Politics and Math

Daddy sent me this movie about the upcoming election. It's tres funny and it pretty much sums the whole dern thing up.

Now, here's a math problem Matt and I talked about on our walk this evening. Don't read this if you get bored by nerd stuff. Ok, so today I was watching the episode of Freaks & Geeks where Lindsay is back on the math team. And during her competition, they asked her how many radians the minute hand moves … so, I sat there and I dug in the recesses of my mind and remembered that there are 2 π radians in 360 degrees. So that should be 48/60 * 2 π radians. Which would be (reduced) 8 π/5. So I was shocked when they cited the answer as .4 radians.

So I figured I must have forgotten some of my rather overly-extensive math schooling and decided to discuss it with Matt. He agreed with me. So we just decided they were wrong. As it turns out, the question was how many radians does the hour hand move in 48 minutes. It is .4 pi radians (1/12 * 48/60 * 2 π ). They must have just left off the pi or the part of the question where you were supposed to express your answer in terms of pi.

BTW: I loved it when the freaks turned up at Lindsay's math competition.