02 25 00

math problems

I'm all sorts of pissed off.

Today is Min's birthday, and I went to Best Buy to get her a present. (The PC version of Frogger, in case you're interested.) While I was there a game caught my eye and I decided to get it. It's called Populous: The Beginning. As far as I can tell, you're a god over a planet filled with primitive people. You have to get these people to follow you. If they don't follow you, you can smite them.

The smiting part is what interested me. I really want to smite some people.

I checked the hardware requirements. The only thing I didn't have was a high-color (16-bit) video card. But I have another gave which requires that (Mechwarrior 3) and that runs fine. I figured I was ok.

I got the game home and installed it. When I tried to run it... Well, that's as far as I got. It wouldn't even start up. A program called "POPTB.EXE" crashed and the game shut down before it even started.

So I tried all the tricks I knew. I followed through their troubleshooting process. I fiddled with my hardware acceleration and virtual memory allocation. I tweaked this and messed around with that. No dice.

It still won't run.

Tomorrow I'll try again. I checked their "tech support" web page, but that was no help at all. They have a tech support email address, so I'll try that. But I have a feeling I know what they'll tell me.

"Sorry, your hardware isn't sufficient to run this program."

Hmph. Other games that I play have the exact same requirements list. Those games don't give me any problems. Grr. I won't even be able to get my money back for the game because you can't return opened software. I'm out $20.

Bastards.

Yes, I Do Suck

I got a few emails about the math problem in yesterday's entry. Aaron and Jason pointed out that I got the fractions wrong. Of course, like all math problems they solved it two different ways (augh!), but I do understand what I did wrong.

It should be:

60 min     1 hr     9 mi
------- X ------ X ------  =  12 min
  1 hr     45 mi     1

12 min + 10:32pm = 10:44pm

I knew that I was doing something wrong.

See, this way you can cancel out the "miles" units and "hour" units, leaving only "minutes." I did thousands of problems like these in high school, but that was a Long Time Ago.

My dad is a high school math teacher, and he's always been appalled at my math skills. So appalled, in fact, that during the summer he would buy math workbooks and make me (and my sisters) do a few pages of math problems before we could go play. It sucked! Math during the summer? Augh!

My mom also has no math skills to speak of. The joke is that poor math aptitude is dominant over math aptitude, so my sisters and I all have the dominant "poor math" gene.

When I was in college it was awful. My major was geology, which is pretty math intensive. I struggled through algebra and trigonometry but came out of the class with a B.

Calculus, on the other hand, SUCKED. I took it once, struggled for a few weeks and dropped out. The second time I took it I was familiar with the first part of the course all ready, so I was able to get good grades for the first few weeks. My grades on that part were enough to coast me through the rest of the class for a C.

Statistics was easy, though. It wasn't as much hard numbers as it was "correct thinking." If I could think through the problem the right way, it was easy to solve. Also, it was easier for me to spot a wrong answer.

Amusing aside about that class: Statistics was a required class for some business major - a major that happened to attract many girls who were going to college for the MRS* degree. Many of them were dumber than rocks. (I would have called them "dumb as rocks," but I wouldn't want to insult the rocks.) Early on in the class we were talking about random probability events, such as tossing a coin. Two sides to a coin, two results.

The teacher moved on to a more complicated scenario with a single die; six sides, six possible results. One girl in the back of the class raised her hand. The teacher called on her.

"What happened to the coin?" she asked.

The teacher looked at her and asked her what she meant.

"Well, we were tossing a coin a few minutes ago, and now we're throwing dice. How does the coin relate to the dice?"

*MRS degree: girls who are only going to college in order to find a husband. I shit you not.

Anyway, I had a choice for my fourth math/logic class. I could either take Calculus II (the thought of which gave me hives), or PASCAL. Hmm... I had to think about that for approximately three nanoseconds before choosing PASCAL.

Of course, on the first day of the class the teacher walked in and said, "Everything you're about to learn is completely outdated and practically never used anymore." Oh well.

Now, if I could just get that game to run...

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