school: October 2005 archives


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

No Blog for Time

[ rakaur on Tue Oct 18 at 11:02 PM // category: eastgate, games, lccc, life, nikki, relationships, school, technology, work ]

Let me apologize to my ~0 readers about the lack of updates. No, wait, never mind.

I’ve been busy. School full time plus work part time plus pregnant girlfriend amounts to about a 130% demand on my time. My schedule goes something like this:

Yeah, kind of sucks. When I actually have free time it’s mostly spent playing games. Which brings me to my next point.

So, Doom 3 sucks. It’s interesting for about two minutes, scary the first three times Monster X jumps out from Dark Place Y in Dark Hallway Z, and then pretty much boring. Dark hallways, stupid monsters, stupid plot, stupid levels. I can tell Carmack picked up on Halo’s policy of “instead of making interesting mission objectives, we’ll just make one that’s like ‘find the flashlight’ and make a maze of a level so that they have to wander around for ~24 days until they find the super secret spot.” Asshole. Goldeneye and other 007 games are the only ones I’ve ever played that actually have fun mission objectives that consist of more than “find this one spot in this one map.”

Yeah I was going to make this longer but I’m bored with it now.

-- rakaur // 2005.10.18 @ 11:02 PM

« school: August 2005 | Main Index | Archives | school: February 2006 »