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terror (My immediate reaction to high school trigonometry. The concept of imaginary numbers still makes my stomach queasy. Math in any shape or format is clearly not my forte)

phone

A colleague always delays using the phone to beyond the last minute. For him, it's a 'terrorphone'. Bad pun, I know, but what the heck.

As for imaginary numbers, I always think that imagining them as a graph makes them easy. The real bit along the horizontal axis, the imaginary bit in the vertical axis. You are then able to think of a sine wave as the horizontal component of a particle going around a circle drawn on this graph, or for AC electricity, the horizontal component is the voltage out while the imaginary circle is the rotor in the generator as it spins, and you can only get the back & forward horizontal bit down a wire, because a wire can only take a back & forth movement of electrons, a large spinning rotor won't fit inside a wire...

I always wish my maths teachers had given real uses for these ideas, it would have made this sort of thing so much easier for me to grasp.
Fourrier transforms did my head in when I was at school, they seemed so pointless. But if someone had mentioned their use - a way of processing a signal so pops & hissing can be removed from an audio file, or extracting the high energy impact from when you drop an object so you can extract the signal that may break what you drop from the fuzz & ringing that just clutter up an accelerometer signal - then I would have had an incentive to understand. I think the problem with my highest level maths teacher was that he'd never actually used his mathematics for anything and only saw it as an intellectual exercise rather than as something that was useful in the real world. Basically, he was too clever for his job.

Regards,

Richard.

Calls.

Maths! I was chucked out of maths class a year before 'O' level grade! The teacher said I was too stupid to grasp the concept!!
She taught one way and my dad showed me another way and I totally lost it!! He insisted his was the right way!! Result... Confusion!!!

I took on extra lessons in Biology and Human Biology. That teacher was an inspiration to me and I never went back to the maths class.

Cold.


I hate those cold calls. And I have a little dyslexia with numbers. So math bad.

Baltic (a common term for cold in the UK)

The more abstract maths became, the less I understood it, but I'm pretty good on your ordinary arithmetic, fractions, decimals and reading graphs -- all of which I use commonly. Calculus and trig? Not so much. (How I managed elementary physics still stumps me.)

Sea..

Waves

Radio

electromagnetic

Silk stockings

(this may need a bit of explanation. In the musical Silk Stockings with Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse she, in the character of a Russian official who is very efficient and unemotional, sings that love is a chemical reaction, nothing more, and it starts: "When the electro-magnetic of the he-male meets the electro-magnetic of the fe-male, if right away she should say "this is the male", it's a chemical reaction that's all")

Garters

For the last three days I have been trying to remember her name. All I could remember was that amazing skirt made by Edith Head, it was a slim fitting below the knee skirt bu when she danced there was a mile if fabric hidden until she danced. I have always been fascinated by that skirt and it’s amazing construction.

Guts

(I seem to remember the skirt miraculously turned into culottes on and off during the dance as well)

Tripe

(My dad had a dog that loved tripe, probably due to how awful it smelled.)

Haggis

Scottish

BAGPIPES.

I love them, along with men in kilts.

Gentleman

(was it Dr Johnson who described a gentleman as someone who could play the bagpipes, but didn't?)

Laird (trying to continue the wonderful Scottish theme! Not that all lairds are gentlemen, for sure)

(Actually, it was Oscar Wilde who said a gentleman was someone who could play the bagpipes but won't) Spoilsport.

Steamy

Thinking of the bare-chested Scottish lairds adorning covers of some historical romance paperbacks... it was either that or "lard" .

Really enjoyed catching up on the word game since I was on last.

Heat Wave.