Re: off topic who needs math and basic knowledg

>He said that the training was mostly remembering lots of maths that
>the old hands said he would never need.
Maybe they never needed it, but it's hard to say. The summer before I started college a math teacher told me that I'd never need to know about determinants, which was flat wrong. In fact it was the first topic we took up in freshman algebra and a very important aspect of working with computers. Some people don't need math, but the ability to think mathematically and geometrically is a vital skill.

You want to watch out for old hands. People with 25 or 30 or 40 years of experience in your field can be very helpful steering around pitfalls. Others who claim to have 25 years of experience or some such, may really only have 1 year of experience repeated 25 times. Worse, it may have involved 25 yearly repetitions of the same dumb mistake.

Nothing wrong with blackboards, by the way. I spent 2 hours listening to J. P. denHartog explaining a couple of turbine failures with the help of a blackboard. It was the best lecture I ever sat through.

Christopher Wright P.E.    |"They couldn't hit an elephant at
chrisw@skypoint.com        | this distance"   (last words of Gen.
___________________________| John Sedgwick, Spotsylvania 1864)