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.

I think its either a messy ascot or some sort of hip 70s man-scarf style we've all mercifully repressed.

Wait... I think I remember now! Or at least in the last 70's production I worked on, this sort of pimptastic character had the Fred manscarf. And I am pretty sure the designer had research that wasn't, you know, Fred!

An atomic bomb test on a bunch of ships.

Notice the black smudge on the mushroom cloud? That's a battleship, lifted completely out of the water.

[link]

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.

It is? I was wondering, but I didn't think I knew that official.

Exactly. And while the Romans did attack finicky problems in engineering, the solutions were more often practical trial and error results that would be replicated rather than general solutions. Though that is getting a little outside my area.

They were pretty great at accounting, though, and Roman Numerals are very well suited to addition and subtraction whether the numbers involved are large or small. So you could keep track of how many soldiers you lost quite precisely, and could add up the remaining soldiers in a territory easily enough.

For problems like, how much grain can we store in a silo of particular dimensions? They were less prone to abstractions about that sort of thing than, say, Egyptian mathematicians. As far as surviving documents go, anyway.

Notice the black smudge on the mushroom cloud? That's a battleship, lifted completely out of the water.

The vertical smudge on the right side of the mushroom "stem"?

The vertical smudge on the right side of the mushroom "stem"?

Yeah.