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Palm OS Wristwatch
countach writes "Amazon are taking orders for a new Palm OS Wrist Watch. It has an infra-red port, touch screen, back-light, stylus and 2MB of RAM. Price is $US 295.00." Because sometimes you don't look nerdy enough ;)
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I already have a dandy of a time just keeping the crystal of my little Seiko from getting scratched up, how am I gonna manage to keep a touch screen safe on my wrist? Not to mention incidental pushing of the on-screen buttons. I know these are relativly logistical concerns, but these things could prove annoying...
http://images.amazon.com/images/P/B00009QR9X.01.LZ ZZZZZZ.jpg
Would you wear one of these? Its huge and the screen looks like it escaped from the 1980's.
There have been watches that allow syncing with PIMs for years (equally ugly). The MS SPOT watches look more interesting with their GRPS internet connectivity.
In this day and age they could have used OLED technology to make the face colour and themeable, so you could download nice different facias off the net when you felt like a change.
There is no god
So you are saying that you can't understand math if you use a calculator?
Nope. I say that the learning process is better if you learn how to do it first without a calculator.
I would say that it would be easier to learn, or at least grade math when calculators are used.
And I'd say (snarkily) that you've never taught math.
Think about it; if what you are really after is getting your students to understand the concepts, then why dissallow calculators that prevent them from getting incorrect answers from arithmatic errors ('oops, forgot to carry the 2' or some shit).
The point of learning something is to master it. In the grand scheme of things learning the fundamentals of math and futzing up an answer here or there due to an arithmetic error is exponentially better than *not* knowing fundaments and relying on your calculator for everything. Teaching math also means teaching how to think logically, how to understand the underlying principals so you can apply them to other situations than the ones presented in your homework.
For instance I also taught calculus. Whole chapters were devoted to graphing equations using maxima, minima and inflection points. Now, some kids wanted to use their graphing calculator to come up with the answers (and undoubtedly did when they did their homework), but they screwed themselves in the long run. Why? Because the point of graphing 40 equations wasn't to make pretty pictures, it was to drill the student in taking first and second derivatives, finding local maxima and minima, etc. Those who took the easy way out using their calculators were royally fucked when in the next section you had to apply those newly taught skills to solve minimization problems.