On 4-5-2011 14:34, Invisible wrote:
>>> Exactly. I mean, unless you happen to be able to compute 64/7 mentally,
>>> which normal humans can't.
>>
>> You're not that much younger than me, so maybe there's something
>> fundamentally different between the school system in the UK vs. Canada,
>> but in the 2nd or 3rd grade, we had to learn our multiplication tables
>> by heart.
>
> This is almost universally regarded as one of the most useless things
> you learn in school. I haven't studied this statistically, but I suspect
> the majority of adults long since forgot all this stuff.

The whole point of learning multiplication tables by heart is that you 
need them to do all other computations in base 10.
If you don't know them by heart a large part of our culture is 
inaccessible to you.

>
>> Or if they don't, they should be able to guestimate that since 64 is
>> rather close to 70, there's a good chance that 64/7 would be just a bit
>> less than 70/7, which is easy to compute.
>>
>> If not, I weep for humanity.

I'll join you.

-- 
Apparently you can afford your own dictator for less than 10 cents per 
citizen per day.

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