# Junk in the Mind's Attic



## MarkW (Feb 16, 2015)

I had a niece who once dated an MIT grad student. He was heard to remark how glad he was to know calculus -- how he didn't think there was ever a day that he didn't use it -- and he wasn't just referring to his research!

I can't think of a day in my post-education life when I ever needed calculus. It caused me to think of other facts rumbling around in my brain for the last 40+ years that I have seldom if ever used.

-- The Quadratic Formula. I can recite it, but can't think of an occasion when I needed to solve a quadratic equation.

-- Avogadro's Number (6.0247 x 10^23). It's the number of atoms or molecules in a mole. So?

-- DNA nucleotides. DNA is a wonderful and elegant molecule. But why do I have to still know it's made up of adenine, guanine, thymine, and cytosine?

-- Speed of light. Okay it's sort of useful to know it's really fast, and that if you count the seconds between a lightning flash and the sound of thunder you can estimate how far away the storm is (a mile for every 5 seconds, but that's more a function of the speed of sound, anyway). Just for fun, I once learned it as 186,262.3 mps from the Handbook of Chemistry and Physics, but why I don't know.

-- My fourth grade teacher's license plate number (H87-699, green '56 Ford). I don't know where that came from.

-- General Relativity. Just kidding. I don't understand it any more than anyone else does -- but it's fun to watch a ball roll around a rubber sheet. 

-- Synthetic division.

-- CPCTE (corresponding parts of congruent triangles are equal)

What do you know that you never use?


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## MarkW (Feb 16, 2015)

Addendum: My dad taught me that he always remembered the square root of 3 (1.732) because it was the same as the year George Washington was born (1732). Well, more apropos of this forum, I would tend to associate it with the year Haydn was born -- but I haven't had a lot of use for either.


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## brotagonist (Jul 11, 2013)

I took 2nd year university math, so I remember those, too. I know there are a lot of historical dates that are useless, too, like 1066, 1492 and others. How about the Plains of Abraham and balance sheets and ledgers (I took accounting, too). Pascal and assembly language? Cell division? A-T and G-C base pairs?

Honestly, I don't view any of this stuff as useless junk. It's part of a well-rounded education that makes us comprehending and sentient members of our great Western tradition of arts and sciences. I don't mean to bash the younger generations or the current simplified educational systems for morons, but knowledge, all knowledge, is important to me and makes me who I am. I believe that it all interconnects somewhere (the dendrites or is it the axons?) and (hopefully) enables us to think in more complex fashions than simply reacting with the reptilian brain, as would appear to be the current norm.


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## GreenMamba (Oct 14, 2012)

There' a lot of pop culture stuff in there, and a lot of baseball stats. But that's probably not what this is about. 

My 8th grade French teacher referred to common irregular verbs as "a-dam-rit as-piv" verbs. It was a mnemonic device to remember their first letters. Something like "ademmrt aspv." It was funny because those are usually supposed to be meaningful things, not gibberish.

Still, I remember it, though not the exact letters or the verbs themselves. I didn't stick with French.


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## cwarchc (Apr 28, 2012)

42 Though this will only work with fans of Adams?


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## GreenMamba (Oct 14, 2012)

brotagonist said:


> I took 2nd year university math, so I remember those, too. I know there are a lot of historical dates that are useless, too, like 1066, 1492 and others. How about the Plains of Abraham and balance sheets and ledgers (I took accounting, too). Pascal and assembly language? Cell division? A-T and G-C base pairs?
> 
> *Honestly, I don't view any of this stuff as useless junk*. It's part of a well-rounded education that makes us comprehending and sentient members of our great Western tradition of arts and sciences. I don't mean to bash the younger generations or the current simplified educational systems for morons, but knowledge, all knowledge, is important to me and makes me who I am. I believe that it all interconnects somewhere (the dendrites or is it the axons?) and (hopefully) enables us to think in more complex fashions than simply reacting with the reptilian brain, as would appear to be the current norm.


I agree with this, although MarkW's 4th grade teacher's license plate is clearly junk. Also, my French verbs are junk because it doesn't add up to anything.

I tutor, so I wish I remembered more stuff from high school. Plus, I love history, and if you stick with it, the stray dates help you to understand more history.


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## MarkW (Feb 16, 2015)

GreenMamba said:


> There' a lot of pop culture stuff in there, and a lot of baseball stats. But that's probably not what this is about.
> 
> My 8th grade French teacher referred to common irregular verbs as "a-dam-rit as-piv" verbs. It was a mnemonic device to remember their first letters. Something like "ademmrt aspv." It was funny because those are usually supposed to be meaningful things, not gibberish.
> 
> Still, I remember it, though not the exact letters or the verbs themselves. I didn't stick with French.


I remember creating a mnemonic in 10th grade biology to remember kingdom/phylum/class/order/family/genus/species. It was a new, slightly creepy work by Tchaikovsky: Capriccio Fungus (KaPriCciO FunGuS).


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## Ukko (Jun 4, 2010)

This thread appears to be an insult aimed at doddering geezers everywhere.


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## MarkW (Feb 16, 2015)

Ukko said:


> This thread appears to be an insult aimed at doddering geezers everywhere.


As a doddering geezer, welcome to the club.


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## SeptimalTritone (Jul 7, 2014)

At first, I thought in terms of calculus.

Then I thought in terms of differential equations.

Then I thought in terms of partial differential equations.

Then I thought in terms of field theories.

Then I thought in terms of universality classes.

The level of abstraction to understand how seemingly disparate phenomena like the loss of magnetization of iron at ~700 C, or a highly pressurized ~100atm supercritical fluid, or the resistanceless superfluid flow of helium at 4 Kelvin are governed by the same universality of cascades of length scales... oh my God it is so beautiful.


