|
Bill Butler
SOME MORE SERIOUS SENIOR STUFF: THE UPSIDES AND DOWNSIDES OF CRITICAL-THINKING
Would you like to hear what seniors have to endure sometimes? Today I went for my annual physical 10-miles across town at the urgent care clinic. I was driving on a 2-lane gravel road with a speed limit of 55-mph behind a dump truck that had a sign on the rear gate that said: STAY BACK 200 FEET – NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR ACCIDENTS. I thought, “Really? Why am I paying for liability insurance if all I have to do is get one of these signs! Yeah, just tell the world you are NOT responsible for anything. Cool! Then my senior critical-thinking mindset came into focus (see previous post on why seniors can always outsmart younger dudes) and I realized that 200-feet is 20-car lengths.
So, being the responsible law-abiding senior that I am, I slowed down and got my 200-foot distance, but the parade of drivers behind me started honking, giving me the middle-finger salute, and shouting obscenities. Then I noted that rocks were hitting my windshield! Oh crud! This is my wife’s car and she’ll kill me! That’s when I got mad and pulled out my calculator. I sped up and got in front of that dump truck and began slowing it down. You can plainly see that this is going to become a road rage incident, but I had my trusty calculator and defense ready for any scenario… so I thought.
The dump truck pulled over as did I. We exited our vehicles and with arms waving began yelling. I said, “OK you dump trucker (well, it probably didn’t sound like that!), you may be bigger, stronger, faster, meaner, and younger than I, but you clucker are dumber. When you were going 54-mph (80-ft./sec.) your rear tires were throwing rocks at a 45-deg. angle back at my car. According to a law of motion for all launched projectiles, the distance those rocks travel is equal to velocity squared divided by the acceleration of gravity (32-ft./sec.2) times 2 times the sine of theta (45-deg.) times the cosine of theta (45-deg.). If you played golf, you’d know that! Therefore you ultra-stupid imbecile, you were chucking rocks that came down exactly 200 feet behind you. You probably own a windshield replacement business, right? Hey, my insurance company can beat up your insurance company!” I continued.
“Any brain-dead idiot and retarded piss-ant with a frontal lobotomy would know that if you were going 60-mph (88-ft./sec.), you would be throwing rocks 242-ft. behind you over the top of my car. Didn’t you learn anything in high-school driver ed, dimwit? It’s so basic you simpleton! I’ve even purposely left out the air resistance factor plus the Coriolis force affecting all moving objects on a uniformly rotating spherical frame of reference, …and, and, and ah, the mass isn’t even needed to calculate this, and, and, and ah, your ugly old dump truck needs mud-flaps, OK!!” I continued.
“Any senior like me knows that driving 121-feet behind a truck going 60-mph will be in the most protected space under the apex of the parabolic curve. Finally, you nauseating nincompoop, my car is moving at 54-mph so the kinetic energy, i.e., the ability to do work, of the rock impacts is found by the formula: KE=(.5)mv2, where m is mass and v is velocity…. and please note, dummkopf, that velocity is squared which makes it a huge number. You wanna borrow my calculator to figure it out, huh?” The truck driver muttered something about smart aleck, bass turds, and butthead; then I blacked out and regained consciousness at the urgent care clinic.
OK, so, I arrived at the doctor’s office for my physical 30-min. late. She said, “Mr. Butler, it’s nice to see you here at my practice, but for God’s sake, how did you get the black eye, broken nose, and missing teeth… they’re all very recent?! And may I suggest that you wear a face shield on your motorcycle helmet because those impact scars are looking pretty bad.” I said, “Gee, doc, I musta fell out of bed this morning, then tripped over my cat, then stepped on a rake. I can’t recall, but I’m fine. I’m good. No dementia. Nooo problemo! But heck, doc, I want the real medical thing – don’t just practice on me. Is that too much to ask?”
The doctor checked my vitals and reflexes and asked a bunch of dumb questions, then said, “I want you to remember these three words. In 15-minutes I will ask you what they are -- flower, dog, sun.” I said, “Hey, this is suppose to be a physical exam; it’s not fair, I would have studied for a mental eval! Do I get a handicap for pop quizzes, and do you grade on a curve, and do guesses get penalized? And why are you mumbling irrelevant random words like flour, fog, and son? This is getting expensive and cutting into my nap time so can we just speed things up?”
Doc said, “Mr. Butler, I have good and bad news. With your hair and teeth implants, your heart and liver transplants, your elbow and knee surgeries, your glass eye, your hip replacement, the botox treatments, and the titanium plates and screws in your bones it all figures out to an updated body age of 47-years. The bad news is that your driver’s license is no longer valid with your 1944 DOB and I can’t let you drive home.”
Then Doc gave me pen and paper, “Draw a clock, but don’t cheat by looking at your Mickey Mouse watch”, she ordered. I said, “Sure thing Doc, an atomic clock, e.g., uranium 238, has 92 protons and 146 neutrons and 92 electrons; it’s a radioactive isotope with a decay half-life of 4.5-billion years; those electron energy shells are hard to draw so it’ll take me awhile.” Doc said, “Forget that clock, now start over.” So I drew a 3-minute egg timer with grains falling from the top funnel to the bottom funnel. I began calculating the volume of a cone and the rate of 1/16-mm-diameter sand grains falling through the 0.064-mm diameter orifice. I said, “Hey Doc, do you know what the cohesion factor and angle of repose is for very fine sand?” Doc said to start over again. I said, “Can I do a sundial?” She said, “NO!!” I replied, “Why didn’t you say you wanted a plain old analog clock? I was ready to draw a digital clock with a binary microprocessor, but the mechanism is so small you wouldn’t know what it was.”
Doc said in utter exasperation, “Here’s your last 2 mental tests. Science tells us that music, sex, chocolate, golf, and cool motorcycles all stimulate the exact same part of our brains, so how many different combinations are there for any two of these which will excite our sympathetic nervous system and put us into wild ecstatic elated exuberant overdrive? Any three will put you into cardiac arrest so we’ll limit it. And by the way, what were those 3 words you were suppose to remember?”
I said, “these-three-words.” Doc said, “Very interesting, har har! Touche’! Hey, wisenheimer, I’m trying to decide if you’re a danger to yourself and society, or just a smart aleck who suffers from insanity.” I said, “Doc, no suffering here! I enjoy every minute of it; please cut me some slack, I’m a savvy senior in critical-thinking mode! And the answer to your logic question is given by the formula: C=N!/r!(N-r)!, where N=5, r=2, and ! is factorial. Hence, C=5!/2!(3)! = 120/2x6 =10.”
I finished by saying, “Am I right, Doc? You wanna use my calculator and see my high school diploma? By the way, do you have any Curium 247 with 96 protons and 151 neutrons for my headache? And my bumper sticker says: SENIORS ROCK! – Stay Back 121 feet!” 
|
