(Totally) mental arithmetic
I love doing mental arithmetic. I guess it comes from doing ‘times tables’ at primary school every morning where the whole class would run through a given table (e.g. 1×2 =2, 2×2 =4, 3×2 =6, etc.). One of the (many) good things about the Scottish schooling system (although there were many bad ones also).
I often do calculations on things such as the number of people carried by a train (in the case this morning a 12 carriage). This mornings problem made me realise that I am pretty cold when it comes to people en masse:
“I wonder how much revenue First Capital Connect would loose if this packed commuter train crashed and everyone died”
I then realised how morbid that thought was, I haven’t done the calculation.