Saturday, November 29, 2008
Random thought on 'Black Friday'
A few years ago** Polistra explored the history of bookkeeping, with an eye toward its cultural and religious connotations.
It's odd that the convention of using black ink and red ink for positive and negative numbers has carried on in everyday language, still forming phrases like 'Black Friday' or 'swimming in a sea of red ink'. Actual red ink was long gone when I worked in bookkeeping in the 1970's. At that time, in the sunset of the mechanical adding machine age, a negative result was indicated by brackets or parentheses.
Negative numbers (invented in China way back BC, like everything else of importance) weren't common in Europe and America until 1800. Thanks to calculators and computers we now use negative numbers fluently, but we tend to forget how new and strange this is!
In most of the practical uses of arithmetic, a negative number is still absurd and unusable. You can't mix -2 cups of sugar into a cake, you can't use a -3/4 inch wrench, you can't cut a board to -6 feet long.
If more of us mixed cakes, turned wrenches, and sawed boards, perhaps we wouldn't be quite so eager to adopt purely abstract falsehoods and frauds like Global Warming and Credit Default Swaps. Perhaps we'd be appropriately wary of computer models that are not firmly tied to physical reality.
= = = = =
** Just realized the Mill is four years old. I began writing on LiveJournal in late November of '04, transferred to Blogspot in March of '05. ¶ 6:44 PM
A few years ago** Polistra explored the history of bookkeeping, with an eye toward its cultural and religious connotations.
It's odd that the convention of using black ink and red ink for positive and negative numbers has carried on in everyday language, still forming phrases like 'Black Friday' or 'swimming in a sea of red ink'. Actual red ink was long gone when I worked in bookkeeping in the 1970's. At that time, in the sunset of the mechanical adding machine age, a negative result was indicated by brackets or parentheses.
Negative numbers (invented in China way back BC, like everything else of importance) weren't common in Europe and America until 1800. Thanks to calculators and computers we now use negative numbers fluently, but we tend to forget how new and strange this is!
In most of the practical uses of arithmetic, a negative number is still absurd and unusable. You can't mix -2 cups of sugar into a cake, you can't use a -3/4 inch wrench, you can't cut a board to -6 feet long.
If more of us mixed cakes, turned wrenches, and sawed boards, perhaps we wouldn't be quite so eager to adopt purely abstract falsehoods and frauds like Global Warming and Credit Default Swaps. Perhaps we'd be appropriately wary of computer models that are not firmly tied to physical reality.
= = = = =
** Just realized the Mill is four years old. I began writing on LiveJournal in late November of '04, transferred to Blogspot in March of '05. ¶ 6:44 PM
