A national disgrace ... or renewed incentive to empire building? Clearly one of the key motives for the UK's last global land grab was that colonization forced the locals to learn your language, not vice versa.
>... for god's sake learn basic
>calculus everybody. It is not as if it is difficult (although as far as I
>can
>see, American universities make the most astonishing meal of it, teaching
>"calculus" and "multivariate calculus" as different courses!), and it is
>unbelievably frustrating to the rest of us to have to spell out what we
>mean in
>any discussion of rates of change with respect to things (I doubt it is any
>more fun for you lot to have to keep taking things on trust).
If you're talking about pronouncements from the financial sector, rest assured that I take nothing on trust. My experience of Wall Street is that it is a world of rigorous calculations built on the shakiest (if not actually imaginary) assumptions.
>Not knowing
>calculus is like not being able to dance ...
<Sigh> I suppose I was fated from the get-go to a lifetime of slinging prose not equations. The thought of anything as arid as calculus bearing the slightest resemblance to that vital form of human expression, dance, would never enter my head.
All in all, while I recognize the contemporary utility of math proficiency in assuring personal job security, I think excess quantification has been the death of civilization. With the ascendance of econometrics, for instance, economics has literally become too ridiculous for words.
Carl