A challenge and a half

Written by eklastic

Since I don’t have a cardinal (butterfly) nor a cardinal (bird) no even a Roman catholic cardinal (although I played a 1/2 one once) on file, I turned to cardinals aka 1,2,3 … or so I thought. But I looked at cardinal numbers (instead of numerals) and fell into a rabbit hole of my own private hell, aka mathematics. Apparently, cardinal numerals are the words we use to count things, but cardinal numbers … well, I have the equivalent of an A-level in maths but I don’t remember a darn thing about it from 50 years ago, I barely remember the expressions like logarithm to the base of ten, analytical geometry, binomial distribution, etc. but not even the littliest thing about their meaning. I started to hyperventilate when I looked at the wikipedia article on cardinal numbers. Fortunately, my cat jumped on my desk and lay on my keyboard and mouse and rescued me.

And for this guy and other cartoon characters it must be a real challenge to count on their fingers using the octal system. Almost as difficult as using the imperial system.

Ragtag Daily Prompt: Cardinal

14 thoughts on “A challenge and a half”

      1. The scary thing is that event though I was never good at maths I must have had a rudimentary understanding of the concepts when I passed the A-level. And now it is all gone.

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      3. I went to a math-orientated highschool. To this day I don’t know how I survived. But it was the highschool in our vicinity that started with English and then French as foreign languages. The alternative would have been Latin then English then French. My parents were worried that if I didn’t survive the first two years I’d have to go to a lower form of school where they invariably start with English and I’d be two years behind (and having learned “useless Latin”). So maths it was.

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      4. Useless Latin eh? My mother was a Latin teacher, and while I can’t say I enjoyed it, I’m glad to have learnt it, as I’m sure it helped later with Italian, French, Spanish etc.

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      7. My father was generally against higher education (he considered them snobs). I think he would have been the same with boys. But he was able to learn. My oldest sister just had 8 years of standard school, plus one year of secretarial college. My next sister wento to school for 10 years and left with what is considered a “medium” certificate in Germany. And I was allowed to go the highest form of school (my sisters fought for me) and then I could go to university.

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