On Tue, Feb 22, 2011 at 04:33:43PM -0500, Steve Weinstein wrote:
> Wow! Between you, Ben, and Norm and others I had no idea that the mere
> mention of "Abacus" would start a whole 'nuther thread! I'm sitting here in
> frozen NYC (about 19 as the 'high' overnight!!) and laughing my butt off!
Oh - I was just in NYC a little while ago. We pass like ships in the
night. :)
> I mentioned the abacus originally 'cause I was having a really bad
> 'technology' day. I was ready to toss the computer out my 8th floor
> apartment window and then calmed down, researched my issue (a mis-behaving
> program), took a (admittedly bundled up) walk with the dog, and came back in
> a much calmer state of mind.
That's a good time to remind yourself that abaci beat computers at input
speed, a handful of uncooked spaghetti beats them all hollow at sorting
algorithms (just rap the whole thing lightly, one end down, and it's all
sorted by length), and a rubber band plus some stick pins can solve the
Travelling Salesman problem in one snap while the poor computer will
struggle endlessly. *We're* the ones with the brains, dammit! :)))
> Having said that, I don't ever think I've actually seen an abacus. There
> were already "adding machines" when I was a kid in the '50s although they
> were huge and weighed many, many pounds!
Right... the only place I've seen those (IBM tabulators, as I recall)
was in a museum of computing, somewhere in California. They also had a
mechanical computer that used a beautifully shaped cam for integration;
just great stuff, branches of development we ended up not following
because electrons were so much easier to juggle.
> Anyway, just thought I'd chime in and say thanks, I learned something today
> about an abacus! Maybe I'll try to find one and learn how to use it and
> develop "mental math" - although having survived the '60s I'm not sure how
> much mental capacity I've actually got left!
Oh, boy. You're going to have fun. :) Some people actually discover that
they enjoy math once a physical component has been added to it. Besides,
it's a neat skill: many operations have "speed" variations, and can be
done with a reduced number of hand motions. A good abacist doing a long
problem looks like he's playing a small one-handed piano, and sounds
like castanets. ;)
Ben
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