Young Writers Society

Extract from my column based book. (And blog)

Earth & Its Contents

by Ben Franks

The Art Of Math & Ladybird Eating

Today, I realised that mathematics was beginning to become a bore, and this had taken approximately 4,500 billion banana years to reach this judgement. You see, in maths, nothing really happens and most naive students would question it's relevance in the world today. Like I did.

So, the teacher, instead of doing her job and pitching to me the weird and wonderful lengths in which Algebra or something as pointless as trigonometry would come in useful during my day-to-day activities of sleeping, working and drinking bad coffee, she merely said "Go and find out."

Now, to my distress, I couldn't resist doing so. However, firstly, I required some kind of amusement. I pondered on the prospect momentarily before residing to searching the "Point of Maths" in Yahoo and laughing at the suggestions Yahoo threw at me. They're like an uneducated version of Google who's stuck in a constant cylce of hormone packed pubity and sexual wavelengths. Yahoo is useless. Thus, I fulfilled my need of entertainment and asked Mr. Google what the point of Maths was and he gave me a long list of things such as 'engineering' and 'cashiering'. However, I decided that these were obvious and then drew every last bit of focus to a most unusual link I'd found.

Somehow, Google had been convinced that "The manual of eating ladybirds" was related to Maths and, much to my amusement, I soon discovered that you need Maths more-so whilst you consume a ladybird, than you do when you put together a Royal Airforce jet engine or even when you embark on the hardest task of all and try and calculate the cost of a cup of coffee in Starbucks.

Any'oo. Back to the ladybird manual.

Apparently, to make the most of its taste, you need to eat it in a certain way, which requires extensive uses of trigonometry so you angle your teeth in an exact way to fulfill an exact taste. However, there is then the danger that it touches the wrong part of your tongue, so apparently you need to do some Algebra. I'm told that T (for taste) = A (for area of tongue) x C (for 'Chris' the tastebud') + G (for the time it takes to gulp down the microscopic substance). This equals 3.14159, which is unusually Pi to 5 decimal places.

So, when the teacher asked me the next day what the point of maths was. I replied gracefully, "That you're better off eating a pie, than a ladybird."

~ February 2010