Interesting. During the summer between college and grad school, I worked in a public park in St. Louis and one day we had to paint a crosswalk. The older guys,

Interesting. During the summer between college and grad school, I worked in a public park in St. Louis and one day we had to paint a crosswalk. The older guys, who had high school degrees (if that) tasked me with figuring out the distance between stripes, which proved surprisingly complicated. The stripes needed to be evenly spaced and uniform in size. Lacking a calculator (no mobile phones in those days) and armed only with a tape measure, a pencil and a piece of paper, I thus managed to chalk out evenly spaced stripes which they proceeded to paint more or less as described in the article. I came away with renewed respect for people who did this type of work. It also drove home just how important the maths are even in manual labor. Nothing good can come of dumbing down math education in secondary schools.