Math?
Maths!
When someone says that math makes their head hurt, they may not be speaking metaphorically. A new study has shown that math anxiety can cause actual, physical pain. "We show that, when anticipating an upcoming math-task," the researchers explain, "the higher one's math anxiety, the more one increases activity in regions …
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I hope they randomized the "yellow triangle == math, blue square == words" association across their subjects, as it is common knowledge that the colour yellow, and yellow triangles in particular, mean *warning* for many people, which could skew the results if consistently used for one or the other.
Reminds me for some strange reason of the story of John von Neumann being at a party and being asked to solve a fairly simple mathematical puzzle. Two trains are travelling towards each other at a certain relative velocity and a fly is doing laps between the closest points of both trains, again at its own (faster) speed. The puzzle was to find out how far the fly would have flown before the trains collided. Our computer-related guy thinks for a moment and then gives the right answer, and the questioner is amazed that he got the answer so quickly and comments that most people try to work out the sum of the series (legs) of the fly's flight. Slightly embarrassed, Mr. Computer has to admit that that's how he solved it ...
the distance it has flown before the trains collided would have been the initial distance between the trains times the ratio of the fly's speed over the trains' closure speed
Or, put more simply: it is trivial to figure out Δt (the time that elapses before the trains collide), since the trains have constant velocity. That's also the fly's Δt, because it stops flying when the trains collide. And the fly is assumed to travel at constant speed (and velocity is constant except for a reversal of sign, which is irrelevant to the problem). So the distance is just the fly's speed times Δt. If you have the numbers it's easy to do in your head.[1]
Incidentally, the story as reported in some sources (possibly Poundstone's Prisoner's Dilemma) has JvN puzzled (not "embarrassed", per the OP) that anyone would bother solving the problem using any approach other than summing the series. That sounds more plausible to me; I can't see JvN being embarrassed by others' failings.
[1] If you're math-anxious, don't think about this. Don't think about it!
...or are merely buzzword-deficient. 'The Short Math Anxiety Rating-Scale (SMARS)?" Couldn't they have called it the Short Math Anxiety Rating-Tabulation (SMART)?
BTW, since this was an American study, the use of 'math' would be how they termed the activity. Do we really need to translate from English to English for Brits?
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