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I hate to be that guy, but…
Maybe you should have learnened some spelling? It’s actually pretty relevant.
Seconded.
Hasn’t this been done, like, an infinite amount of times before?
True
apparently the author’s “career” doesn’t require spacial awareness… or basic thought, for that matter. i guess burger flipping can be done without geometry, right?
Pretty relevant? Really? The average salary in the U.S. is about $48K per year, so I don’t think average working stiffs are using geometry very much. If they are, then wages are even worse than I thought.
I think Dan was trying to say that spelling is pretty relevant, since learned is spelled wrong.
learnened
Learninating the geometrology into my cognizator allows me to negogiamate hairpin turns at the speedway. Go NASCAR!
WIN
The average salary may be low, probably even lower than you’re stating at this point due to the economy, but I’d sooner blame it on people being ignorant of incredibly simple things like correct spelling and grammar than on lack of geometry applications. When the “average” person shows that he/she has the intelligence to remember the difference between there, their, and they’re – your and you’re – then and than – two, to, and too – I’ll consider your opinion on geometry.
While we’re at it, let’s also acknowledge that a huge segment of the population has no idea how to properly pluralize words. Apostrophes are NOT for pluralization, they are for contractions and possessives. “Dan’s five dogs,” not “Dans five dog’s.”
If people can’t remember what they were taught from 3rd to 6th grade, they don’t deserve to make a salary that’s anyshere near “average” anyway.
Proofreading FAIL on my own part… anywhere*
Double retort fail? Surely you weren’t referring to my post in deriding the poor grammar of “average” people? And unless you’re an architect or geometry teacher of some kind, then yeah, I’m sticking with my original post of saying that most people don’t use geometry in their jobs.
anyshere?
If you are going to post a tirade on correct grammar, make sure your
spelling is correct.
uh, good job pointing out something that was already noted by fuzzi?
There is absolutely no way the average salary of everyone in the U.S. is 48K. Absolutely not.
Here’s a link with more detail. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/26/business/economy/26income.html This shows gross as $58,029, which adjusted for an “average” tax bracket would be about $48K.
Granted, the info is from 2006, but I think it’s recent enough for this forum. If any further detail is needed, there’s always the U.S. Census Website.
48K average? I’ve got some contract renegotiating to do…
See what happens when we make it easy for anyone to use graphs? Quality goes WAY down, and the children try to make adult humor…
damn those children!
Maybe if you were smarter, your career options would expand enough that you could conceive of a life where knowing how to take complex problems and break them down into a series of small, manageable, logical, sequential steps might be useful to you. but since you can’t even find spell check on a computer…
Can we move this to the “FAIL” blog now, please?
This would have been funny if it had used geometry within the graph; say, two rhombus’ instead of circles.
rhombi*
pluralization FAIL
Funny thing about that–*circles* are actually shapes, too.
You get a sticker from the preschool teacher for being correct, and a gummy bear treat for using your kind words.
:>)
People blame it on geometry, but that’s just the class people are in when they get to the stage in their lives when they think they know everything.
Geometry helps you understand trig, and trig helps you understand calculus, and calculus is absolutely useless… no physicists or anyone important use calculus, so, yeah, I guess geometry is pretty useless.
Calculus is useless? Are you kidding me?
You have to use Geometry to play pool, which only applies to your career if it is a business lunch.
So, it’s not that I do this professionally, but, I sew and do needle point almost everyday, and geometry is incredibly important if you want to make anything look right.
And yeah, if we didn’t have geometry, we wouldn’t have gone to the moon and we wouldn’t have bad ass special effects movies.
I now end my rant in defense of geometry.
What the hell does “rant” mean?
I’ve always thought they should really teach statistics instead. It would help people know what the “latest studies” actually mean, how to interpret opinion polls, and why they keep losing all their money at the casino!
I agree that statistics would be a useful thing for the average person to know.
A good understanding of geometry goes a long way in understanding statistics.
Standard deviation seemed magical when I first learned about it. The formula was easy to apply. It’s just plugging in numbers, after all. With a simple example, it shouldn’t be too hard to see that it does what you want it to do (measure how things are scattered about the mean, or in other words, how they deviate from the mean). It seemed to come out of nowhere, though. Why is this particular formula used to measure deviation? There are others at our disposal. Why not one of them? It wasn’t until I read an article in which the standard deviation was given a geometric interpretation that it really made sense, and that this was in fact the right formula to use.
More recently, I taught a first year undergraduate linear algebra course. One of the topics was linear regression. This was another thing that was simply presented with no explanation. The formulas as they are usually presented are ugly and, like the one for standard deviation, mysterious. In this course, it was presented in the context of linear algebra, but most of the explanations were geometrical. Although the formulas could be derived completely without mention of any geometry, it helps a lot to see why these formulas are used when a geometric interpretation is given. (the formula can also be presented more compactly when the machinery of linear algebra is used).
If you’re asking yourself, “When am I going to use this?” you’ve missed the point. If all you care about is your “career” or “job skills” go to a technical school and give us back your diploma; you’ve not earned it.
if, however, you recognize the utility of all knowledge, esoteric or otherwise, to be strength-training for your brain and aiding in helping you understand your place in this complex universe, then you might just be on your way to becoming a decent human being.
