mathematically, but Annie and I methodically approached this problem from every angle, without success.  So, until I'm proven otherwise (and I'm not going to prove myself wrong), the scenario wanted doesn't work.  I wish I had known this beforehand.  It would have saved me hours of my life that I'll never get back.

U + Me = Us.  [At least] I know my Calculus,
~RoB