What Counts

I remember carefully knocking small, colorful, plastic bears off of a 2x4 or a cigar box or a case of empties in my 1st grade (or was it 2nd grade?) classroom. We were learning addition and subtraction. I would line them up in a row and knock them down, one by one, to arrive at the answer for some complicated mathematical operation like 7 minus 3. I don’t remember counting on my fingers to accomplish the same calculation, but I suppose I did. It just wasn’t as memorable as defenestrating bears.

Using your fingers to do arithmetic is frequently considered bad form. It’s seen as unrefined—almost rude. I imagine that the practice of counting on one’s fingers probably offended the sensibilities of some self-assured school administrator at some point and then caught on as a new pedagogical war to be fought. (“Surely we can’t have children using their hands! That’s for babies! It’s undisciplined or… cheating! They can’t expect to be able to use their hands to do things in real life!”)

As it turns out, kids using their fingers has been linked with better mathematical abilities. Another bit of evidence for embodied and enacted cognition; there is a benefit to literally getting a “feel” for math.

While I suspect that disparaging finger-counting has to do with a feeling that the body is vulgar, there might simply be a general cultural bias against the literal. One insult often leveled at someone who doesn’t understand a verbal explanation is, “Do I have to draw you a picture?!” That might be good, yes; please do. Luckily, this perspective doesn’t seem to extend to math. Using a pencil and paper for ciphering or sketching out mathematical concepts can be vital, since they can quickly become complex. Past a certain point, there’s no easy way of getting around using a symbolic notation to manage it.

But there is some poetry, too, in that we use our digits (fingers) to type digits (numbers) into computers (bright rectangles that steal time from us). And here’s a fun fact: you can count up to 1,023 on your fingers by using them the way a computer would. Each finger represents one bit: on or off, up or down. With both hands in front of you and a slight change of perspective to a base-2 number system, you can count far, far higher than 10. Demonstrate this the next time you’re at a party and see how long it takes for you to be asked to leave.

We count with our fingers, with an abacus (or preferably plastic bears), with tally marks, with numbers, with computers and sometimes quietly in our heads. 

And we still hold up the fingers of our hand to let the hostess know we’re a party of 2.

A Group of Goats Walk Into a Field…

A group of goats is properly called either a tribe or a trip. A tribe seems fitting: they do seem to be a tightly-knit bunch, at least when I’ve seen them at farms or petting zoos. They play and they hang out with each other. Sometimes they butt heads.

And they are a trip, too; particularly where food is concerned. You will know this if you ever see one preparing to nurse from its mother, if you ever walk toward the fence with a handful of feed corn, and maybe if you stay a little too close to the fence after you’ve run out of feed corn.

A tribe or a trip, certainly, but I would propose adding another term: a party.

Because these goats look ready to party.

Flossing

Animals don’t really need to clean their teeth as much as we do, or they have other ways of coping. Hippopotami open their mouths and little birds are happy to fly in and pick away at their teeth to clean them. Sharks just grow entire new rows of teeth as replacements. But in addition to brushing our teeth (because compared to most other animals, we eat a lot of powdered sugar) we humans floss. I don’t know what evolutionary advantages we gain from having teeth that require this kind of maintenance, but I’m sure I’m not alone in wondering if it’s worth it.

And perhaps there’s no advantage. Maybe it’s simply a drawback of having a giant brain that craves (and dutifully rewards) sugar intake, and our genetically programmed, socially coordinated brain conspiracy has finally achieved its evolutionary goal: unlimited corn syrup. Or maybe it’s a side effect of developing the technology we call cooking. We don’t eat extremely tough things like antelope bones and tree branches anymore: there’s no need to chew as much before swallowing and so there also isn’t any attendant tooth-scouring.

But teeth are very important to the enjoyment of food and the production of speech—so we must floss. We must floss, despite the fact that it feels a little unnatural; a little uncomfortable. We must floss, even though it takes just a little more time than we’d like to spend each night before bed. We must make these clumsy attempts to coordinate hands, eye and jaw in the mirror; struggling with a string too short to tie any knot, yet somehow too long to easily manipulate in our mouth; thin and fine enough to cut off circulation to our fingertips and paradoxically so stout that no neighboring teeth will let it pass between them without great resolve and determination.

Which is only somewhat easier than trying to find precisely the right kind of weird-ass, disposable flossing utensils to buy at the store.

Dammit.

Three Laws

Isaac Asimov wrote in his science fiction stories about laws of behavior programmed into robots to prevent them from harming humans or destroying humanity entirely. They formed a hierarchy based on human safety and utility:

First Law: A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

Second Law: A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

Third Law: A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

Many of Asimov’s robot stories are interesting because they deal with situations that introduce ambiguities and unknowns that cause the robot to fail to act appropriately. He later wrote that these concepts were obvious and applicable to any human tool:

First Law: A tool must not be unsafe to use.

Second Law: A tool must perform its function efficiently unless this would harm the user.

Third Law: A tool must remain intact during its use unless its destruction is required for its use or for safety.

Many of our tools are now embodied by software. While some of these are, indeed, mission-critical and/or safety-related, most of them are pretty ordinary. I propose here a set of usability laws for software and related devices that we all must use regularly:

First Law: Software must not automatically or by default piss off the user, or through some inexplicable delay or aborted function cause the user to become pissed off.

Second Law: Software must perform its functions efficiently unless it produces a surprising, nonsensical, counter-productive or useless result that would surely piss off the user.

Third Law: Software must perform updates as needed in order to maintain and/or improve its functions, unless the update actually degrades its functions; or the timing, duration and sheer frequency of those updates would cause the user to become pissed off.

Here There Be Dragons

Bats are like little dragons: miniature, furry, mammalian dragons.

I know that a very common conception of a dragon is that it is nominally reptilian and has an head shaped like an iguana or an alligator, but consider the claws, fangs and leathery wings of bats—all very dragon-like.

If you suddenly came across a 12-foot bat in the wilderness, the shape of its head and face might give it away, and you might say, “Oh my God! A giant bat!” But if you had access to the tales of myth and legend surrounding dragons, I think you could be forgiven for exclaiming, “Holy shit! A big, ugly, hairy dragon!”