Counting

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Newsletter readers Terry and Valerie each won a free e-book for answering the question in the last issue. The ancient Babylonians seemed to have counted by twelves. How might they have done it on one hand?

To count to twelve, touch your thumb to the first joint of the fingers on that hand: one, two, three, four. Then touch the second joint: five, six, seven, eight. Finally, touch your thumb to the tips of your fingers: nine, ten, eleven, twelve.

The next question was about a hardware clerk who counted out 30 carriage bolts for me using one hand. How did he do it?

When I asked why he was flipping his fingers madly as he counted, he held up one thumb. "That's one." He put the thumb down and raised the forefinger. "That's two." Then he raised both thumb and forefinger: "That's three." He was counting in binary! His fingers were the binary digits one, two, four, eight, and sixteen. All five held up together added up to thirty-one.

 _ _ _ _ 1 = 1
_ _ _ 1 _ = 2
_ _ _ 1 1 = 3
_ _ 1 _ _ = 4 
_ _ 1 _ 1 = 5
...
1 1 1 1 _ = 30
1 1 1 1 1 = 31

Aphorisms

I've used a lot of aphorisms in my career, short sayings to make a point. Some of my favorites were:

  • Sufficient unto the day are the meetings thereof
  • Cheap hardware isn't
  • Anything can be accomplished given sufficient caffeine
  • To explain simply, understand deeply
  • The art of removing bugs is called debugging. The art of inserting bugs is called programming.
  • Cables are mathematically guaranteed to tangle
  • Simple things work

In writing, an aphorism can be used to add some punch to dialog when a character is making a point. Or they can be used to convey personality, such as in the Tad Williams novel I'm currently reading, where the assassin keeps reminding himself, "Confident, cocky, lazy, dead."

What are your favorite aphorisms? Let me hear from you. The first five people to send me an aphorism at nl@lamp.works will win a free kindle version of one of my novels.

New Home

We're moving to a new home on the web soon: lampworkspublishing.com will become just lamp.works (it's a lot less to type!). The transition will happen over several months. At https://lamp.works the new website is getting its final checkout and most of the content has been copied from the older site. It's looking good! Give it a preview and let me know of anything that needs fixing up before the grand opening.

The newsletter will start coming from nl@lamp.works soon. You might want to add this to your address book to be sure you continue to receive it.