Google Streetview (Brainmelt Avenue)
Whilst sounding like something a pop wannabe would need deep in their soul in order to take part in the lumberjack version of ‘The X Factor’, this was the quickest way to get my eyes to glaze over and the easiest route for me to lose the will to live during my secondary school mathematics lessons.
I mean, just what in the name of glory are logarithms all about?
It just a bunch of numbers and graphs for boffins. It’s hardly likely to come into play when one is standing at the bus stop trying to work out if one has enough cash to get home without walking… or making sure the checkout girl at Tesco hasn’t short-changed you is it!
The teachers always handed me a brown-paperback old codebook containing nothing but numbers. They then called out what sounded like telephone numbers with decimal points in them. You then had to use the codebook to look up the telephone numbers they gave you, and you call back to the teacher a totally different telephone number with a decimal point in it.
I remember I got the detention one day for saying to one maths teacher (with clearly no sense of humour) that I dialed the number and it was a swimming pool cleaner in San Francisco. He went ‘mental’ and wrote out the detention there and then. He obviously thought I should have reversed the charges!
I left secondary school 37 years ago and since then I have not used a flaming logarithm ever since. That’s seven school terms of my life that I never get back!
This article proves, I believe, that Logarithms are about as welcome to most people as a lump of prime Scottish beef being thrown into a ’Tofu’ making machine.
