Jul 28 2008

Ask A Dharmaniac!

donThere is no precedent for this kind of massive ego fest on DocuDharma.  budhydharma, the owner of this site had the following contention-

One of the most impressive things about YOU, is the breadth of knowledge YOU have accumulated.  Smarts spanning from aardvarks to Zymurgy.  If you ask a question on Dkos, ANY question, it WILL be answered, at the very least with a link or a clue!

It’s true we have a large variety of expertise.

I am shallow and one dimensional.  I have a passing knowledge of a variety of things and it’s hard not to come up with a couple of suggestions for a Goggle search failing all else.

Among subjects I’m prepared to give advice on is computer repair since that’s my primary source of income.  I only work with XP machines, Vista is unrepairable by definition.  I’ll be happy to salvage the data on your drive and install a working XP system for you though, takes 2 days- one to salvage and one to install your new system.

I’m also considered by some a fairly reliable source on how the Daily Kos website works.  You might wish to read an all-in-one digest or any of my 13 part New Users Guide or my less structured and indexed work collected as Welcome New Users.

Speaking of which, this is not a substitute.  I had intended to publish a Welcome New Users on Friday at it’s normal 11 pm ET time, but my subject was FiredogLake’s new Oxdown Gazette (and Gazette is mine by the way) regular member diary system, but that’s  been sightly delayed.

Instead the intent is to be a more general purpose forum so that we can share information.

As budhy always reminded us-

PLEASE REMEMBER, THIS IS A  COOPERATIVE EFFORT!!! MAKE SURE YOU TRY TO ANSWER A FEW QUESTIONS WHILE YOU ARE HERE!!!

Which brings me to an important point I have not yet emphasised sufficiently!  This is a Community Diary!  It’s supposed to be fun!

budhy is the pony master.  Thousands of them in his unlimited Photobucket Account (none of them the one I was looking for mind you).  I, as you can see, am a little more text minded.  It’s a different kind of fun.

All questions, even the silly ones, get answered.  The profound ones take longer and some questions have no good answer at all.

  • I’m sorry.  I have every confidence you’ll be able to recover the data from that Vista machine.

In other changeups, just like Jeopardy! after the Quiz Scandal we provide answers here.  Please frame your response in the form of a question.

Tonight’s category is Veepstakes.  Your answers are-

  • Spouse has never done full frontal nudity.
  • Knows Route 66 is also named Washington Street.
  • Has a Technical College degree.
  • Will be almost as old as John McSame in November.
  • Is a popular hispanic Governor of a swing Western State with foreign policy experience.

And finally a educational interlude courtesy of my father, Richard Gilmore, who turned me on to Tom Lehrer a long time ago-

For those of you who wish to sing along-

New Math by Tom Lehrer-

Some of you who have small children may have perhaps been put in the embarrassing position of being unable to do your child’s arithmetic homework because of the current revolution in mathematics teaching known as the New Math.  So as a public service here tonight I thought I would offer a brief lesson in the New Math.  Tonight we’re going to cover subtraction.  This is the first room I’ve worked for a while that didn’t have a blackboard so we will have to make due with more primitive visual aids, as they say in the “ed biz.”  Consider the following subtraction problem, which I will put up here: 342 – 173.

Now remember how we used to do that. three from two is nine; carry the one, and if you’re under 35 or went to a private school you say seven from three is six, but if you’re over 35 and went to a public school you say eight from four is six; carry the one so we have 169, but in the new approach, as you know, the important thing is to understand what you’re doing rather than to get the right answer. Here’s how they do it now.
You can’t take three from two,

Two is less than three,

So you look at the four in the tens place.

Now that’s really four tens,

So you make it three tens,

Regroup, and you change a ten to ten ones,

And you add them to the two and get twelve,

And you take away three, that’s nine.

Is that clear?

Now instead of four in the tens place

You’ve got three,

‘Cause you added one,

That is to say, ten, to the two,

But you can’t take seven from three,

So you look in the hundreds place.

From the three you then use one

To make ten ones…

(And you know why four plus minus one

Plus ten is fourteen minus one?

‘Cause addition is commutative, right.)

And so you have thirteen tens,

And you take away seven,

And that leaves five…
Well, six actually.

But the idea is the important thing.
Now go back to the hundreds place,

And you’re left with two.

