“I would totally go live on Mars and stop worrying about America and Iran, but unfortunately I’m no good at terraforming.” - John Green
I intended to write many more words this month than I did last year (~56,000). In reality, I have ended up at about 52K. In my defense, my cousins are visiting.
Tonight, with said cousins, we played a game called Kids vs. Grown-ups, in which the kids answer questions grown-ups should know the answers to, and vice versa.
All I can say is, the kids it was designed for must be pretty dang stupid.
Not to say that some of the adult questions weren't idiotic either. (Ex: What is the square root of 144?)
So maybe my family isn't average. Us kids are smarter than most of our age (and I'm not bragging- we + cousins have the scores with which to back it up), and our parents are involved in our lives and are interested in some things (Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings) outside of us. So the HP and LotR questions can maybe be excused, despite the fact that kids "8 and older" are too young to have been allowed to watch Lord of the Rings at the time of its release. Heck, I was too young, and I'm the one who watched some PG-13 movies at age 5 with my dad next to me to hold my hand during the scary parts and to tell me which words I wasn't allowed to say. (Then again, even when I hadn't actually read The Hobbit, I still knew the storyline upside down and backwards. And again, I have the documentation to prove it.)
That's not all I dislike about the game, however. The questions were poorly phrased, and some of the given answers weren't even correct. For one thing, the square root of 144 is not 12. It is technically plus or minus 12. But let's say I excuse that. Galileo still wasn't the first one to "notice" that the earth wasn't the center of the solar system. It's Copernicus who is credited for that (although I'm pretty sure the Mayans and quite possibly some other civilizations knew by some means before he did).
Also, Picasso didn't put "eyes and noses in the wrong places." He drew his portraits from the perspective he speculated to be the 4th spatial dimension. But that one can be excused as well.
But all in all, I'm having a great break. I've missed this branch of the family, despite that I've been playing The Elderscrolls IV: Oblivion alone in my room for many more hours per day than I should be while the others literally launch people off of giant crossbows into cities and try to hit as many things as possible and then get run over as much as possible after landing on the ground on the PS3 in Pain (Utterly hilarious). Sorry about the excessive use of prepositional phrases, there. I know its a bit awkward to read.
It depends on what you mean by the square root of a number. If you want it to be any value which, when squared, returns the original number, then +/-12 it is. However, there are some advantages to having the square root operation be a function, so it is usually defined to have a single value, traditionally the positive choice. This is why we need to add the +/- sign in front of square roots, for example in the quadratic formula, instead of them being implied. And yes, the square root of a number being only positive still gives me fits sometimes too.
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