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lauradi7dwThe math cobwebs are still thick, but I have concluded that my main problem with Physics is
that I lack a keen grasp of the obvious. I was desperately sweating a quiz question about the
velocity of a ball dropped from 20 meters blah blah blah and couldn't get anywhere with the formula provided because I didn't know what the initial velocity was. It was zero, as it turns out. If it's not going anywhere while it's in the hand of the person who is about to drop it, it doesn't have a velocity yet. Zero is a perfectly good number. I should have been able to figure that out, but no.
On the other hand, I remember how to draw a graph. I have not been corrupted by having computers do it for me, which apparently is a problem some people have. I don't want to be too negative about having a machine do computations, though. It continues to be a convenience to have the calculator quickly tell me stuff like sines and square roots. The last time I used such things, I had to get them from a table in a book or my slide rule.
Think how much time must be saved everywhere but in the US, as they don't have our units. I have been participating in the annual back-to-school convert things from our system to metric festival. It seems to be part of every science course, and I overheard someone on the bus complain about it today.
that I lack a keen grasp of the obvious. I was desperately sweating a quiz question about the
velocity of a ball dropped from 20 meters blah blah blah and couldn't get anywhere with the formula provided because I didn't know what the initial velocity was. It was zero, as it turns out. If it's not going anywhere while it's in the hand of the person who is about to drop it, it doesn't have a velocity yet. Zero is a perfectly good number. I should have been able to figure that out, but no.
On the other hand, I remember how to draw a graph. I have not been corrupted by having computers do it for me, which apparently is a problem some people have. I don't want to be too negative about having a machine do computations, though. It continues to be a convenience to have the calculator quickly tell me stuff like sines and square roots. The last time I used such things, I had to get them from a table in a book or my slide rule.
Think how much time must be saved everywhere but in the US, as they don't have our units. I have been participating in the annual back-to-school convert things from our system to metric festival. It seems to be part of every science course, and I overheard someone on the bus complain about it today.
