Mar 21

Written by:
3/21/2010 9:32 AM 

This morning my wife and I discussed arithmetic. I’d tossed a book on sets and the new math, she’d read about fibonacci numbers, and then of course there is Richard Feynman and his reverence for time as in you cannot count it. Mainly I was thinking about a granddaughter who dislikes “math”, as in a class where you have to do decimals. So I quoted a brother who has pointed out that base ten is not the only scheme for writing down a number. There is for example the binary scheme in which a hundred years would be written 0010011. Wow, just think of a people with one finger on each hand that marked a century with oooneoooneone! Gimme five, for heaven’s sake. And what would the “fifties” be called? Well, okay, the point is that counting with base ten may be as natural as the nose on your face, but it’s entirely arbitrary: take away those two god-given fives and who knows what scheme would evolve for writing a number. Let that sink in a while, good menwomen of Vashon, and then let me remind Fox News and all its bigoted chickens that it was the Moslems who introduced the zero into numerical notation. ‘twasn’t the Greeks, nor the Italians, ‘twas the Moslems. Without that zero, nada centuries, nada decades, nada Beach Boys. Let those in the White House, the Pentagon, and Congress be reminded that in trashing Iraq they have trashed the birthplace of civilization. May the lot roast in the embers of what they have wrought.