On Wed, Feb 23, 2011 at 02:06:50PM -0500, [email protected] wrote:
>
> Ben,
>
> Well, there you go. I should have known better.
Norm, you grew up in a country where technological progress is mostly
driven by competition, while I grew up in one where it was doled out at
a rate determined by social policies. There was no reason for you to
know anything about it - while I had excellent motivation for knowing
those fine little details. Yours was a completely reasonable question;
it's probably the most common one that people have the first time they
look at an abacus. As you've seen, the answer is not so obvious that it
can just be intuited from looking at the thing.
> Thank you for your detailed response to my little message.
Thanks for the question! I had fun recalling all that stuff, and
actually had to go and look up a few of the proper terms ("abacist" and
the plural of "abacus" - which a lot of people disagree on anyway.) It
was also rather nifty recalling the "shortcut" motions as I was writing
about them; '7 + 8', for example, is a neat little flip of the fingers
that sets them _and_ adds them, almost in one shot (well, it's two
motions really, but they flow right into each other.)
> I had only seen the abacus used for adding up my bill at the check-out desk
> of Chinese restaurants. Should have known it was far more involved than
> that.
I never got to doing cube roots or vector calculations with them, but -
yep, all doable. In fact, while looking up the spellings and such, I ran
across this:
Forbes.com editors and a panel of experts rank the abacus as
the second most important tool of all time, in terms of its impact on
human civilization:
http://www.forbes.com/2005/08/30/technology-calculators-abacus_cx_de_0830abacus.html
> >From time to time I have seen races between the abacus and an electronic
> calculator, but these have always been "fixed" races with adept abacus
> users and clumsy adding machine operators so I have taken the claims of
> greater speed with the abacus with a grain (or more) of salt.
Yeah, people like to emphasize by cheating on that kind of thing. I find
that rather annoying, since it's not necessary. OK, the difference is
small... so what? It's a 2,000 year old gadget against an electronic
"marvel" that wasn't even possible 50 years ago. The fact that they're
even close, or within the same order of magnitude, is the mind-blowing
fact - not that one is "much" faster than the other.
Ben
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