I love having most of my reading done.

[jlh]

Tonight's adventures in television included:

• It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown. Gotta love that Linus, poor soul.
  
• I Love the 80s 3D (1983). A segment on Press Your Luck, the game show with the Whammy, reminded me of the infamous Michael Larson incident, where a contestant had figured out the board. However, like many such tales it has a lame ending.
  
• VH1 reality. I still love Breaking Bonaduce and I still don't care about My Fair Brady.
  
• World Series Game 3. Why were they playing U2's New Year's Day during the game? It's a great song, no doubt, but relevance? Anyway, I lend those "other sox" my "believe" tonight since they're all about that Journey song anyway. Hopefully the curse of Red Sox fans rooting for another team (see the 2001 Series) has been broken, too.

Also:

You Passed 8th Grade Math

Congratulations, you got 10/10 correct!

Could You Pass 8th Grade Math?

C and I did meet on the math team after all.

Comments

[nmalfoy.livejournal.com]

It's not Halloween until I've seen that show.

You got 10 out of 10? I barely passed. You're so scarily smart.

[jlh.livejournal.com]

Not really. I mean, if it were a bunch of calculus derivatives or a pile of trig—all that sine/cosine stuff—then maybe. But algebra I use in my daily life, actually; if I need to work out a percentage or a ratio I tend to set up an algebraic equation because I can never remember the formulas.

That said, I must point out that at my crappy high school if you were on regular track math you didn't get to algebra until 9th grade and therefore you never really got to proper calculus (Algebra/Geometry/Trig/Pre-Calc). However, I don't really remember much of what I took in math after Geometry, and even that I forget. I had to do major revision for the GREs, let me tell you.

Did you watch it last night then? I bet they'll have it on again, as ABC usually shows these specials twice (though they don't promote them very well and I always seem to just trip over them).

[nmalfoy.livejournal.com]

I just happened to stumble across it (like you) because they don't promote stuff like that at all and I don't have a TV guide.

How bad is the math portion of the GRE, anyway? I did okay in basic college math (college algebra, business calculus and statistics). Not great, but okay. B or C most of the time.

[jlh.livejournal.com]

It's nothing like that. It really stops at geometry. It's pretty much SAT math though possibly a little harder. I had to review all that complementary/supplementary angle stuff and how tangents work in geometry and all of that. I don't think there are any stats but I could be remembering wrong.

[amyamy.livejournal.com]

The -7 question aggravated me, because my understanding of whole numbers does not preclude negatives and thus it's both an integer and a whole number, but it's been a while since I've had to do really simple math, so I may have forgotten.

[jlh.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I stared at that one for a while, and then I remembered that there was some concept that was only positive numbers and since that wasn't an integer it had to be a whole number. It was like the 2,2,3,4,5; I knew it wasn't a median or a mean or a standard deviation so it had to be a mode, even though I couldn't remember what a mode is. I think half this stuff is knowledge and half is old-fashioned SAT-taking skills.

[amyamy.livejournal.com]

I definitely don't remember anyone ever telling me whole numbers were only positive, but eh. I did at least know where my missing point was and could go back and take it again to get the 10/10. Mean, median and mode I remembered because median sounds like 'medium' and is thus the middle, and mode starts with 'mo' and so does most, so it's the number that there's the most of. So then, those out of the way, mean has to be average.

[dramawench.livejournal.com]

It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown. Gotta love that Linus, poor soul.

Awww man! I love that show and I miss it every year. Sigh. Maybe they'll play it again.

As soon as the Red Sox bit it, I transferred my good luck vibes to the White Sox. Cause I just can't in good conscience root for Houston. --->disgruntled Braves fan