Bookworm Room

Conservatives deal with facts and reach conclusions; liberals have conclusions and sell them as facts.

The Democrat victimhood mantle, plus racial education madness

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The story of the sweet beer guy and the doxxing reporter is a microcosm of Democrat behavior, plus racial — and racist — education madness in Seattle.

Education Blacks

A photograph from a time when education recognized students’ inherent dignity.

The first part of this post is about the way in which the Carson King and Aaron Calvin saga parallels the saga of Trump, the Democrats, the Russian Hoax, and the investigation into the origins of the hoax. The second part looks at education insanity in Seattle. I’ve done a podcast on the same topics, which is not identical to this post, but it’s close enough that, if you prefer reading, you won’t miss anything by not listening to the podcast.* And if you listened to the podcast, you’ll find in this post links to the things I mentioned in the podcast.

The Beer Guy, the nasty reporter, Trump, and the nasty Democrats. You’ve probably already heard this story, so I won’t go on at length about it. Carson King is a young man who, during ESPN game night, put up a sign asking people to buy him a beer and giving his Venmo account name. It was silly, audacious, and charming. People responded with cheerful vigor, eventually sending King $1.12 million. King promptly turned around and donated the money to a hospital in Iowa City, where it will be used primarily to help children with cancer. This is a nice guy.

Aaron Calvin is not a nice guy. He was a young reporter at the Des Moines Register. He thought it would be a good scoop to troll King’s twitter feed. After crawling back eight years, he found a tweet or two in which King quoted some movie or TV show in a way that is no longer considered politically correct. (Keep in mind that what’s acceptable changes on an almost daily basis now.) King gave the ritual apology. [Read more…]

Math help needed

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My daughter got a very challenging assignment.  She did wonderfully with about 80% of it, and then hit a wall.  I got intrigued and started helping her out, but I too have now hit a wall.  Perhaps you can help, because this is making me very frustrated.

Here’s the deal:  She was given the numbers 1, 2, 4 and 6.  Using addition, subtraction, multiplication and division, and using each of those numbers only once, she has to create mathematical statements that result in the numbers 1 through 50.

Here are some examples, all of which she figured out:

1 = 6+1-2+4

3 = 2+6-4-1

8 = [(6×1)+4]-2

39 = 62+4-1

44 = [(6×2)-1]x4

As you can see, not only is she using each of the assigned numbers only once, she can also use exponents.  Incidentally, you can create exponents, such as 5, by making the exponent 4+1.

Does that make sense? For those of you familiar with the old math game of Krypto, it’s like Krypto, only using four working digits, not five.

So, my daughter made fantastic progress, and I was able to help out with a few more.  We got completely stumped, though, trying to create formulas that would equal 34, 38 and 43.  Are those do-able or impossible?  I suspected some of you might know.