Student FAIL.
WIN.
Oh, and nice use of vocabulary. I love esoteric. Mostly because it’s become somewhat esoteric itself. =P
Amen.
And a second AMEN. I teach math and was about to say what you just said, but you did it more eloquently.
Thank you for being a math teacher! I’m helping my middle kiddo with a project for geometry called “Careers which use Geometry”. If you go onto job search websites, you’ll actually find quite a few which list the ability to use geometry as a requirement. Obvious things like system engineers and biomed engineers are there, but then there are machinists and builders and draftsmen working on our bridges, etc. I’m glad some folks are learning geometry, so the bridges don’t fall out from under me while I’m on them.
yay for machinists!
Nope. Not much use for geometry working at either the car wash, MacDonalds or living off a government grant.
If you had a real job or a real life, it would be different.
As an English teacher of mine once remarked to a particularly unmotivated student, “… still sucking the vapid pap of ignorance, I see.”
1.) There is inherent worth in knowledge.
2.) If you do ANY sort of engineering, construction included, geometry is paramount.
I think this one belongs on the failblog.
What, are you in middle school? Yeah, I guess you don’t need to know that much geometry, spelling or really anything they teach you in school to make fries for people. Why even bother?
If this guy thinks that geometry has this little relevance in the world, then let him keep thinking that way. I still need my groceries bagged and my coffee piping hot when I order it, and both of those professions do not require geometry. Nor does business, psychology, art history, humanities…
But then psychology, art history, humanities, and most of everything we know are all about as useless as high school geometry in almost everyone’s everyday life.
The main difference between these and geometry is that you have to think harder in geometry, and mathematics in general.
Don’t you think bagging groceries has at least a little bit of a geometrical flavour to it? After all, much of the stuff you buy comes in a box in the shape of a rectangular prism or a can in the shape of the cylinder. How do you arrange the boxes and cans in such a way as to minimize the number of bags used? This may seem trivial or insignificant, and your high school geometry class may not have been of any help, but problems like this (optimal packing problems) are the stuff of active research. On a larger scale, when you’re shipping large amounts of goods over large distances, you want it to be done in the most efficient way. That’s not so trivial, since shipping costs are ultimately passed on to the consumer. You also want the trucker to have some geometric intuition. If the driver doesn’t estimate the turning radius properly, the truck could get stuck. I’ve seen it happen.
I’m biased. Mathematics is my bread and butter. When I tell people what I do, they often come back to me with stories about how the mathematics that they learned in high school, which seemed useless at the time, is now relevant. Not everything is going to be relevant to everyone, but much of it is relevant to someone. I could even think of ways that geometry is relevant to each of business, psychology, art history, humanities….
If I want to hire someone to do learned, procedural tasks, I’ll hire someone who’s a math whiz. If I want someone who has vision, a well-rounded and balanced approach to doing things, I’ll hire a liberal arts type. I happen to prefer people who can see that life isn’t black and white, and that much of success in life can be attributed to how one handles plan “b.” In my experience, the worker bees are the mathematically inclined while the leaders are more apt to gravitate toward the arts, communication, humanities, etc.
I think you should look up the definition of the “liberal arts.”
Depending on how you count, 3 or 4 of the seven are directly related to mathematics.
Also, every mathematician I know (and I know quite a few) sees the world less
in “black and white” than the average person — they understand that belief and knowledge aren’t the same thing. This comes from often thinking you understand
something mathematically, but realizing in the course of attempting a proof that
maybe you don’t understand it……
I think you are confusing “math whiz” with something else — I’m not sure exactly
what. Very few “math whizzes” end up as “worker bees.” They end up as research
physicists, actuaries, engineers, doctors, lawyers, chemists, etc…
I guess it’s easy to pick apart such a general statement. I should’ve been more careful.
Venn diagrams arent really funny unless you label the intersection.
Oh god…I learnened some things too. I learnened it’s easy to repeat the same graphs on this site apparently. As well I learnened that Venn diagrams are extremely boring, and are used far too often here.
I believe the original poster has been learninated.
The Federal Chancellor of Germany studied Physics, so much to leading positions.
And beside this fact one third of all managers today are mathematics or physicists, you get told this when beginning to study one ot these.
Mathematics are not the working bees and they never have been, they intelligence would just be wasted.
i imagine the cross-over area probably has something to do with billiards…
Amen
@I8MYD8
“And unless you’re an architect or geometry teacher of some kind, then yeah, I’m sticking with my original post of saying that most people don’t use geometry in their jobs.”
Architects and geometry teachers? How about every single engineer, mechanic or person with a similar job. How about physicists. How about medical doctors? You obviously have no idea what you can apply geometry to.
I’m sure I’d make a great machinist without geometry. You’d still be subsistence farming if it wasn’t for geometry, asshat. I, for one, am glad that I “learnened” geometry. Not relevant to your future career? Yes, I would like fries with that. Bitch.