Sunday 13 January 2013

S4.122 - Food for Thought

Lyn shook her head. "Isometrics, not ISO metrics. Though metric may be the standard for the ISO - International Organization for Standardization. Which by the way abbreviates ISO - not IOS - from the Greek." She frowned. "Wait, we're back to languages again..."

"And have you all forgotten we discussed the metric system earlier?" Nat reminded.

"That involved tech - metric mass is in the news now," Cosine cut in. "And there are new connections to cooking. How many milliliters in a tablespoon? How different is a fluid ounce from a "dry" ounce, and of course a ton is different from a metric tonne..."

Elly frowned, falling out of her meditative pose. "Pet peeve. Some recipes say 1 pound is 500 grams. A pound is about 454 grams! Upsizing using 500 will go beyond rounding error into sheer lunacy!"

And meat is packaged in random weights

"I'll go one better!" Root chimed in. "A tweet which found 20 cheese packages at 1.25 oz each, created a box weighing 24.6 oz. How can you have a negative weight box? Incidentally, the same person has also been able to use food to represent systems of equations..."
Suspect 700 g = 24.7 oz is part of the problem

"It's all using math in daily life," Secant affirmed. "In fact, anyone else starting to wonder if we're overthinking this? Why do we even need a specific subject?"

"Point," Lyn yielded. "We could simply link up with an amusement park. Do math in connection to roller coasters, for instance. Calculate the number of people a ride can hold, factor in the time of the ride, and use that to estimate how long you'd be standing in line."

"Nice," Elly agreed, looking more mellow. "Or we estimate speed of rides based on degree of drop, or rotation. There's another good website out there on estimations. It's family math!"

The three trigonometric functions nodded back at the conic. "Yes, if there's one thing we relations know about, it's family studies," Nat agreed.


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