From Newsgroup: alt.windows7.general

On Tue, 27 Jan 2026 04:58:03 -0500
Paul <nospam@needed.invalid> wrote:

On Tue, 1/27/2026 3:59 AM, Daniel70 wrote:

On 26/01/2026 11:43 pm, J. P. Gilliver wrote:

On 2026/1/26 11:13:59, Daniel70 wrote:

On 26/01/2026 2:01 am, R.Wieser wrote:

<Snip>

Isn't language fun!

Almost as funny as math.a :-(

Well, I enjoy it. (Can't really help it in my family - both parents were >> language teachers and brother works for the dictionary.) And I do enjoy
_some_ maths (UK spelling!) too.

As much as it grates on me, I can, sort of, accept the Yank 'Math' ... I mean the full word IS 'MathematicS' and, if you were going to truncate it by dropping the tail-end, then ALSO dropping the 's' makes sense ..... but it sounds so awkward!!

If you were on campus, you would soon get used to acronyms
and abbreviations and shorthands.

Such shorthands are more popular with STEM students. Hahaha.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science,_technology,_engineering,_and_mathematics

You can learn many things at university, but a common joke when discussing what courses to take, would be "Have you considered Basket Weaving...".
See, there really is such a thing. But that would not be shortened
to Bask101. I think you can imagine how such a persons office at
work would be decorated when they graduated.

https://carleton.ca/indigenous/avpii/wp-content/uploads/doublewoven-baskets-1200x900-1.png

I had an applied math professor, where the office he had, had farm tools
in it. A piece of a plow. Various odds and ends you might find in a barn.
We never asked the guy what that was all about, because the
conversation "might become uncomfortable". And you wouldn't
want to be chased down a hall, with a pitchfork. He was one of
my favorite characters because he could derive *everything*
from first principles. He would start at 10AM with a yellow
pad of quad-rule paper, and derive Greens Theory, and for the
1PM class, he would put a solid ten pages of notes on the
blackboard (in one hour). In other words, he did not work from "canned notes".
The ink was still wet at 1 PM.

I recall a tale from my Applied Maths tutor, that Green himself
re-invented his stuff daily, after a hard night on the booze and
the miller's daughter.
Tales like that livened up maths lectures a bit.

I had to buy a special "high speed pen", just to keep up with him
on note-taking. That's one class you could not arrive with your
Rapidograph (that's a favoured tool of Physics students).
That kind of pen is just too slow.

https://bijansartstudio.ca/product/koh-i-noor-rapidograph-artist-and-technical-pen-1-0-50/

Paul

--
Bah, and indeed Humbug.
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