Though the earth stops spinning round
And the heavens explode and death rules the road
And all the mighty mountains come roaring down
It's only a sound
-- William John Tychonievich
"Word problems," in which a mathematical problem is couched in the form of a story, however contrived, are a staple of children's math textbooks, and one of these from my childhood has stuck in my memory all these years as being so obviously perfunctory and irrelevant as to be funny. It began: "As the Saxons waited for the Normans to attack, they thought of consecutive odd integers. . . ."
Lately I've been feeling as if the unfolding birdemic apocalypse were the only thing I had the right to write, or even think, about -- so I'm officially rejecting that view. This has never been a topical "news and views" blog, and I'm not about to start now. Whatever hell may be breaking loose out there, I reserve the right to think about consecutive odd integers.
Is that escapism? I guess that all depends on how you answer the question -- and everyone will answer it differently -- of what is really important and what is just a distraction.
1 comment:
Hear, hear.
And you're in good company: If the story is true, then Archimedes reserved the right to think about geometry even after Syracuse was conquered by the Romans.
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