Are degrees in the UK value for money?

getmore4less

economic wrote: »

Today i learnt that a leap year does not occur every 4 years. It occurs every 4 years unless the year is divisible by 100 in which case if its divisible by 400 it is a leap year only.

I did a maths degree at a top uni. I studied maths at alevel. I was pretty studious. Why is a simple fact like this not hammered into my brain?

It's not really a maths problem, its astronomy using a tiny bit of arithmetic.

It can effect some areas that are math related like statistical time series.

GunJack

SngleSue - you're never going to get economic & ape to understand the real world, with real people, real earnings & costs, etc., especially when you throw in something like ASD (our youngest has it)...

economic

getmore4less wrote: »

It's not really a maths problem, its astronomy using a tiny bit of arithmetic.

It can effect some areas that are math related like statistical time series.

It is a maths problem in that you use maths to solve the problem about say average days in a year which isn't 365.25 obviously.

Malthusian

economic wrote: »

Today i learnt that a leap year does not occur every 4 years. It occurs every 4 years unless the year is divisible by 100 in which case if its divisible by 400 it is a leap year only.

I did a maths degree at a top uni. I studied maths at alevel. I was pretty studious. Why is a simple fact like this not hammered into my brain?

Because everyone has a calendar?

Because it won't matter until 2100 when most of the people old enough to learn this factoid will be dead?

It is a maths problem in that you use maths to solve the problem about say average days in a year which isn't 365.25 obviously.

To know how many days it actually takes the Earth to go round the Sun is astronomy, not maths. To then work out how to insert extra days to the calendar to adjust for that fact is the maths problem.

Eventually the calendar will go out of sync anyway, but if I have understood Wikipedia correctly it will take about 7,700 years, by which time we will have either adopted a new calendar or, if we're still using Gregorian, we can just insert a one-off day.

economic

Malthusian wrote: »

Because everyone has a calendar?

Because it won't matter until 2100 when most of the people old enough to learn this factoid will be dead?



To know how many days it actually takes the Earth to go round the Sun is astronomy, not maths. To then work out how to insert extra days to the calendar to adjust for that fact is the maths problem.

Eventually the calendar will go out of sync anyway, but if I have understood Wikipedia correctly it will take about 7,700 years, by which time we will have either adopted a new calendar or, if we're still using Gregorian, we can just insert a one-off day.

That is what i meant by being a maths problem, to adjust for the actual days it takes to revolve around the sun.

The fact that we shouldn't care as 365.25 days a year is a good approx specially since most will be dead by 2100, is irrelevant.

Some people still would like to know a more precise number such as those who look at vasts amount of time series data.

I agree to the average person it makes no difference whatsoever. The point i was making is i did a maths degree and even i had no clue about this (until yesterday). Now if it was taught it and i wasn't paying attention then it just shows how irrelevant most degrees are. If i wasn't taught this, then why wasn't i? Shouldn't a basic concept such as this be included even at Alevel (i did maths and physics).

getmore4less

economic wrote: »

That is what i meant by being a maths problem, to adjust for the actual days it takes to revolve around the sun.

The fact that we shouldn't care as 365.25 days a year is a good approx specially since most will be dead by 2100, is irrelevant.

Some people still would like to know a more precise number such as those who look at vasts amount of time series data.

I agree to the average person it makes no difference whatsoever. The point i was making is i did a maths degree and even i had no clue about this (until yesterday). Now if it was taught it and i wasn't paying attention then it just shows how irrelevant most degrees are. If i wasn't taught this, then why wasn't i? Shouldn't a basic concept such as this be included even at Alevel (i did maths and physics).

says more about your general level of education if you were unaware of this, as you say, basic concept.

it is taught much younger age around 7.
National curriculum Lower key stage 2(Y3).

economic

getmore4less wrote: »

says more about your general level of education if you were unaware of this, as you say, basic concept.

it is taught much younger age around 7.
National curriculum Lower key stage 2(Y3).

It proves nothing about my general level of education. It just proves a basic concept was either not taught or not taught enough to hammer into my head. As i said i was studious and I also have a very good long term memory. I am 99% sure i was not taught this at Alevel or GCSE.

Is it really taught at age 7? Maybe the concept of leap years and the wrong definition that it occurs every 4 years. But the actual definition of a leap year? I dont think it was/is.

[Deleted User]

Leap years are taught in Key Stage 2 maths (e.g. http://www.twinkl.co.uk/resource/t-he-254-leap-year-or-not-a-leap-year-activity-sheets)

So yes, that's between the age of 7 and 11.

I know i've explained the idea of leap years to my 8 year old, who hadn't covered it at school yet. Or wasn't listening

Why would you expect this to be covered in a university syllabus??

westernpromise

It's a planetary astronomy thing. It so happens that in the time taken to orbit the sun, the Earth spins 365.25-something times.

There is no astrophysical reason in fact why years are longer than days. One is transit around the Sun and the other is spins. If the Earth took 400 days to spin once, it would mean a day was longer than a year.

If the Earth were not tilted, I doubt we would even have the concept of years. The tilt gives rise to seasons and the spring/summer/autumn/winter/spring rotation is how we know a year has passed. If that seasonality didn't exist, we wouldn't notice years, and we'd have to base our idea of longer periods of time on something else. Eventually we'd have pointed a telescope at the sky and inferred that we orbit our sun over some period, but it would be far from obvious until then.

If the tilt were greater so that one pole always pointed at the sun and the other away, there'd be a hot side and a cold side and envy monkeys from the cold side would want taxes on the rich side. In a way, we have this now. We have part of the country (London and the South-East) pointing towards the money; and we have everyone else - poverty-stricken, envious and frequently rather ugly as a result.

This is why I suspect we are constructively alone in the universe. One of the terms missing from the Drake Equation is whether a technologically advanced civilisation would evolve socialism. If it did, it would never look up at the stars but would instead be looking down wholly preoccupied with lowering the overall level of advancement so that everyone was equally destitute.

It's a depressing thought that if Voyager is ever encountered by aliens, they may well be little green men like Arklight or Moby: little because they're lefties, green with envy of our better planet, and not really men at all.

getmore4less

Now everyone is upto speed on leap years we can move onto leap seconds.