So aerobic bacteria are the mafia, basically.
And yet I get in trouble for saying that.
I have a really hard time understanding general reasoning without having worked through examples. I can't do any of these calculations.
OP.Heebie: I rarely break out a pencil for casual math papers, particularly when I'm just skimming for interest, or to see what's going on. But when a formula's adjusted for column strength (or any other thing affecting my day job as an engineer), I always want to work the problem longhand at least once, so I can get a feel for magnitudes and complexity. That way I can catch people who trust their spreadsheet or design software, but don't understand the impact of a release, point of fixity, slenderness, or a foot increase in column height.
I topped out mathwise, among other ways I suppose, at around the end of ninth grade. I kept taking math, and even did ok-ish, but none of it stuck. Turns out you can have a reasonable adult life without a lot of it.
No, I don't read math papers.
3 is funny!
On Heebie's take: when I read a paper with equations, I skip the equations. I am in a pickle this spring, trying to master...no, not master, trying to get a glimmer of understanding about some statistical approaches to calculating mortality (in some birds I study), and as I work through the 1200 page ironically-named "gentle introduction" to the software package that does this stuff, I skip two pages full of equations, a dozen pages, 20 pages at a time. Because I do not have time to learn/relearn matrix algebra and differential equations and whatever else is going on in there. Do I? Like CharleyCarp, I have had a pretty good career relying on 9th grade math, at which I remain competent. Faced with the tougher stuff I've got nothing. I remain interested about how others deal with it.
Like Heebie I have no insecurities about biology, though.
What package, if I'm not being too nosy.
Program MARK, for analysis of mark-recapture data.
I guess it depends what you mean by "casual math," but I pretty much always work stuff out. If it's sufficiently non-computative, that might be in my head. This is a weakness of mine (I originally wrote "weakness of mind," that too), that I don't have a good intuition for when I can just gloss over stuff.
Most recent minor fascination: the Weak Law of Large Numbers is a trivial application of Chebyshev's Inequality, which is a trivial specialization of Markov's Inequality. Which itself is just trivial. Since the Law of Large Numbers is super important in terms of letting probability correspond to our intuitions, that's kind of mind blowing to me. Yes, I had to work out each step.
Do you know the Law of Small Numbers? (The math joke, not the econ phenomenon that is turning up on google.)
11: The originator of that died last month (not Gardner, the other Guy.). Presumably not related to the current unpleasantness.. But he lived to 103, which is, for these purposes, quite a large number.
I can't find online the formulation of it that always makes me laugh, but I've heard it for proofs where you just need to check a few cases as "The law of Small Numbers is that there just aren't that many of them."
Yay MARK! What kind of bird, if you don't mind sharing?
hydrobatidae: Loggerhead Shrikes. Bothering them is how I spent my morning (and a majority of mornings lately). "Yay MARK?"
I've been wanting to do MARK since I learned it for a class in my PhD. Almost got to try it on eels but left that job. Hoping for something else at my next job.
Love shrikes. Sounds like fun fieldwork
At this point, I'm mostly amused that there is apparently a book called, "Mark, A Gentle Introduction."
Hydrobatidae, what you really need in order to scratch that itch is to coauthor a paper on Loggerhead Shrikes. I mean, it just seems obvious. "Job," pshaw.
Shrike fieldwork is fun usually but one of them just *punished* me as I took her out of a mist net this morning. Probably 40 powerful bites. And I didn't even want to catch her, it was her mate I was after, and he just looked at me mockingly. Shrikes: 1, Chill:-50.