I have another question! A real one, this time. I have "My Hero, Zero" from Schoolhouse Rock in my head, and it makes me think. Seriously, how did the Romans multiply large numbers? Did they just all have to be memorized? Or what??? How do you figure DXVI times LCIII???

Seriously, how did the Romans multiply large numbers?

They made their slaves do it?

Seriously, multiplication is very difficult using Roman numerals....

At lunch MSNBC was all MJ all the time with brief snippits of, oh, the Supreme Court nominee, potential revolution in Iran, a coup in Honduras... silly things like that. We're on the 24 Hour Not-News Cycle again, aren't we?

I didn't quite realize how big MJ was. I always thought of him as more of an 80s thing, maybe early 90s. I'd really like to hear more about Iran and health care policy. I have, however, gotten my fill of news about the Luv Gov.

Giving up my iPod for a Walkman:

When the Sony Walkman was launched, 30 years ago this week, it started a revolution in portable music. But how does it compare with its digital successors? The Magazine invited 13-year-old Scott Campbell to swap his iPod for a Walkman for a week.

Kids these days really don't understand how cassettes work...

It took me three days to figure out that there was another side to the tape.

Kids these days really don't understand how cassettes work...

I'd getting to a point where DVDs seem crude. Physical media just seems so 90s. A least they're shiny though.

My kids saw me with an LP and asked, "Mom, why's that CD so big?"

Seriously, multiplication is very difficult using Roman numerals....

This is what I'm saying! And yet! They had large numbers of things!

Romans did have large numbers of things but they took care to organize them into powers of ten whenever possible, which is quite easy to manage with Roman Numerals. You don't often have to be really precise with large numbers, after all. And when you do, you hire a specialist to do it for you, and he probably takes a long time, and then you try to keep things so you can keep qpplying the same result over and over again.

It's kind of like the walkman vs iPod, in a way, before you know there's the possibiity of a random shuffle, you don't miss it.

What's fascinating is how well the Babylonians did with no way to distinguish between 1,000 10 and .001 except context.

[I hardly ever get to pull out the History of Math stuff. I could go on and on]

Ooh, thanks -t. That makes sense, and please feel free to go on and on! I guess it doesn't matter if you lose a few of your soldiers -- but having your troops decimated, now that's serious.

The Rowe interview turns out to be from 2004 and otherwise suspect.

And it's been well-known for some time that MJ was not the bio father of his first two kids, and probably not of the third, for that matter.