I am NOT smarter than a 5th grader. Well, that might not be technically true. Maybe I should say 7th grader. No wait. She didn't get it either. I should say that I'm not smarter than some one on my wife's internet buddy list. That much would be true at least.
I called my wife on the way home from work and was confronted with a math problem that she was trying to help my daughter with. It had to do with solving the following equation for a:
a(2x+3) = 9x+12 -x. I got the right answer, but I couldn't show my work. Even the Wizard of the Internet didn't provide an exact answer. It may have provided the answer if we'd dug a little, but nothing came up in the one box :-)
I had the right idea, but couldn't complete my train of thought. I guess that's the first thing to go ... the mind? Maybe that's 'cuz once the mind goes it can't realize what else is already going as well.
Anyway, back to the ice cream story. No wait. Math! Yeah, that's it.
My wife used her own little "Wizard of the Internet" -- the collection of friends she met on-line when she was pregnant with our daughter that have stayed together on an on-line bulletin board. People from all over the world and, apparently with mad math skills. Within a few minutes she had the answer to our problem - factor out a 4 from the right side (after combining the x values). Once we did that, all became clear.
Maybe there is some value in the "social network." Speaking of which, has anyone see that movie - The Social Network? I missed the free screening that I saw on Film Metro. I'm not a Facebook user (I know... I know), but the movie has been getting pretty good reviews.
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