I admit my weirdness. As a kid (and still one) I love math. I loved doing long division. I loved when my 10th grade whacky Chemistry teacher Bloom Friedmen taught us all about dimensional analysis for unit conversions all it is is multiplying stuff by one.
There goes a tangent again.
But math and this old book as a kid got swept up in another one of my link adventures on the web diversions-from-what-Im-supposed-to-be-doing.
I can’t help it. People keep bemoaning how bad the web is and how broken it is, yet ever day I keep finding more stuff to tag cool that I find as shiny gems off of the beaten track of trending/viral/boredom. If you spend all your time at social media it’s like living in the mall. Get outside! The wide open web! Click and go!
Now The Zero and the Zillions
Lately I came back to a key source that started with joking around in the socials, this had to do with teasing my good friend Todd Conaway about some math play and he responded with:
to which Eric jumped in with:
And the connections in my mind light up to me as a math loving geeky kid, and this book I had called Zero to Zilllions … ZOMG I do not have to link to Amazon, this book is in the Internet Archive. I did not have my original copy but as an adult I picked up a used copy
The story I always remember was The Allowance Trick, which ends up teaching the difference between geometric and arithmetic progressions and how the former as an allowance formula outstrips the latter.
“Dad,” John says, “would you change my allowance? Instead of a dollar a month, would you give me one cent for January, two cents for February, four cents for March- giving me twice as much each month until the end of the year?”
Without stopping to think, his father says yes.
“Will you change mine, too?” Sue asks.
“All right, Sue,” says her father. “But I’ll start you with more than John. Instead of a dollar a month, I’ll give you 10 cents for January, 20 cents for February, 30 cents for March — that is, every month I’ll give you 10 cents more.”
Without stopping to think, Sue agrees. Which plan would you choose? Careful! Numbers are tricky.
That seems like a direct connection! I ended up using this before as a frame for connecting in a different internet era
I just get a kick how one thing associates with another and another, lather rinse repeat all the way down the internet rabbit hole.
Yes, Dave, “My god, it’s full of links”
Featured Image: My own remix of the Allowance Trick pages of Zero to Zillions, text obscured, and my logos and path added. it probably is a copyright violation, I do so only out of love of this book (of which my family has purchased at least two copies, one being mine). I share it as do whatever you want with it.