And you take away one from two,

And that leaves…?
Everybody get one?

Not bad for the first day!
Hooray for new math,

New-hoo-hoo-math,

It won’t do you a bit of good to review math.

It’s so simple,

So very simple,

That only a child can do it!
Now that actually is not the answer that I had in mind, because the book that I got this problem out of wants you to do it in base eight.

But don’t panic.

Base eight is just like base ten really – if you’re missing two fingers.

Shall we have a go at it?  Hang on.
You can’t take three from two,

Two is less than three,

So you look at the four in the eights place.

Now that’s really four eights,

So you make it three eights,

Regroup, and you change an eight to eight ones,

And you add them to the two,

and you get one-two base eight,

Which is ten base ten,

And you take away three, that’s seven.

Now instead of four in the eights place

You’ve got three,

‘Cause you added one,

That is to say, eight, to the two,

But you can’t take seven from three,

So you look at the sixty-fours.
“Sixty-four? How did sixty-four get into it?” I hear you cry.

Well, sixty-four is eight squared, don’t you see?

(Well, you ask a silly question, and you get a silly answer.)
From the three you then use one

To make eight ones,

And you add those ones to the three,

And you get one-three base eight,

Or, in other words,

In base ten you have eleven,

And you take away seven,

And seven from eleven is four.

Now go back to the sixty-fours,

And you’re left with two,

And you take away one from two,

And that leaves…?
Now, let’s not always see the same hands.

One, that’s right!

Whoever got one can stay after the show and clean the erasers.
Hooray for new math,

New-hoo-hoo-math,

It won’t do you a bit of good to review math.

It’s so simple,

So very simple,

That only a child can do it!
Come back tomorrow night. We’re gonna do fractions.

Now I’ve often thought I’d like to write a mathematics text book someday because I have a title that I know will sell a million copies. I’m gonna call it Tropic Of Calculus.

 

43 comments

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  1. Absolutely a reprint.

    With minimal added content.

    You should tell me what you think.

  2. Link

  3. I screwed up by accidentally hitting the wrong key while I was at dKos and all the writing shrank in size.  And while the sidebars on the homepage are still in their proper places, the sidebars when I enter a diary (I mean, the rec button, etc.) are now down below the last of the comments.

    THEN, this a.m., something weird happened to my computer and when I rebooted, manually because the screen was going absolutely nutso and nothing was readable, Windows tells me that my settings are low and do I want it to reconfigure?  So I click yes or whatever, and now dKos is narrower as well as in tiny type.

    I missed the “event” because I’d gone back to bed for a nap before work, leaving the computer on…power surge is possible; there were storms south of me although it didn’t rain here–frankly, I have no clue.  I am clueless in many ways: but when it comes to computers, I would rather replace a drive than deal with software.

    So how do I restore dKos to its normal width and typesize?  And please go step by step, assuming that I know nothing about computers, having been raised in a cave by bears.  You will not be too far wrong!  ;-D

    Thanks.

    P.S.–docudharma, thank whatever deity, remains normal.

    • Edger on July 28, 2008 at 09:40
    • #

    But I can do 200 – 31 in my head. Once I get there. 🙂

  5. What’s the html to get a sentence (or a group of words) highlighted in yellow and/or green?

    Muchissimas gracias.

    • RiaD on July 28, 2008 at 14:24
    • #

    why do my rec’s (comments & essays) not always ‘take’??

    or, in an essay w/lots of comments the first dozen or so are not rec’d(or the essay) when i go back.

    i have tried:

    rebooting

    dump caches, temp int files & reboot

    ctrl/alt/f5

    all to no avail

    i’m on XP (i think)

    a work around i’ve found is:

    go to essay, read essay, refresh essay page & wait 2min.

    but geeeze….its teh sux 🙁

    help?

  7. last time I tried to copy and paste videos from you tube to DD it got goofy. I wanted to do two. I moved the first did the embed trick and previewed. I went back to you tube and copied the second when I pasted and cleaned it to and tried to preview nothing came up including text all I got was a red message that said html embedded/embedded so what’s up with that? I never had it happen before when doing this and now I have to use a new Post a comment box to do multiples. The computer has recently been cleaned up as it was riddled with spyware, its real fast and tricky now.

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