What If There Was No Zero?

          Did you know that there is no Roman numeral for zero?  Zero wasn’t even considered until it was put forward by Western mathematics.

          Well, I, for one, was aghast. How could they not have zero? What did they call it when they ran out of cookies? Or money?  Did they just stop speaking and writing?

          So, I looked it up, and I must tell you, the answer was not very satisfying. Experts say their additive system was for the business of pricing and trading goods. What—are you telling me no one ever got cheated and was down to zero? Or had zero goods left to sell?

How could you even have a decimal system, algebra, or calculus? How could scientists measure anything? How could computer science even have been invented?

          Guess when else you get zero answers? When you search “common uses of zero.”  You get a list of grammar sites that describe the Zero Article in English. These are times when we don’t use A, An, or The.  And they are super obvious, not worth having a huge explanation. (We don’t use them when we say college, winter, today, midnight, and probably hundreds of other times we omit articles.)

          So, not only was the poor little zero ignored by the Romans, but by today’s entire computer system as well.     

          And, for this, I give both of them a big, fat ZERO.

However, I will give you 100% if you join 10K of my subscribers, on my Youtube Mom Channel, filled with fabulous, short life hacks.

An Open Letter to You Math Types

 (This blog first posted 10 years ago, but bears repeating. It's also my way of reminding you to scroll through and read bunches of my old  posts. Make it a whole day of chuckles.)

            I am hereby calling for the return of all the letters of the alphabet that you math types have stolen.  Yes, you heard me.  I discovered this blatant disregard for property in the 8^th grade when I found a little lower case y hiding under a line, next to a 4.  Shivering, probably.  The teacher, who should have been dialing 911 if they’d had 911 in those days, hadn’t even raised his eyebrows at this wrongdoing, and was in fact urging us to guess what number it stood for.

            And why a y?  Was he trying to make a pun?  Math types are not known for clever puns (though they think they are), and this possibility only served to introduce another distraction to math class, next to a rattling air vent, underarm stains in the teacher’s shirt, a tapping pencil three desks back, and a tiny fleck in the window (possible bullet hole?).  Wasn’t it hard enough to combine numbers the right way without having yet one more reason to jump off the track and think of something else?

            It’s not as if there aren’t plenty of symbolic substitutes.  You could use hearts, stars, squiggles, and a plethora of other graphic options before resorting to sacred letters!  Above all, why use x so often?  X means “multiplied by” and thus slipping it in where you don’t mean that seems especially cruel.  Soon there were m’s, a’s, b’s, d’s-- virtually a dozen evidences of larceny on one page alone. 

            You people cannot come riding into Alphabet Land like masked marauders, snatch a little lower case n from her crib, and then gallop off into Math Land and stick her next to an equals sign.  Not on my watch. So I’m blowing the whistle. Put all the numerals you like in brackets and label it a set if you feel better.  Do not mix this set with alphabet letters.  This is akin to pouring ketchup on ice cream, or frosting on a steak.  They do not go together any better than your plaid, polyester pants and your cotton gingham shirt.  And if you can’t group like objects, don’t you need to go back to kindergarten?  Even they can tell you not to wear an orange shirt with a maroon tie.

            Admit that you made a mistake.  Apologize to the word people.  We are forgiving types.  Well, mostly.  We certainly don’t substitute numbers for letters, if that’s any sign of character, and I think it is.  We don’t talk about Alice in 1derland.  We don’t write 2morrow or 4ever.  We follow the rules and leave you in one peace.  We also make better puns.

Have you watched my Youtube Mom videos, yet?  Lots of great life hacks, check 'em out and subscribe!

Opinions R Us

          Medicine is an odd field. First you have people on the other side of the world doing entirely different things for diseases, some of which do work. Then you have local Experts, people here with degrees. There are also wonderful friends who share their experiences and ideas. 

           Then you have the unwashed masses of the public, many of whom are convinced you should try their ideas, and these come at you in the form of a fire hose.

          But whenever you have a big decision to make, we can all agree that a second opinion never hurts. Either it will open your eyes to a whole new idea, or it will confirm that you were already on the right track.

          What unsettles me is the word, “opinion.”  It’s as if this is all just nebulous speculating, all up for grabs by the person with the longest arms, say.

          Imagine you’re in math class. You work an equation, and you get the answer, 24. You now take it down the hallway to Professor Wiggins to see what she thinks. “Oh, no,” she says. “I get 16.”  WHAT?!  So you come back and ask Professor Jones to weigh in.  He says, “Nope. It’s 41.”  WHAT?!

          Surely there’s a finite answer, an indisputable truth when it comes to math, right? And no, don’t tell me about iffy equations from deep space that I won’t understand, which are full of contradictions.

          The point is that there ought to be an empirical answer, a decision about which no one can argue. I like that sort of solid footing when it comes to my health, you know? I don’t want people sliding all over the landscape and then “trying” some idea they heard about.

          So until someone comes up with an indisputable cure, we wander. We research.  We interview professionals and wonder if we should just calculate an average based on their responses.

Ultimately we hunt down someone we can trust. And then we take a leap of faith into the arms of someone we hope studied really hard in math class.

