Psychology != Math
[ rakaur on Wed Oct 19 at 12:58 PM // category: lccc, school ]
Apparently. they’ve been lying to us all this time. Pregnancy isn’t really nine months, it’s ten. Or, at least, according to my Psychology instructor, it’s ten. Her entire lecture today was based around “nine months is a lie!” Well, get some paper and do the math, you dumb bitch.
She claims that pregnancy is 10 months because “it’s 40 weeks, and 40 weeks has to be 10 months because there’s 4 weeks in a month.”
Any idiot can figure out that, since there are 7 days in a week, and “four weeks in a month,” seven times four is 28. There’s only one month of the year with 28 days. So, gee, let me think, I’m guessing a month is slightly longer than four weeks. Just slightly enough to make her “40 weeks = 10 months” statement absolute bullshit. I thought anyone with half a neuron floating around could figure out this fairly basic caldendar fact.
Since there are different days in different months, the duration of pregnancy can only be estimated or averaged. For the purposes of this conversation, we’re going to take the mean (that means “average”). There are 12 months in a year. Seven of those months have 31 days, four of those months have 30 days, and one of those months has 28 days. Add in a quarter of a day to account for leap years, and we get our 365.25 days to a year.
31(7) + 30(4) + 28 + 0.25 = 365.25
If we take the average of that, we end up with a mean of 30.4375 days in every month.
365.25 / 12 = 30.4375
Now, she claims that pregnancy is 40 weeks, but she’ll be damned if she’ll cite a source. Forty weeks is 280 days.
40(7) = 280
According to the National Library of Medicine, the mean pregnancy length ranges from 280.6 days to 283.6 days. So, we’ll take the mean of those two to get an average pregnancy length of 282.1.
280.6 + 283.6 = 564.2
564.2 / 2 = 282.1
Using our average days in a month of 30.4375, we can easily figure that pregnancy is in fact, on average, 9.26817248459959 months, or 40.3 weeks.
282.1 / 30.4375 = 9.26817248459959
282.1 / 7 = 40.3
QED, bitch.
She was wrong. Way wrong. Even if you round up, it’s still only 9.3 months. She had her duration of 40 weeks pretty close to right, so she had the right information, she just sucks at even the most basic of math.
I mean, this wouldn’t piss me off normally, I’d just write her off as a fucktard. However, she’s teaching this shit to kids as if it’s the truth, when really, she’s just a moron.
I guess my only hope is that a vast majority of people are blessed with the ability to do basic arithmetic. That hope is fairly shallow.
-- rakaur // 2005.10.19 @ 12:58 PM
0 TrackBacks
Listed below are links to blogs that reference this entry.
TrackBack URL for this entry: http://mt.ericw.org/mt-tb.cgi/181
