Method 2 of body temp regulation: drinking hot water. Provides hydration, and introduces warmth to the core.
(I have my doubts she’d like the heat on sensitive gill membranes, but I suppose gill flushing with hot/warm water would also be a good idea)
When you spend the afternoon reading Dr. Calvin instead of doing your math homework, your brain goes Kablooey.
my parents were no help once letters starting creeping into my math homework. I remember Mom hated the train problems.
Reminds me of the legalese on ballot initiatives.
Ha ha, Todd, welcome to the wonders of helping your kid with homework!
That would depend on where her gills are. Water Selkie drinks may not even contact her gills. In the flash backs I have seen it looks like her people either use magic or a high tech. That may be how they deal with the cold or the sleepy reference might indicate a hibernation cycle. All things it will be interesting to see as the story develops.
He was talking about her flushing her gills with hot water because she hates the cold, not drinking it. She has to flush her gills since they aren’t in regular use.
Hooray for new math!
New-hoo-hoo math!
It won’t do you a bit of good to review math!
It’s so simple, so very simple,
That only a child can do it!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UIKGV2cTgqA
*High-fives another Tom Lehr fan* I think Selkie would be one too, considering her established tastes in humor.
Ah, the word problems. Not my favorites from primary school either, unless they involved geometry.
As a math nerd your attempt to make a weird sounding math question is painful…
Yeah. What’s fives got to do with it? The right answer to that question is, “This question does not have an answer.”
If it stopped after ‘twenty-four’ it would be solvable. As stated, it translates to ‘Math teacher is not qualified to teach this subject.”
Pretty much what I was thinking– mostly it’s just a really badly written problem.
And that is supposed to make it unrealistic? I have had to do terribly-written math problems, and I wasn’t even fed the”trick question” math problems.
I believe you meant to say “no solution.” You have to get your terminology right when your being tested on math and reading comprehension at the same time.
**grin** No, I said exactly what I meant to say.
It’s entirely possible that the question has an answer– Todd clearly broke off before he reached the end. However, without any units, it seems needlessly obfuscatory. It’s hard for a lot of people to grasp numbers as an abstract concept– it’s easier to attach them to something, which is why early arithmetic education is often in terms of collecting or distributing physical objects (often fruit, for some reason). The problem would be easier to understand if it dealt with objects distributed into equal groups, or people cooperating to complete a task, or the steady consumption of a resource over time.
Isn’t that part of the joke though? Kind of like how a cartoon character doesn’t succumb to the effects of gravity until they notice that they should be falling at the moment. It wasn’t supposed to be a workable problem.
Ok I’m dyslexic and I found your math problem made my head feel AH it really hurts! reminds me of all the horror that I had to go through in english class!
math has always been my worst subject. that math problem made me feel like crying T^T
LOL I love the ref to Calvin and Hobbs favorite book, Ooey Gooey and Hamster Kablewie
it was “Hamster Huey and the Gooey Kablooey”
That’s right!
HAMSTER HUEY AND THE GOOEY KABLOOEY!
Ahahaha, that problem is about as daunting as my homework that reads like, “Consider the (real-valued) damped wave equation on [0,l]x*[0,inf)t with Robin Boundary Conditions: utt+a(x)ut=(c(x)^2ux)x, ux(0,t)=Au(0,t), ux(l,t)=-Bu(l,t).”
For your own good and for the sake of humanity, I will have to kill you now. It won’t hurt one bit. Well, not more than reading that “math” problem did. 😛
My Differential Equations professor gave us a problem that said:
It began snowing at a constant rate at a certain time during the day. At noon a snowplow comes out to clear the road. It plowed 2 miles the first two hours, and another mile after another 2 hours. When did it start snowing?
Totally broke the entire class, and the teacher. The teacher showed it to an engineer at a party, who solved it in 2 minutes on a cocktail napkin, saying “engineers do this kind of thing all the time.”
Engineers rule, math sucks. (says an engineer.)
Wait a minute. Todd is a freaking Architect. He’s had more complicated math than that.
Now I’m leaning towards a poorly-written problem as well.
Are you sure you are not missing some data, because I cannot get my head around this one? What does the distance plowed have to do with the rate of snowfall? And by the way, I am an engineer.
Plows move more slowly through heavier snow, and as the day goes on the snow is getting deeper.
The rate of increase (how fast the snow is falling/how much snow is accumulating) comes from the function of speed reduction on the basis of snow, and the curve it makes increases as X does, so it crosses the x axis at some point before noon, which gives you your solution.
The data missing is that you’re assuming he’s constantly plowing fresh snow, so it’s compounded, I believe (i.e. that the curve is smooth and the correlation is kept, because that’s the only relevant data you’re given).
My answer: It started snowing before noon. Probably after 6am, though, if you assume “day” means “after sunrise.”
Didn’t it start snowing one hour before noon? Suppose it’s snowing ‘one unit per hour’, and there are x units on the ground at noon. Then during the first two hours after noon, an average of x+1 per hour is moved. During the second two, an average of x+3. So 2(x+1) = x+3. This means x=1, so one hour before noon there were zero units.
That’s not right, but you do show good instincts in thinking that way.
