Everyday Math for 2-20-09

My older son has Type 1 (juvenile) Diabetes. Because of that we need to know how many grams of carbohydrates there are in the food he is eating.

Sometimes that is easy - the package will tell you that one bagel is 50 grams of carbohydrates. But other times it says that the serving size is 1/5 or whatever of the whole thing (like pizza). Often times it isn't very convenient to cut it into the number of pieces they want us to. Pizza is a good example - who wants to cut a pizza into 5 pieces? Eight is MUCH easier.

So tonight we had brownies from a box. We didn't cut it into 20 pieces like they wanted but rather 8. But we still needed to know how many grams of carbohydrates there were in each larger serving.

This is pretty straight forward. Multiply 20 pieces by 23 grams per piece to get 460 grams for the whole thing. Now we just divide 460 grams by 8 pieces to get 57 grams of carbohydrates per piece. We also divide that by 15 to get the number of carb exchanges. 4 in this case, which is a lot for such a little thing - but it is all sugar and flour.

German Engineering at its smallest (sort of)

Germans make really cool model trains.

This one is from 1959.

The locomotive has lots of small intricate pieces/details.

The locomotive is a Marklin 3003 (BR 24).

What Every Woman Should Know About Home Computers

This article came with a Commodore 64 I picked up at a garage sale. Judging from the computers in the pictures, it must date frome the early to mid 80's. The actual article was a bit disappointing - too straight forward and factual. It does have some interesting insight into the olden days.

It looks like the photographer and models didn't know much about computers. What is the girl looking at? The TV might be off to make it easier to take the picture. To be fair, the Adam did work like a fancy electric typewriter in its default mode

You can find out more about the Coleco Adam Computer here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coleco_Adam


This is from the last couple of paragraphs one this page:

Memory is measured in terms of kilobytes (K). Every kilobyte is equal to 1,024 characters - a character being a letter, numeral, punctuation mark, or space. If a computer has 32K RAM that means it can temporarily store 32,738 characters or about 22 pages of double-space typewriter type.

Computers come with as little as 1K, as much as 64K, and MORE; additional memory can often be added.

I don't think most kids today know what a Kilobyte is anymore.

Pictured is a Timex Sinclair 1000 and Coleco Adam Computer System.