80% of people don't use mathematics

England is a nation of shopkeepers.

Napoleon Bonaparte

Chatting to a (teaching) colleague the other day I was rather stunned to hear him expound that as a nation we spend way too much time teaching the hard stuff like mathematics, and we should be doing more in the Arts instead.

He remarked that "80% of people don't use mathematics".  Oh the irony of using percentages to "prove" this particular point!  And I must admit I love the random amount of 80%.  It reminds me of an old mathematics joke: "34.78% of statistics are made up on the spot".

Another STEM colleague opined that we shouldn't be attempting to teach the little ones coding because we needed more tradies in Hobart.  Cough, splutter!  He reckons that we can always import our coders from overseas.  Apart from the long term problem of importing increasingly technical goods and services, and only having rocks to exchange for them, there is the niggling little fact that industry is crying out for more coders.  To the keyboards little ones!

On top of that little gem was more news in the SMH today that the big new thing in innovation is refitting a caravan used for food dispensing - you know, like my mates in College were doing in the early 1980s.  One such newly minted purveyor of culinary delights is an aerospace engineer.  Not much call for that in our third world agrarian economy we surmise.  One of our neighbours in Tasmania has quit his lecturing job in Health Sciences at UTAS to run a coffee van.  Apparently UTAS are lousy employers - who would have guessed that after hearing of Kym's experience banging her head up against the local numpties at said same formerly august institution.

Anyhoo, whilst we seem content to imitate the Old Dart back to the future and sell wares to each other at an increasingly frenzied rate, it was heartening to hear Annabel Crabb describe the Federal Parliament circus in these terms: "why are we endlessly searching for crazier hamsters when we could be redesigning the wheel itself?"  Good one Annabel, spot on as usual.

Down on the Hobart waterfront with Jonathan Livingston Seagull
doing some expert photo-bombing