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## SeptimalTritone (Jul 7, 2014)

Calculus describes motion, change, time, space.

Calculus, with Newton's laws and thermodynamics, gives how fast you fall to the ground, or why the earth has its atmosphere and temperature. Calculus tells you the difference between moving through air versus moving through viscous honey. Calculus gives you galaxy formation.

Calculus, with quantum mechanics and the Pauli exclusion principle, is why carbon/hydrogen/oxygen/nitrogen form the lego bricks of you. Calculus, with quantum mechanics and solid state theory, gives you the difference between conductors and insulators. Calculus, quantum physics, and quantum chemistry give you the silicon transistors that are the lego bricks of your computer.

Calculus and the partial differential equations of sound in air and solids give you the vibrations of musical instruments.

Calculus with its analysis of rates of change gives the Brownian walk of the stock market, or the social dynamics of groups, or the analysis of traffic flow.

It is not "trivia" or "junk".


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## MarkW (Feb 16, 2015)

SeptimalTritone said:


> Calculus describes motion, change, time, space.
> 
> Calculus, with Newton's laws and thermodynamics, gives how fast you fall to the ground, or why the earth has its atmosphere and temperature. Calculus tells you the difference between moving through air versus moving through viscous honey. Calculus gives you galaxy formation.
> 
> ...


Hi ST: I'm not saying that any of the above is trivial or junk -- only that, as a non-scientist/mathematician, my mind is full of a lot things I learned that have never and will probably never use. And I fund it amusing what some of those things are.


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## Ukko (Jun 4, 2010)

SeptimalTritone said:


> Calculus describes motion, change, time, space.
> 
> Calculus, with Newton's laws and thermodynamics, gives how fast you fall to the ground, or why the earth has its atmosphere and temperature. Calculus tells you the difference between moving through air versus moving through viscous honey. Calculus gives you galaxy formation.
> 
> ...


Is its beauty warm, or is it cold?


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## SeptimalTritone (Jul 7, 2014)

Warm beauty is overrated. Truth is more important, and truth is logical, unified, elegant, and inevitable. Both the best math/physics and the best music is unified and inevitable.


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## trazom (Apr 13, 2009)

MarkW said:


> DNA is a wonderful and elegant molecule. But why do I have to still know it's made up of adenine, guanine, thymine, and cytosine?


Each nitrogenous base also comes with a 5-carbon sugar and a phosphate group to make a nucleotide. And in RNA, it's Uracil instead of Thymine. Okay now that I got that out of my system, instead of regurgitating all the academic facts I know, I'll just post the purely useless information that I can list off the top of my head:

-I know Daniel Radcliffe's birthday because it's the same as mine
-I can name all 50 states in alphabetical order because of a song I learned in 5th grade.
-I know the musical key of all 27 Mozart piano concertos and their catalog numbers(well the original one anyway)
-Stephanie Tanner's most famous quote is "how rude."
-Franz Joseph Haydn liked wine.
-JS Bach liked hard cider and "yeast brandy."
-I also know where some of you live.


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## MarkW (Feb 16, 2015)

trazom said:


> -I also know where some of you live.


Well, Ukko and I are both Vermonters, but if you come after us, we'll get Bernie Sanders on your case.


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## Weston (Jul 11, 2008)

I remember a few words of Esperanto.  My dad and I tried to learn it when I was a kid. I never could roll the "r" correctly. I'm afraid I don't see it ever taking off.


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## mstar (Aug 14, 2013)

-Thomas Jefferson had children with his slave and had an obsession with architectural domes. 
-Andrew Jackson inherited a massive amount of money when he was 15 years old and spent the majority of it in a year on prostitutes, gambling, etc.
-Andrew Carnegie had such an obsession with world peace that politicians disliked him and called him obnoxious. He ended up writing a letter to the US president congratulating him on entering WWI. 
-I always thought ln was "IN", pronounced "eyen", not LN. And then I took precalculus. 
-Rachmaninoff liked driving and rowing. He sent himself into political exile. 

What a cluttered mind I have.


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## Huilunsoittaja (Apr 6, 2010)

The "Junk" in my mind is stories about the Russian composers I've read in books that I'll literally tell_ no one _about, but I know them still because they make me happy. It's getting mighty cluttered up there in my head. Information that only serves to please myself, I consider that a kind of junk, because I personally find pleasure in sharing information more than simply knowing it. It is information that only gives half its potential enjoyment from.

Well, that's only for the time being. Things could change in my circumstances. Curious people could start asking... and then I'll never stop telling. :devil:


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## brotagonist (Jul 11, 2013)

We're asking. Tell all, tell all! :devil:


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## Huilunsoittaja (Apr 6, 2010)

brotagonist said:


> We're asking. Tell all, tell all! :devil:


8 years of research in 15 minutes.


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## Kivimees (Feb 16, 2013)

All I need to find junk in the mind's attic is to think back on my school days - subjects dealing with (revisionist) history, the proletariat, class struggle etc.


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## Xaltotun (Sep 3, 2010)

I have an extremely good memory and it's full of song lyrics and film lines and prose and speeches and Latin names of plants and stuff. How about this one:

"Fire and wind come from the sky... from the gods of the sky. But Crom is your god, and he lives in the Earth! Once there were giants in the world, Conan... and in the darkness of chaos, they fooled Crom, and took from him the enigma of steel! Crom was angered, and the Earth shocked! And fire and wind came down from the sky and struck down these giants and fell their bodies into the waters. But in their rage, the Gods forgot the secret of steel and left it on the battlefield. And we who found it, are... just men. Not Gods, nor giants. Just men. The secret of steel has always carried with it a mystery. You must learn it, little Conan; you must learn its discipline! For no man... no man in this world can you trust. Not men, not women, not the beasts! THIS (points at sword blade) you can trust!!!"


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