1 – 2 Buckle My Shoe …
3 – 4 calculator of yore!
Our
love affair with mathematics
is practically ingrained, as even the ancients created methods to calculate
taxes. Sigh.
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| Slide Rule Museum |
Fortunately,
we invented computers, so not only can we calculate our income at the speed of
light (or airwaves, radio waves, whatever),
we can also spend it even quicker, without taking our shoes off to add up our
purchases! Wow – sure beats the ol’ quipu
…
quipu (kēʹpōō, kwipʹōō) n.: a device consisting of an arrangement
of cords variously colored and knotted, used by the ancient Peruvians to keep
accounts, record events, etc. [WW #52]
And you
thought everyone was raised on the abacus. While it apparently came first, the quipu is no slouch,
confounding and irritating the conquistadors (mid-1500s) as they attempted to
convert, then annihilate the Peruvians.
The Inca society put the quipus to use
for everything from simple math, to recording labor projects, and the census, during
their rise between the 12th and 13th centuries. “The
cords contained numeric and other values encoded by knots in a base ten
positional system. A quipu could have only a few
or up to 2,000 cords.”
So
when you visit your tax consultant ask to borrow her quipu to determine the amount of the refund of hard-earned dollars
you “saved” in the government’s annual, mandatory, non-interest bearing account.
And then hope you receive it, instead
of a low-life black hat hacker. (P.S.: File for your refund ASAP. That way you get to it first!)
Word of the Week: QUIPU. Can you fit it into your next writing?
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