This question has no answer. There is an implicit assumption that the depth of the snow is related to the rate of plowing, which is not true. The snow started when it started and the driver stopped when he (or she) fell asleep.
There is a simplifying assumption which isn’t made explicit- but there’s a always a simplifying assumption.
I gave this to a class in 2003. Still get hate mail!
42.
Well, yes… since that’s the answer to everything!
Ah, good ol’ Calvin & Hobbes.
Out of curiosity, Dave, have you worked out the approximate rules for when Selkie adds (or doesn’t add) a terminal ‘s’ to her words?
My primary hard rule is that proper names don’t get pluralized (Mary, Todd, Selkie) but titles can (Dad, Doctor).
Words like “and” as well as articles like “the” get pluralized regularly.
Other than that, it mostly has to pass the Spoken Word test. Write a line of dialogue, then speak it out loud to see if the words that look fine when written make the tongue stumble when spoken. I’ve had to tone down her pluralses for this reason a few times.
I’m curious about the plurals also – is this a function of her transition from her native language to English, or a function of her teeth? I can’t remember if you’ve answered this before.
Having donned extra large fangs for Halloween I can tell you it’s the teeth. You lisp in places you never thought could be lisped.
Joss Whedon found out that he had to write vampire dialogue to avoid specific sounds, because with their vampire faces on they couldn’t say them and still sound dramatic or threatening.
When they’re in human faces, of course, they can say anything.
When’s the xkcd crossover?
All I could think reading this one was the raptor comic: http://xkcd.com/135/
This is how you get kids (and right-thinking adults) into math.
Oo, nice one. It’d quite slipped my mind- thanks for the reminder.
Hamster Huey and the Gooey Kablooey!
Query: Do her plant sensitivities extend to making her unable to tolerate tea or cocoa? What about, say, a cup of chicken or beef broth?
Some broths and some bouillons are made entirely from meat products and meat derivatives, so that’d be safe from what we know. I don’t remember her reaction to plants offhand, though, so that’s all I can really comment…
I don’t remember if she just can’t digest them so she pukes them up (which is unpleasant, but not really an issue) or if she gets ill for some period of time.
We really need a bio-profile as we learn things about her, so we can link these answers and such <__<
Plant-based foods generally taste bad to her, and unless mixed with copious meat or diluted in water, will aggravate her stomach and cause vomiting, sometimes with lingering upset stomach.
Tolerating it would depend on the concentration of tea leaves/cocoa used, but taste is also a factor. Plant-based foods don’t taste very good to her, nor do most sweet-things (which tend to be sugar-based anyway)
Beef bouillion is the drink of the Gods. There’s no feeling in the world like realizing you’re drinking a hot mug of meat.
I wish we were on Reddit so I could submit that to /r/nocontext.
Sounds like most of my homework from about fifth grade on. -_- I, to this day, hate mathematics.
You know, I had to read a book in school, and I hated it. Which is why all literature everywhere sucks.
I still remember how, in secondary school (no use me trying to translate it exactly, but it’s voluntary secondary education, often prerequisite for going to university, people are usually aged 15-19 during it), we had this “world literature” course, where we had a book list, and the teacher suggested we pick a book we’ve never even heard of, read it, and give a report to the whole class.
I got to choose outside the list, cause I’d already read all the books on the list (even Dante’s “Divine Comedy”, which says something about the kind of bookworm I was), but what really made this particular class stick to mind was the fact that one of the boys had (for his misfortune) chosen the book Brave New World, which I’d read just scarce months before… and as we got to ask questions after the presentations, my question made it obvious he hadn’t touched the book after the first 30 pages or so. (Teacher made him read another one, and give detailed report in writing, with questions asked.) 😛
Mind you, there were some books we were required the read during all my school years that I hated and couldn’t wait to be rid of (the first part of The Red Pony by John Steinbeck nearly put me off of school reading entirely).
I’m rambling a little… excuse me while I go look for the map for the Memory Lane.
Ah Hanna, meet you there!
I read TDC just afer leaving school in ’83, but I fall into that camp that preferred Milton’s approach- you know?
Ah, once again caught up. Anyway, I’ve a question regarding Selkie’s biology. Namely, how many chambers does her heart have? Fish typically have a two chambered heart, as that’s all they need, the blood being pushed through the gills to the brain before heading along the spine to feed the tail muscles. Amphibians have a three chambered heart, since their skin is oxygen permeable, so they don’t need full efficiency. Reptiles (turtles, at least) have a false wall, which, while not a full divided into four chambers, comes rather close to accomplishing the task of keeping the oxygenated/deoxygenated blood separate.
I only bring that bit up as the recent discussions regarding Selkie being exothermic led to numerous reptile suppositions, when to my eyes she appears more fish-like then reptile.
This also has me thinking of another question: how does Selkie speak? Humans and other animals use vocal cords to make sound, but with Selkie’s gills, isn’t the air she draws in through her nose and mouth exiting out her torso?
She can project air/water out of her mouth as well as her gills due to a secondary diaphragm that reroutes air/water out of the throat.
Awesome Calvin and Hobbes reference. Makes me happy, also appropriate considering his hatred of homework.
I have a method for word problems. Write down all the #s as they appear
Great Calvin & Hobbes reference with the story book. 😀