Fear not, math scores aside, you can enjoy my books right here.  And even find hundreds of short Youtube Mom  videos to share with your professors! Be sure to subscribe.

Numb and Number

            My eldest son is wildly in love with… numbers.  From the time he learned of their existence, he ascended (descended?  side-scended?)  into a happy little world of ratios and logarithms, even sharing an elaborate equation with me one time, including lovely arcs, to prove the uselessness of cleaning his room.

            I, on the other hand, recoil mentally whenever a digit appears.  I think it started with story problems in elementary school.  Well-meaning teachers would hand out preposterous questions, I assumed, to see who could go the longest without screaming.

            “You have one apple and you want to share it equally with seven friends,” such questions would begin.  And that’s when I would stop and imagine such a ludicrous situation.  Who planned so poorly as to have only one apple when seven friends arrive?  My solution was ultimately to make a small Waldorf Salad, though I didn’t know its name at the time, and wasn’t convinced this would be anywhere near enough food for a total of eight people.  And why can’t “applesauce” be considered a correct answer?

            “You found one grape and want to share it with nine friends,” one question said.

Immediately I would try to picture this—and what are these people—street urchins from the Dickens era, covered with soot, who find one grape in the gutter, that even the dogs won’t eat, and decide to share it with nine friends?  Sounds like they ought to spend less time socializing and more time working, so they can buy everyone a grape.  I wrote, “I would not do this” for my answer.  What was next—dividing a pea into twenty pieces with a scalpel?  Were we going to be given microscopes for the next batch of story problems?

            And then along came fractions, criss-crossing operations, long division, and ultimately algebra.  Which, if you haven’t pictured a bra made of algae yet, means you haven’t given enough thought to that word.  Worst of all, they were now mixing letters with numbers, a sacrilege if ever there was one. (See my “Open Letter to You Math Types” blog of April 17^th.)

            My daughter inherited my distaste for things mathematical.  But in her case, it’s because she’s an artist.  When given a long equation with a little two elevated above the other numbers, to indicate “to the second power,” all she could think of was how stranded that awkward two looked, like a lone painting hung too high on a giant wall.  When she finally solved the equation, that’s all that was left—that little two floating up like a lost balloon.

            Numbers people have other amazing abilities as well.  They’re like savants of a sort, for whom musical training is a snap.  I have yet to meet a math wiz who is not also a gifted pianist.  And juggling!  Who would have thought juggling went along with this, but it does.  I know of an AP Calculus teacher who tells his students that whoever masters juggling will get an A in the class, and he’s invariably right.  Evidently the same gymnastics your brain goes through in order to juggle, are the same processes it needs to understand calculus.

            And all I can think about are the bruised oranges that will result as folks try this at home, dropping the fruit time and again until it cannot be shared with one friend, let alone forty-nine.

Portions of this blog post appear in “Funeral Potatoes—the Novel,” published by Covenant Communications.  There’s Jewish humor, Catholic humor, and definitely Mormon humor. Round out your collection with a bunch of my LDS books; click on their titles right here on my blog’s home page!  They’re usually much cheaper than my mainstream books (not that the content is cheaper) and you gotta like that.

An Open Letter to You Math Types

            I am hereby calling for the return of all the letters of the alphabet that you math types have stolen.  Yes, you heard me.  I discovered this blatant disregard for property in the 8^th grade when I found a little lower case y hiding under a line, next to a 4.  Shivering, probably.  The teacher, who should have been dialing 911 if they’d had 911 in those days, hadn’t even raised his eyebrows at this wrongdoing, and was in fact urging us to guess what number it stood for.

            And why a y?  Was he trying to make a pun?  Math types are not known for clever puns (though they think they are), and this possibility only served to introduce another distraction to math class, next to a rattling air vent, underarm stains in the teacher’s shirt, a tapping pencil three desks back, and a tiny fleck in the window (possible bullet hole?).  Wasn’t it hard enough to combine numbers the right way without having yet one more reason to jump off the track and think of something else?

            It’s not as if there aren’t plenty of symbolic substitutes.  You could use hearts, stars, squiggles, and a plethora of other graphic options before resorting to sacred letters!  Above all, why use x so often?  X means “multiplied by” and thus slipping it in where you don’t mean that seems especially cruel.  Soon there were m’s, a’s, b’s, d’s-- virtually a dozen evidences of larceny on one page alone. 

            You people cannot come riding into Alphabet Land like masked marauders, snatch a little lower case n from her crib, and then gallop off into Math Land and stick her next to an equals sign.  Not on my watch. So I’m blowing the whistle. Put all the numerals you like in brackets and label it a set if you feel better.  Do not mix this set with alphabet letters.  This is akin to pouring ketchup on ice cream, or frosting on a steak.  They do not go together any better than your plaid, polyester pants and your cotton gingham shirt.  And if you can’t group like objects, don’t you need to go back to kindergarten?  Even they can tell you not to wear an orange shirt with a maroon tie.

            Admit that you made a mistake.  Apologize to the word people.  We are forgiving types.  Well, mostly.  We certainly don’t substitute numbers for letters, if that’s any sign of character, and I think it is.  We don’t talk about Alice in 1derland.  We don’t write 2morrow or 4ever.  We follow the rules and leave you in one peace.  We also make better puns.

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