[geeks] Why? i.e. why do people have such poor math & engineering skills?

[Tim H.]

On Wed, 31 Jul 2002 15:21:55 -0400 (EDT)
woods at weird.com (Greg A. Woods) wrote:

> However I did think it made a good jumping point to start off a
> discussion of the more general issue.  After all I'm obviously not the
> only person who will on occasion make wildly wrong assumptions about
> matters of the physical world.

As much as I hate to admit it, there is a useful thought under there.  

The best teacher I ever had was one of the electronics teachers I had at
the local community college.  (He gave up designing satellite power
supplies to teach at a CC, raise llamas and run a bed and breakfast,
really weird guy)  But one of the things he strove very hard to teach
was the automatic ballparking of results, as a separate thing from
calculating or measuring.  

He was always saying how simple it is to get the numbers right, that's
what calculators do, but a calculator mkes it easy to miss a decimal
place or two, or to do math with the wrong units.  So he was always
pushing his students to learn to feel where the answer should be, just
so that they would catch their own mistakes.

It is nice even now to be able to do that with electronic stuff,
somebody throws numbers around, and you look at them, don't see a
specific mistake, but you know it just isn't right.

I can do that with electronics, weights of meat (I spent a couple years
in college working in a seafood dept.) and a few things like that (like
how much old equipment can you fit in that Geo Tracker?!?!?) but I must
say I have never been able to do it with objects like cannons or walking
draglines.  

Tim