Frank’s personal memoir of Yallourn tech and his life spent at ‘Camp Rolfe’ (Yuendumu) was adapted by Hollywood into a cinema classic.
From Frank of the North-West Frontier.
Another fascinating insight into the power of metrics. Good thing we say the Americans haven’t been seduced by the metric system and have stayed pure with the old imperial system. It makes perfect sense as the Imperial system is what made empires GRATE!
In this episode Frank casts a half-light upon measurements, and why it’s important to keep measuring things, cos if you don’t you run the risk of losing your school-teacher. They’re rarer than Diprotodon’s in the outback, and possibly as adapted to a remote, outback kinda environment.
Frank writes;
Guten Tag Freunden,
The Science Wing at Yallourn Technical College.
Not sure if I ever told you about when I did night classes in ‘Scientific German’ at Yallourn Technical College. All we had to do was translate German scientific articles into English with the help of a dictionary. The class would take it in turns to read and translate paragraphs. The textbook had chapters on various disciplines. The biology chapter dealt with the atrophying of Körperorgane by underuse. When the organ eventually fell off, the class collapsed into uncontrolled hilarity. Ah, to be young and silly again.
Atrophying isn’t confined to body parts. My knowledge of calculus has met the same fate as the tool in the Scientific German textbook.
I’m not one of those who dismissed mathematics as useless and not worth learning. On the contrary, the minimal mathematical knowledge I eagerly acquired has served me well.
I cannot listen to a politician abusing statistics without almost instantly detecting the insult to my intelligence and the intelligence of others who have the misfortune of listening to his/her drivel.
I’ve never had a problem with the knowledge that the odds of flipping six heads in a row are 1 in 64 and neither that the counterintuitive odds of flipping a sixth tail after having flipped five tails are 50:50.
Yallourn Tech. In the olden days, before it was dug up.
So when the sealing of the Tanami Road commenced with a 90 Km stretch, to be followed by 30Km a few years later and a subsequent 10km, I thought that we were dealing with a geometric progression which could be expressed as a calculus formula. Derivative? Integral?
The next stretch of sealing would be 3Km followed by 1Km, then 300 metres, 100 metres and so forth, never reaching Yuendumu, ever.
In the olden days Yallourn Teachers experimented with Coal-powered vehicles. Seen here a prototype being tested.
I had already worked out that the NT funding of schools method (based on attendance rather than enrolment) was a downward spiral, when an article appeared in the ABC online NT news in which figures obtained by Independent Arnhem Land MLA Yingiya Guyula reveal that out of 15 remote schools listed, Yuendumu School suffered the highest percentage drop in funding. In 2022 Yuendumu school funding had dropped 27% from $3.7M to $2.7M.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-11-16/nt-remote-education-funding-effective-enrolment/101517962
Recently Yuendumu School lost two Kardiya teachers. This is how it works, attendance drops, when the school needs more resources to attract students back to school, it receives less funding, and attendance drops, thus fund allocation drops, ability to attract students drops. Anyway, you get the picture. I am sure mathematicians can express this as a mathematical formula.
Bis zum nächsten Mal
Frank
As a student, young Frank excelled in algebra and trigonometry
Multiplication (Bobby Darin):