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Showing posts with label US math. Show all posts
Showing posts with label US math. Show all posts

Monday, October 14, 2024

Murderous Pi


Political Pi
 

When π thought that she’d never want to be associated with gun violence and senseless death, was she just being politically positive or naive?

Pi’s fear has now come true. Without repeated funding from gun manufacturers and pollution-enabled organizations, an obscene number of morally corrupt halfwitted lawmakers in TrumpLand would never get elected or reelected.

Even as you’re reading this, the odds of another senseless shooting or tragedy currently being witnessed in some red-pilled states are anything but zero.

It looks like if only those GOP selfish lawmakers and their loved ones or friends were the victims, maybe then they’d eventually do something about gun control; otherwise, it’s all NATO (No Action Talk Only).


Should Math Teachers Be Armed?

The Blame Game

People are sick of hearing the years-long canned story from inept and morally bankrupt politicians, who simplistically blame mental health, inequality, racism, or whatever social ills, rather than the free flow of guns for the recurring senseless deaths. It’s like the political equivalent of scapegoating the forced learning of algebra for the nation’s high innumeracy rate.

The U.S. is the only “civilized” nation in the developed world that has continually shortchanged its schoolchildren and their teachers. When profits and politicians triumph over principles and people.

Or, only in TrumpLand do we read about these senseless school gun deaths—when students shoot teachers and their peers because they can do it. And those preventable school shootings have only got more frequent and resulted in higher casualties in recent years.


Murderous Statistics

Below are some “murderous statistics” I’d tweeted over the years following numerous school shootings:

Sadistic Statistics from the National Rifle Association (NRA): “No guns, very high murder rates; more guns, very low murder rates.”

Murderous Math: People in the U.S. are 20 times more likely to be killed by a gun than someone else in another developed country.

Gun Ownership: Singapore ranks among the bottom 10 for the number of privately owned guns per 100 people.

It’s said that the chance of a 15-year-old boy dying by the age of 50 is now higher in America than it is in Bangladesh. The odds might even be higher now with Trumpism and moral bankruptcy plaguing Trumpublicans.

Deadly Statistics: The positive correlation between the coronavirus and the growing gun sales in the U.S., which has the highest crime rate in the developed world.


Dark Problem Solving

Ironically, school and gun shootings in the U.S. have provided math educators with real-life math problems, which could be used to hone students’ guesstimation skills. Two such questions are:

Political Math: Guesstimate how many “corrupt zeros” Trump and his billionaires-donors (and the mostly morally corrupt GOP lawmakers) pocketed, by protecting profiteering guns, insurance, and pharmaceutical companies.

Death Statistics: How many students in the U.S. senselessly die every year from gun violence?


No Gun Reduction, but God’s Protection


Let’s end with a haiku I recently X-ed in the aftermath of Trump’s lackey saying that school shootings are a “fact of life.”

Serial School Shootings

Money politics
that support gun businesses.
That’s a “fact of life.”


If the U.S. is dead serious about protecting schoolchildren and teachers from gun shootings, maybe it’d do it the Singapore way: Zero tolerance for gun sale to 99.99% locals. Vote out politicians who’re funded by weapon manufacturers.

Safely & securely yours

© Yan Kow Cheong, October 14, 2024.

Friday, September 27, 2024

Risqué Math Cartoons

 @pickover on 9/23/24

What about a math joke that could in itself be treated as a kind of math joke? A so-called metamath joke.

Admit it! It’s not uncommon that sometimes it takes a while before you can get a math joke, especially if it relies on some basic knowledge of advanced or abstract (or abstruse) math.

Experiencing that aha! takes a little longer. For novices, a mature or sophisticated math joke wouldn’t spark much mathematical joy in them—it seems or sounds more like a boring math textbook or a vanilla math teacher than anything else.

Of course, there are some math jokes that are open to different interpretations, especially those bordering on poking fun at “oft-proudly self-professed nonmath” or semi-innumerate folks, which may arguably be perceived as being elitist, racist, or sexist (or all three) in some illiberal or puritan circles.

Cartoon by Mike Seddon

MAGA Math (or Haiti Math?)

Below are two political math jokes I recently X-ed in the aftermath of racist rhetoric perpetrated or repeated by a white supremacist, who once proudly self-proclaimed to be the “least racist person on the planet.”

Political Algebra: A MAGA equation that could lead to the loss of millions of conservative votes, as people have had enough of racist or nativist language, which divides rather than unites a polarized nation.

An equation à la Trump

Dog Math: How not to submit your math homework—thanks to Trump and Vance and MAGA ambassadors of bigotry, who forget that they themselves are the offspring of immigrants. Estimate how many millions of kids would get away from this racist excuse.

My Dog Stole My Homework (Again)

These days, it’s getting harder to share a math joke or a quasi-clean limerick without being labeled with all kinds of four-, five-, or six-letter adjectives in the “cancel culture” or “woke” world we live in.

Are the days of adult or mature math jokes numbered? Is vintage recreational math found in out-of-print math puzzles titles, periodicals, or journals—which is often inarguably colonialist, racist, or supremacist—heading the way of the dodo?

Humorously & irreverently yours

© Yan Kow Cheong, September 27, 2024.


Facebook’s “UK Best Jokes & Puns” (Feb. 13)