What's that all about then?

Mishap A future Brian Cox, do you think?

Wow mishap and thrice times wow
I went to a lecture this afternoon in our local secondary school. They do science lectures from eminent academics. it was about searching for extraterrestrial life. First half quite good but he got more mumbly and boring in the second half.
Best things were the younger kids that knew the answers to his questions. (how would you try to detect life from space, that kind of thing)
And the small girl (must surely have been a little sister not an 11 yr old) in a grufflo/cow hat. She was in front of me in the make your own tea queue at the beginning. Then at the end there was this small person making herself another cup, still wearing brown furry hat with horns.

Jess; have you see the film 'Up'? I think Kevin may be a Moa [or very like one].

youtube.com
not sure this has copied...

nope

www.youtube.com/watch?v=4fcxkKspq0c

What was before the Big Bang and what is outside the infinite universe?
We cannot comprehend these concepts intellectually, only mathematically!
I'm not even sure I believe in maths?
Does e= mc (squared)?
It seems to rely on unproven constants.

No doubt Bags can explain.

jeni i was one of those "girls" back then at school that thought I couldn't do maths*. Now I see maths in everything! When I knit and the pattern works out, I say "Look I just did maths!" When I see the fractals in my tree fern, I see maths. When I used to do the cash wages where I worked before, and had to go to the bank and get the correct change for the weekly wage payout (and it changed every week depending on how many people worked that week) and about 3/4 of the way through doling it all out into the little piles of cash, I used to get a sense of whether it would balance or not, I'd think "I'm doing maths!" And when I play cards and I just sort of know what still needs to come out of the pack, I think "It's only maths". *The fact that the maths teacher would come into the class of mostly boys and say "I can't teach girls" may just have had something to do with it. Well it was 1965!

Grannyknot, I was 'no good' at maths a school either. I was among a group of girls at my Grammar School who didn't take O level maths, but were put in for RSA Arithmetic, and I can honestly say that in my everyday life I've never felt I missed out. I'm quicker and more accurate at mental arithmetic than DH, who has qualifications in higher maths. As you point out, there are so many activities in our everyday lives which require the balancing and working out of numbers, or groups of numbers that we do as a matter of course.

When I had the dubious pleasure of teaching 'general studies' to reluctant day release students from various trades, there were always those who said they 'couldn't do maths'. But they understood the odds on horses, the likelihood of whether a horse would win and how much they stood to win - if it won.