First, let me get this out of the way: "Hi, my name is Liz, and I watch Survivor." And yes, dad, I know -- it's all filmed in LA and the winner is picked out ahead of time. Whatever.
So I was watching Thursday night's Survivor online today (I believe I had surrendered control of the tv that night to let Wes watch a basketball game. When your husband's on call every third night, you do that for him.) In this week's immunity challenge, the contestants had to go through an obstacle course, memorize a series of mathematical functions, plug them into blanks on a slate, and calculate the result based on the numbers provided to them. The problem is, whoever set up the game forgot PEMDAS -- you know, Please excuse my dear Aunt Sally, the order of operations (not to be confused with King Henry died Monday drinking chocolate milk, which is the mnemonic for the metric system). The calculation began 6 -2 / 4... According to the order of operations, you would divide 2 /4 before subtracting the difference from six.
I've Googled this to see that others noticed the same thing. There's some discussion as to whether this was clarified in a pre-challenge Q&A session. But still -- what kind of message does it send our children, our future mathematicians, if Survivor doesn't follow basic rules of math? If you can't use your math knowledge in the wilds of Brazil, where can you?
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