Baby Blues by Rick Kirkman and Jerry Scott for September 10, 2024

You need to know the number symbols in order to use a calculator.

You never wonder what those function buttons are actually doing to those number inputs?

You need to pay attention when the car salesman adds $5,000 to the price of the car.

gotta figure how much you’ll need to pay the bail bondsman

The calculator just speeds things up. You still have to know what buttons and signs to push and at what point.

The calculator basically just does arithmetic. If you work as a scientist or engineer you might need to know how to solve complex equations and use higher forms of math.

Why is my comment gone? It didn’t violate any of the rules.

It took me years to develop my opinion on this. Learning math, science, health, history isn’t just about the facts of the subjects. It wires your brain to be able to accept and understand new ideas and helps with critical thinking. A much needed skill these days. And being young, your brain has more plasticity, and new pathways are easier to make (on average).

Our 9-year-old whines about reading assignments. Hates books. Then asks ME to type names of games on his kindle. Hmm! Maybe he needs math, say, “1 + 1 = 2”?

I’m no mathematician — about as far from it as you can get — but even I know you really do need math in daily life. You can’t even use a calculator well without understanding the basics. And for the most basic stuff, a calculator shouldn’t be necessary and just slows you down.

I had a math class in college that didn’t allow calculators. But I remember having to order a TI one for my son in HS (he did independent study-TAG), it was over $100 24 years ago.

It’s about brain exercise. You won’t need pushups at a job either, but you’ll always need the exercise. Do your math (or “maths” for you Brits).

Things like this remind me of when I was reading an anthology of sci-fi shorts, and the editor fondly shared a nostalgic vision of his early days, of a space traveler in a tough situation, his technology in ruins, bravely figuring out a solution using his slide rule — do kids these days even know what that is? Logarithms? Shoot, I can barely remember using those. I’m glad for learning math as much as I did though, and wish I’d done more of that rote homework and gotten better at doing the relatively basic stuff in my head. You may not use it much in everyday life, especially now, but you never know when you might need it and the tech won’t be handy. If we ever get entirely dependent on AI robots we would be headed for ending up like the Eloi in The Time Machine.

And you have to remember how to work with the great Indian Chief, SOH CAH TOA. I refer to him a lot when I’m building things in my wood shop.

“You will use everything you learn.” I had some surprises. My grandfather taught me how to throw playing cards into a wastebasket from across the room…I found that I used that skill sorting parcels at the post office.

I love Darryl’s relationship with Hammie

“You need to learn math so you will be able to understand the answers and how to use the calculator on your cell phone.”

You need to know what the minus sign in front of your bank balance means.

Today is “National TV Dinner Day”.

Don’t put the aluminum tray in the microwave.

It is good to have an understanding of why the calculator came up with the answer it gave you. Especially if you entered anything in incorrectly.

Believe it or not, sometimes the calculator is wrong, especially when it comes to long problems. Like 3×8/2+7+6/4×12-6.

these days, you really only need to be able to count (or measure)

Siri and Alexa can handle the rest; and you don’t have to push any buttons – just ask, “Siri: if Ⅰ have six apples and give two away, how many are left?” or, “Alexa: how much is two and a half feet plus fourteen inches?”

You need to know what to have it compute. A couple months ago I was at a pool party and got into the most infuriating argument over the difference between the formulas for calculating the circumference of the circular pool versus the area.

It will also save some time if you know multiplication, division, and percentages offhand well enough that you can look at a number and know that it’s just about right. Then you don’t need to bother with the phone at all.

Hammie got you there dad.

We weren’t allowed to use calculators, and we didn’t have mobile phones in my day, didn’t have a television until I was nine.

All I know is that in my 70+ years, 99% of what I need to use was basic math. Just like science all I needed was Newtonian physics. While the relativistic is interesting it has no effect on my life

I need a calculator for calculus and rocket science and reed making stuff.

I had a similar conversation with my son when he was in elementrary school, even though he likes math. I told him he isn’t learning actual math yet, he’s just learning arithmetic. For real math, you use a calculator to get through the arithmetic, but you need to know arithmetic before you can do real math. He started understanding this once he got into algebra. Now he’s in high school learning trigonometry and pre-calculus.

I recall when early calculators came out. Watching people entering numbers and then punching keys to add, subtract, multiply, divide, square root, any function key numerous times. They would look at the results, nod, as though the calculator came up with the same results they calculated in their head.

and you want to grow up like your dad Hammie – in some office job?

Most of the time I need to understand what to do for the calculations so I can tell the computer what to do, whether that is a simple tax calculation on a spreadsheet or something more complex in a program. It helps to be able to check the results when you put in simple values so you can then trust it for more complex results. Understanding things like calculus has been over the years, but I don’t think I’ve ever used Laplace transform outside education,

Because learning math helps your brain to think and reason.

When I was in high school (way back when we rode dinosaurs to school), somebody in one of my math classes asked if we could use calculators on a test, kind of as a joke. The teacher said, “Sure,” and everybody was like, “Wait – are you serious?” He went on to say that he was, and there was no point in fighting technology, that it should be used and embraced, but…if you just wrote down an answer w/o showing your work, you’d get no credit because he’d have no way of knowing if you knew how to solve a problem. He said the important thing was showing you understood the concept.

My Mom was really good at math. She could do it all in her head in a matter of seconds. That’s how I knew there was something wrong with her when she stopped being able to do that.

You might need it for your career, Hammie. Three Whoppers, two large fries and one Coke.

Today’s comments have been very entertaining, and educational. Many were funny, only because I understood the math.

My brain is wired for English, writing, linguistics, not math. Sometimes I want to figure out a math problem (is this product a better deal in bulk, for example) and I don’t know what to put into the calculator.

Even with a calculator, you still need to know how to use it