this post was submitted on 07 Oct 2026
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Showerthoughts
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:
- Both “200” and “160” are 2 minutes in microwave math
- When you’re a kid, you don’t realize you’re also watching your mom and dad grow up.
- More dreams have been destroyed by alarm clocks than anything else
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Don't forget "you need to be good at math if you want to work with computers."
I never heard that one. No one gave a crap about computers at all.
They told us that for nursing school then it was all middle school level ratio and proportion (admittedly with multiple ratio steps like when you've ratioed the right volume of the dose but then you need to convert that to the gtt of your drip kit). The only real equations needed were three (maybe I'm forgetting one) that you could just memorize for the week then forget again until next semester. Two were °F to °C / °C to °F with one inverted ratio +/- the constant. The other one was BSA with two variables but you don't have to solve for one or the other they're both just measurements you get from the patient and plug in.
...but then you realize that the only acceptable score on that test is a 100% (some programs will drop you if you get anything less than a 100% on the drug dose test after two tries) and that what nursing school is actually looking for is both accuracy and precision. You're doing a relatively basic but fundamentally logical, and more importantly highly repetitive puzzle 25 times in a row in an hour and if you make even one error you fail. I had to create a whole specific mental technique to beat my ADHD into submission enough to 100% that test (honestly half of what nursing school taught me was ultimately ADHD / attention management techniques, which it turns out is actually also most of being a nurse). Like the EMR does basically all of the math these days but being aware of where my attention is and why and how to nudge it where it needs to be has been suuuper useful.
Edit: BMI! That was the equation I was forgetting about. Weirdly it's mostly useful in population health but also if you're under a certain BMI on admission the EMR starts suggesting a diet consult every time I open that chart until I either document a reason to permanently override it or just put in the consult so that the dietician can immediately decide whether or not to start loading them full of protein shakes. Really important for the seniors if they go into the hospital with 0 chub they're probably not coming back out alive.
I run into less and less F these days, thank god. Worst conversion factor ever.
Hmm... I think it was something like, "you need to be good at math if you want to be a computer programmer", and in some ways that remains true.
I mean, you don't need to be good at your times tables to learn javascript, but there are lots of transferable skills.
I'm playing around with some Geospatial data stuff presently, and the math involved is about as complex as it gets, but you don't really need to do the math just playing around with the data.
That seems like a more recent development. I think at least another generation and a half got in before that
Yeah, I (a millennial) experienced the no calculator era, but I have no recollection of people talking about needing to be good at math to use a computer.
But, I fell like that would be more accurate in the 80s and early 90s when PCs were just becoming a thing.
Mostly true. I have actually used some calculus (derivatives and integrals) to write some interesting queries for Prometheus metrics.
But that's pretty niche.
A friend of mine built an interactive card-flipping in, I don't know, I think silverlight back in the day, and did all the 3D computation manually. While I stared at him in disbelief.
I think that was somewhere around 2010?
I certainly remember the needing to be good at math to get into computers. Same with needing to be good at math to get into science. Let me tell you, the majority of scientists I work with are dogshit at math.
Logic, or understanding math.