Why we learn

      I often have conversations with people where I get told my facts are useless and that no one would ever need to know them. People always ask when they will ever use what they learn at school. This bugs me. You see, there are two types of people (actually there are 6,903,900,000 types of people right now, but let's not be pedantic): the applied and the pure. Someone who is more interested in the applied side of information thinks "How can I use what I learn in my day to day life?" Someone with a pure take on the world, which is what I tend to be, thinks "What can I learn from my day to day life?" This difference in objectives is most prominent in subjects such as maths. Trying to convince an applied scientist that it is important to solve Fermat's Last Theorem or Goldbach's Conjecture is typically an exercise in futility as they try and work out why we would ever need them.
      I'm not entirely sure where I'm going with this to be honest, it's just been on my mind for a while as I've been trying to work out how to use the second derivative of a cubic function to find the roots. Which is the kind of thing applied scientists tend to not get, as it is somewhat pointless. Especially as I could just find out by googling it. That is, if it's possible. Otherwise I'm going to be wasting quite a bit of time on nothing for the next couple of weeks.
      Anyway, hopefully next weeks post will be better, bye.