On Mon, Nov 03, 2003 at 09:30:37PM -0800, T. Joseph Carter wrote:
>
>On Mon, Nov 03, 2003 at 02:45:21PM -0800, Maximillian Von Schwanekamp wrote:
>> >>"don't accept domestic donatinos"... WTF?
>>
>> Actually, they don't "DO" domestic donations. That is, they accept
>> donations (from G3's to "tachyon-based equipment" to "wireless
>> abacuses") from domestic sources but donate to folks in other countries.
>
>What could would be a wireless abacus? What else are you going to slide
>beads across? String maybe?
>
The original abacus ( < Greek "abax" = "board" ) was a flat area with a grid
marked on it, together with some loose beads or pebbles (calculi). You
move the pebbles into different grid areas to represent different values.
The bead-frame was introduced for portability reasons, but later
implementations in the seven-beads-per-column series support some nifty
shortcuts in division, as well as allowing faster finger motion over the
beads, as it is harder to push rail-mounted beads into the wrong column.
On the other hand, the loose-beads-on-a-plane models support arbitrary
relationships between columns (this is why the odd conversions between
classical measurement units of diffrent orders, and particularly the
asymmetric progression of English coinage, was supported as long as it was;
with a little practice the transitions across the abacus are easy).
I suspect it is no accident that Chinese traditional measurements tend
to follow base-ten progressions, while at the same time China was the
first culture to standardise on the bead-frame abacus. In the West
the killer app that drove standardization on base-ten and algorithmic
( = written out) arithmetic was bookkeeping; with abacus arithmetic
the bookkeeper would first enter the records, then calculate on the abacus,
then enter the results, but with algorithm he could calculate directly
in the ledger, saving a context switch and leaving an audit trail.
--
.
...
..... <-- Grains of mysterious beige powder
.......
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