Funny Pictures. Safe For Work, and Safe For The Kids Too.

Not a picture, still hilarious:

Delinked the post - if you want to endanger your intelligence, you're welcome to follow the link.

 

It is on Faux news. It makes sense that way.

Little mathematical importance. Pffft. I guess there is no deficit and vote counting is not important mathematics to them either

*Edit* I thought about updating the Wikipedia page to show how useless they are since Faux cannot ever be wrong, but that would probably require me to argue against the whole page here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prime_number

 

11:03 PM - Mining: "https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prime_number"
11:03 PM - Mining: "Prime numbers are very important in mathematics and computer science."

Fact checking ftw.

 

Well you don't generally need to understand prime numbers at the supermarket or making change as a cashier. That's all the average person thinks about when they are considering if something mathematical is 'important' Never mind that the study of mathematics in general can help teach a person how to think logically (which I grant you, those same people might have a difficult time being able to logically conclude as being important).
I once had someone ask me if I'd ever needed to use Calculus later in life, and I had to explain that while I didn't have to use it, I actually did use it because it made what I was trying to do a lot easier than had I not used it.

ANYTHING you don't know is unimportant to you because not knowing it, you learn to make do. So maybe you won't get that valuable job working for Bell Labs, but you could always become a Doctor or Lawyer instead, Because after all, neither a doctor or a lawyer is going to seriously feel incompetent without their knowledge of prime numbers.

But if you ask if some piece of knowledge is important to mankind, well that's a different question entirely, and answering it takes a great deal of knowledge about how things work.

Knowing things can make life easier IF AND ONLY IF you encounter the types of problems that can be made easier by knowing that thing. So importance is relative, unless you ask the big questions (in this case, not about personal relevance, but about a more universal relevance).

 

^^ Word up. My wife is constantly prattling on about how mastering Math Anal(ysis) makes it way easier for her to...make jewelery. Seriously. When you have beads of six different widths and you're trying to design a necklace that has to be within a few centimeters of 132cm long, the constraints you have to work under make it either a huge mess of trial and error and making do or a single complex algebra problem that, once solved, gives you nice specific design boundaries and makes creating an ingeniously beautiful and perfectly balanced piece of jewelry a snap.

When she tried to explain this to the cashier at Shipwreck Beads, she got this totally glaze-eyed stare and a "...cool."

 

You may not need to understand them in day to day life, but you need prime numbers. Like, you literally *require* them to do any number of day to day transactions.

 

Well, yeah. I'd be pretty shafted without the number 3.

 

My only point is that you can survive without the understanding of them, but to quote "Animal House", "Knowledge is Good". In other words, not knowing something, you aren't going to miss it. But once you know it, it can become invaluable.

Primitive man survived just fine with their limited knowledge, but that doesn't mean that knowing isn't better.

And 3 is truly overrated. Give 7 a go instead -- it's at least twice as good as 3.

 

I'd really like to post a cartoon now where a bunch of cavemen are around and one of them spots a tiger and they start running away except for a brainy caveman who (if I remember correctly) starts calculating the optimal route of escape and then the tiger pounces on him but I can't find it...

Does anyone know where it is?

 

A doctor, a physicist and a mathematician are in a building when it catches fire. They rush to the roof, only to notice that the fire will probably reach them before the firemen arrive.
The doctor looks down, guesses the height and thinks of the impact on his body and jumps. The physicist starts calculating falling speed, impact velocity and force applied to his body, then jumps.
The mathematician starts some calculations in the n-th dimension, applies a Fourier Transformation and then transcribes the resulting matrix, using an archimedic set. Then he jumps and starts moving upwards. Sign error.

 

It sounds like it may have been Far Side or one of those cartoons. Maybe even xkcd.

 

I'm totally going to duel-wield these!

...

 

Warning: not actually entirely Work-Safe insofar as the lyrics include F-bombs.

 

And the most amusing thing is that a quick google search proves that something called "Diggle School" (a primary school, at the very least) really exists.

This is ridiculous...

 

There's also a British sci-fi writer called Andy Diggle.