Posted on 11/27/2010 12:09:10 PM PST by pillut48
If the cost of digging a trench is 9 gin, and the trench has a length of 5 ninda and is one-half ninda deep, and if a workers daily load of earth costs 10 gin to move, and his daily wages are 6 se of silver, then how wide is the canal?
Or, a better question: if you were a tutor of Babylonian scribes some 4,000 years ago, holding a clay tablet on which this problem was incised with cuneiform indentations the very tablet that can now be seen with 12 others from that Middle Eastern civilization at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World what could you take for granted, and what would you need to explain to your students? In what way did you think about measures of time and space? How did you calculate? Did you believe numbers had an abstract existence, each with its own properties?
And how would you have figured out the width of that canal (which, the tablet tells us, is one-and-a-half ninda)?
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Romans actually multipled by doubling one number, and halving the other, (what we could call a binary register shift) then selecting certain of the doubled numbers based on whether they did of didn’t evenly divide by 2.
Calculators now use the same algorithm because of the ease of the binary phase shift.
Not too shabby Romans!
Fred’s table makes it appear to be a small amount compared to the cost of moving the earth. As I say it doesn’t seem to add up.
Liberal arts majors in Babylon didn’t have to screw with that New Math stuff.
They hired guys with with quill pen protectors in their djellabas to build canals and towers and worry about that gin and ninda stuff.
Meanwhile they wrote everlasting stories about Gilgamesh and Einkaidu (an adventure serial with a hero and sidekick) and the relationship of Gods and Man.
Great article, thanks. But it’s from the New York Times - can it be trusted?
Wait a minute! After nine gin, I'm kicked back with the space monkeys discussing astrophysics!
Ptolemy also recommends and teaches Babylonia arithmetic in the Almagest because of its superiority for computation.
Thanks for the information.
“Not too many nindas gonna be dug after 9 gin.”
LOL.
Damn, I used the same calculations for my ditch but came up with a ditch much deeper and longer. (Did I mention free beer after the dig...)
LOLOL!
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