Dear Folks,
One of the things about life is that some of the stuff they made you learn and do as a kid or teen seems so dumb, so ridiculous, it could only have been designed by bored teachers trying to come up with new ways to torture kids. And then some (not all, just some) of those things turn out to come up later in life, and well, one can only send an apology out to the universe that, okay, that turned out to be not as crazy as you might have said.
One was hyperbolas which I spent forever working on calculating the area of, sure that this was useless information, and in fairness to my teen self, I have never been asked to calculate the area of one, but I did end up participating in this, so we could call that not entirely useless.
And then, during my stint in Civil Air Patrol there were disaster scenarios. Now, I confess, I am sort of cheating since I wasn't at this one (I went to the downed plane one) but there was one where the scenario was an earthquake. And, so I hear, many of the participants moaned that that was stupid, because when would that ever happen here in the DC area. (Yes, I know there was a little one last year. This was before that.) And they pulled out this really timely example: 1811-1812. Yes, from 1811-1812 a series of earthquakes known as the New Madrid earthquakes, adjusted the course of rivers and caused churchbells to ring in New England.
Well, now we have a new one to add to the list. (Oh, and Earth, I think this makes an excellent list, by the way, good job. Feel free to stop now.)
Sincerely,
Former Jaded Teen
Rants About New (and old) Things