“That’s a fargin’ trick question!”

Courage, ER.

Being utterly dyslexic myself, I am terrible at math, but most particularly Boolean logic. I would need to study a problem for a while, but eventually do manage to work some of them out.

When I was working on the manuscript for “Mit-Ro-Don,” back in the mid 90s, I needed to know at least the approx. orbital locations for all the Solar planets during the mid-1970s. At the Columbus Metropolitan Library downtown, I found an old stellar ephemeris, did a lot of reading to figure out the required formulas, followed by a lot of long division (page after page), and hand-drawing dated charts to display my results, sort of using the summer solstice as my magnetic north. Then someone created a website that did all this for me, and I found my hand-drawn charts to have been amazingly accurate.

While at DeVry, there was a physics test that included, for extra credit, a problem involving velocity, distance, friction and gravitational pull. Given the basic components of air density, muzzle velocity and altitude, a projectile of a given mass is fired from a hilltop into the air at a precise angle of elevation, out over a shallow valley. The test answer regarded time of flight. In a class of 20-some students, I was the only one to get it right. The next day, the instructor asked if I could do the problem on the board for the class, but I had to decline, as I had already done a mental-dump on the rather complicated formula, which I had worked to memorized precisely for that test.

So, as the adage goes, if you don’t use it, you lose it. Since you do not require the easier problems in mathematics, you lose their functional memory — sort of… It’s really all still there, simply a matter of filing. These solutions are stored in your brain in a very small cabinet, and the neurons required to open such a cabinet may take a bit of time to recall, like an unused combination lock. Exercising your mind to solve the simpler problems should clear the issue, and much faster than one might imagine.

Typos? Doubtful, now that I’ve been able to check myself.

Cheers, and happy arithmetic.

I’ve been catching myself having these lapses lately, like getting lost in long division, or giving up on a simple paper and pencil calculation and using the calculator instead. Is it age, or is it something worse? I can usually recall procedures fairly easily (like solving simultaneous equations) or techniques (like collecting terms, or organizing by powers of ten and isolating exponents) but find myself getting stuck on really simple things like forgetting parts of the multiplication tables.

I know I haven’t used any of this stuff systematically in a long time, but I never imagined I would lose this much, so quickly. It’s scary, this used to be such a huge part of my life, and now I feel it slipping away.

No need to be coy Roy.

Since both of the above statements are true, then adding them up still gives us a true statement. (the Texes add up, the Oaks cancel out)

2 x Tex = 20

and dividing both sides by 2

Tex = 10

Substituting Tex in either of the original two equations and solving for Oak gives

Oak = 4.

Checking our work by substituting into the original equations:

10 + 4 = 14
or, alternatively,
10 – 4 = 6

total runs 14 – 6 = 8/2 = 4 + 6 = 10