Frazz by Jef Mallett for September 25, 2013

I thought it was that the sum of the square roots of any two sides of an isosceles triangle is equal to the square root of the remaining side.

I didn’t learn the Pythagorean Theorem until high school. I’d heard of it before then, but I didn’t really know what it was or what it implied, and I certainly couldn’t recite the formula from memory.

I learned it in fifth grade.

Oz ref! I remember how all the kids in my family pointed out that Scarecrow got it wrong, and the Wizard should take his diploma back.

But isosceles sounds so much smarter. Anyway, this reminds me of something Steinbeck said in Cannery Row, “the world is once again spinning on greased grooves”.

Actually, there are an infinite number of pythagorean triples: You can also use 5,12,13, for instance, or 7, 24, 25. In fact, there is a triple starting with each odd number 3 and up, with the other two sides separated by 1. And a bunch of others. And any multiple of those, like 6,8,10, or 10,24,26.

I don’t think in 23 years of being a parent my our local school district, there was one working water fountain on any of the campuses my kids went to. The excuses ranged from poor water pressure to we don’t have the personnel to keep them working. And where I live, it gets into the 100s in the shade at times, even hotter on an asphalt playground.

@Bigpuma: Now I know you do that on purpose ;)

He never claimed it was broken until he fixed it; he only stated it was working – an accurate statement.

I had major problems understanding the Pythagorean theorem when I was in 5th/6th grade. Then one day it just kind of clicked: don’t worry about why it works, just know that it works and accept it. That approach has solved a lot of problems later in life.

Once, there was a tribe of Indians. The squaws sat around on hides. They used either bear or deer. Then, the chief’s wife got a hippopotamus hide. That made her twice as important as any of the others. From that, we can conclude that the squaw on the hippopotamus is equal to the sum of the squaws on the other two hides.