Monday, December 10, 2007

Mathematics will save the world!

Mathematics will save the world someday…I just know it!
Isn’t it sad though, that I’ve always hated this magical savior, thought it absolutely stupid…
But that’s probably because I was never any good at it!

I was watching this documentary about Apollo 13, the other day, and it said that the astronauts on board, knowing that they were only minutes away from destruction, frantically attempted to solve some complicated math problem, which was there only shot at survival…then they called base to have their answers checked!!

I understood nothing of the complex math problem they were talking about (yeah, that’s how thick I am when it comes to math!), but turns out, they did get it right!
And it saved Apollo 13!! Woohoo for math!

So you see, math will save the world…eventually…and I’ll have nothing to do with it!
My father has always been a brilliant story-teller. He can make the most inane tales sound believable. And as a kid, I believed almost everything he told me…

Once when I was little, my Dad told me the story of how God finds the right parents for every kid:
When God had finished making a batch of babies, he said,(one can only imagine that God has a lot of baby-dough, which he shaped into individual babies, and put them in the heavenly oven to cook!), he would hand each baby a whole bunch of parent pamphlets, and glossy catalogues with pictures and brief descriptions of each set of parents to choose from.
Of course the descriptions were VERY brief indeed, because if he gave away the details, no parents would ever get picked, and heaven would be crawling with an entire population of accumulating babies!
So the babies picked the parents they wanted…(nobody said what’d happen if two or more babies wanted the same set of parents…hmmm…), and after every baby had been matched with it’s parents, they’d be sent down to earth…this is probably where the storks came in to deliver the ickle bundles of joy!

Dad said he was very grateful that I’d picked them!