A Slide Rule Close to Home

Daughter Monique used to be in the cement business. After she read the post on Calculating Instruments (two posts back), she found a slide rule that she’d kept as a memento when making the big leap into the publishing industry. She was kind enough to photograph it for me. Such calculators are obviously still in [...]

Sunday Shopping

Left at 2:30 in the afternoon, and my first stop was:

Why do we patronize Costco? Simple, my friends. This store radiates a down-to earth sanity, very good prices, a vast selection, and is altogether devoid of phony hype. What you see is what you get, and what you get is just fine–sometimes superb. Some things [...]

Quick Abacus Tutorial

Take a look at this picture of the Chinese abacus, also known as the suanpan. This picture is from Wikipedia’s article on the abacus, which also treats of many others. The picture shown depicts the number 6,302,715,408. Thus the right-most column is units and the left-most column is billions. If all the beads were away [...]

Calculating Instruments

I am a calculating sort of guy—which fact you’d never guess from the mediocre C’s I got in every mathematical department on up to and abruptly ending with Algebra. Calculus? Lord. I was a grown man with children before that subject even touched me and I began to trace its origins in Leibniz and Newton. [...]

Shredded Communications

A cooking show is on TV. There is the sound of meat broiling and spattering on the hot barbeque. The lovely red colors of a Japanese sauce blend as the wooden spoon makes its rounds in the white bowl. A scenic sun-drenched landscape forms the background. The chef is explaining the steps in the preparation [...]

Responsibility, Original Sin

Blisters of puss-filled fraud rupturing all over the place should remind us that it takes two to make a fraud succeed,  defrauder and fraudee, perp and victim—and that the oldest business proverb on record is LET THE BUYER BEWARE ; I know the age of this saying because it comes from the Latin (caveat emptor), [...]

Stern Words versus Stern Votes

The powers of the president are limited in significant ways. He can make generals or bureaucrats do his bidding, but he can’t declare war and, under the War Powers Resolution, cannot even deploy troops for longer than  sixty days without Congressional approval. He can sign bills into law—or not. If not, he can be overridden. [...]

Budget Shortfall Parachute? Why Not PSPI?

Having effectively suggested that he is a super-rich entrepreneur, the man says to the woman on the barstool next to his: “Would you go to bed with me for five hundred thousand dollars?” She hesitates, smiles, nods, and snuggles up to him. He puts his arm around her and says: “How about for fifty bucks?” [...]

Beagle Haikus

Do you own a Beagle? Do you know what a Beagle is? A Beagle is a dog classified as a member of the Hound Group. The Hound Group? Well, there are many different, distinct, and famous breeds, not least Afghan, Basset, Blood, Dachs, Bluetick, Otter, Deer, and Wolf hounds. Per Wikipedia here, there are 39 [...]

Corporate Speech

The unusual re-argument of Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission before the Supreme Court yesterday gives us a window on the absurdities that sometimes arise when we enshrine reality in words. I’ll get to those, but the background first. At issue in this case is: Can government regulate corporate spending of money to influence elections? Is [...]