First it was the venom from the politics and the upcoming election where we hear "My candidate is super awesome and his opponent whips puppies with live rattle snakes and if you don't agree you're a baby raping son of a bitch who is going straight to hell".
Now I'm seeing more and more things out there that are ways of saying "I'm super awesomely smart, you're a stupid mouth breather and I'm going to rub your nose in your own puddle of drool if you can't come to the same answer in this basic math problem.
Even if they're wrong.
According to what I was taught in school back in the 70's and 80's (Class of '89) and what Wikipedia confirms is still being used in mathematics, science, and many programming languages currently in use, the order of operations is this.
Terms inside Parentheses or Brackets
Exponents and Roots
Multiplication and Division
Addition and Subtraction
And you do it all from left to right.
So for example, 6 - 1 x 0 + 2 / 2 = to use the one I'm pissing and moaning about...
So there are no parens or brackets, no exponents or roots, this means we start with the multiplication and division. So we have...
6-1x0+2/2=
We do the one in red first since that's the left most one and 1x0 equals zero (since any number multiplied by zero is zero) and the bit in green is 1 since any number divided by itself is 1. This changes the landscape to...
6-0+1
Which is "7"
Getting into the spirit of social media, I went in and solved the equation and posted it when someone posted it to their wall.
It was not as bad as the vile hatred and venom from political matters, but I was hit with a shit storm of "Nuh-uh!" at best and at worst was called by people too numerous for me to want to bother with counting "You are an idiot that should have failed High School and spent the rest of his life shoveling shit since that's all you're smart enough for."
That last was a direct, word-for-word quote, cut and pasted from someone who gave a different answer and decided to rip me a new one from a perspective of some self-induced intellectual superiority.
And I wasn't nasty when I made my answer. I said...
"Well, the way that I was taught math in the 80's...I come up with 7"
I called no one stupid for giving answers that don't jive with mine, I didn't claim that anyone was wrong, I simply stated that the way I was taught leads me to 7.
And trust me, I'm painfully aware that schools can play silly buggers with teaching methods. My own daughter was taught "Whole Language reading" where someone is taught a primer of words and learns to recognize them by sight as opposed to sounding them out. If they come to a word that they have never come across, they're supposed to deduce the meaning of the word and the pronunciation of the word by its use in the sentence.
Now I can understand inferring the meaning of a word through its context. For example I can have a whole language reader read this sentence "The USS Enterprise carrier group was commanded by Admiral William F. "Bull" Halsey."
Even if they've never seen "Enterprise" or "Halsey" they can infer that they're names. But unless the teacher decided to add "Halsey" to that week's vocab list, I fail to see how they're going to sort out how to say it without sounding it out.
And I'd love to have a teacher of the Whole Language method explain how to sort out "antidisestablishmentarianism" either the meaning or the pronunciation.
My daughter stopped reading when she was punished for sounding out the words like she had been taught in the past because someone was trying to resurrect Whole Language.
Another example was my father who was taught "Phonic Spelling" for several years. For example, fish can be spelled "ghoti" by deriving the "f" sound from the gh in tough, the "i" sound from o in women and the "sh" sound from the ti from nation.
Imagine how fucked up your spelling is going to be for the rest of your life when you get taught this for your first several years of school and then told "Well kids, now we're going to teach you how to do it the right way"
Kinda leaves you thinking "But I thought this *was* the right way?"
So, knowing this, I didn't bad mouth anyone because not being in school myself anymore I don't know what they're being taught as an experiment. I simply stated my point of view.
But as we have learned recently, stating one's point of view is evil...and I took several verbal shotgun blasts to the face from it.
So...keep it up. You want to run me off of Facebook? Keep it up. I'll leave. I'll leave Facebook to the ones who want to turn it into a cesspool so they can wallow in their own online filth and be happy and content to do so.
As Mark Sieve as his Renaissance Fair character "Ralph Puke" of "Puke and Snot" fame once said...
"I'm like a man riding through a sewer in a glass-bottomed boat. I'm in this crap, but I'm clearly above it."
