Posted on 08/08/2012 4:34:06 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
I, too, possess a copy of that book. I acquired it back in the eighties, faced with an interesting problem in database marketing. We had a list of several million consumers who were good prospects of our client, who had a network of retail outlets. The idea was, let's send out computer letters to the consumers, informing them where the nearest outlets were. But that would have needed a table of nearest stores by zipcode. Which we didn't have.
However, someone on our team latched onto a database linking five-digit zip codes to latitude / longitude pairs (trivial in the Google age, but required connections of the non-ISP variety in the eighties). Obviously, the answer was to compile a list of nearest stores based on zipcode and use that. Simple: just calculate the distance from the customer's zip to the nearest outlets' by zip. That's where Bowditch (and the IBM 360 floating point instruction set and Fortran 4H libraries) came in (with some assembly language trig simplifications in the interest of computational efficiency).
Of course, it didn't work out too well. Some of the results were positively embarrassing. E.g., folks on Long Island needed boats to reach those near stores in Connecticut. But, for most of the country, it was fine, and the marketing campaign was judged successful.
You never know when you're going to need a new skill. The trick is to know when you need a new skill and to have what it takes to add the skill to yourself or buy it from whomever (the judgement between those two choices being yet another skill, LOL).
>> Nope, not in the software industry.
That’s funny given all the symbols, statements, and functions.
That’s funny given all the symbols, statements, and functions.
It depends on what you do. If you are working on top of the stack building web pages or user interfaces, he's mostly right. If you are further down in the stack developing interfaces or function libraries, less so. And if you are programming at the base you must live and breathe higher math. I spend my time in the middle writing stored procedures and data mining functions. The math is frequently challenging.
Are they hiring at your concrete batch plant? My husband was a foreman for wetcast and drycast; form construction, reading blueprints, the fineries of concrete—until the worldwide company got smart and closed their plant in upstate NY. He left about a year before they closed for good and is now doing HVAC.
I think there are two kinds of people in the world - those who like algebra and those who like geometry.
I loved algebra. Loved doing the homework. It was so much fun. Geometry on the other hand I didn’t like. It seemed to me all about putting numbers into formulas. Very boring but probably useful if you’re going to sell carpet for a living.
I have never used geometry since high school. I use algebra every day.
I just went to my mailbox and found an article that’s relevant to this discussion.
Here is a link to the article: http://www.mauldineconomics.com/frontlinethoughts/where-will-the-jobs-come-from
John Mauldin writes some interesting articles.
When I took algebra I hated the “mixture” problems. That is, combining various materials to achieve the right mixture at the optimal price. I got out of school and then spent the next 7 years doing those. Ouch.
We are seasonally shutting down in a week or two, and will open back up for a limted basis after the first of the year. The season for us here in Alaska usually starts in may until november.
The US Department of Education has said that it is a violation of civil rights to divide students according to abilities. Seriously.
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