Several years ago — OK, it was a long, long time ago — I was attending college as a non-traditional student, finishing up my degree while working full-time. George Herbert Walker Bush was the president of the United States, and Al Gore was a United States Senator who hadn’t invented the internet yet.
One of the classes I was in was college algebra. It was the first college class I had ever taken that required a calculator—the only calculator I had used in high school had been a slide rule.
The airhead I was sitting behind struggled to get the answers and kept asking the professor how to do the calculations for the problems on the blackboard.
Exasperated, the professor finally asked, “What kind of calculator do you have? It’s supposed to be a scientific calculator.”
The airhead replied, “Well, of course it’s scientific — it’s a solar calculator!”
Odds & Ends 013
