31 May
2010
31 May
'10
6:22 a.m.
On Mon, May 31, 2010 at 1:27 AM, Andrew Burton
<aliensrcooluk at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
----- Original Message -----
From: "Liam Proven" <lproven at gmail.com>
To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts"
<cctalk at classiccmp.org>
Sent: Sunday, May 30, 2010 5:18 PM
Subject: Re: Roman Numerals ( was Re: Anyone off to VCF-UK)
Hmpf. Having re-read the entire page, I guess I was thinking of the full
stops after each group of numbers (e.g. "M.M.X." instead of "MMX")
and
Medievil Roman Numerals.
Though it is interesting that the final i can become a j, originally
introduced to prevent forgery (eg. additional i's being added at a later
date).
Hardly! The Romans nicked it off the Etruscans.
The Romans are quite recent, you know. Only a couple of thousand years
ago. Human societies of people identical to us have been around for
about 40,000 years. The oldest buildings known so far are some 12,000
years ago - about 5 times longer before ancient Rome than Rome was
before us.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe
We have written records from Pharoaonic Egypt from circa 7000-8000
years ago, which is just one of the more fun bits of evidence that the
young-Earth Creationists are a bunch of deranged loonies.
The Phaistos Disk shows that there was *print* long before ancient Rome.
One or two hundred thousand years before the Cro-Magnon, the ancestors
of the Europeans and most of the us, the Neanderthals had societies
right across the world, hunting mammoths and so on. They left little
trace other than fossils, so we know very little about them, but they
had a human society that spread across Eurasia about a hundred times
longer ago than ancient Rome.
Roman numerals are no ancestral to anything much. They're a recent peculiarity!
--
Liam Proven ? Profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/liamproven
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On Sat, May 29, 2010 at 6:05 PM, Andrew Burton
<aliensrcooluk at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
purposes.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Liam Proven" <lproven at gmail.com>
To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts"
<cctalk at classiccmp.org>
Sent: Saturday, May 29, 2010 2:55 AM
Subject: Re: Anyone off to VCF-UK
Oh, they're quite fun, and are still used for decorative counting
Metric makes sense. Everything's in tens and hundreds and thousands;
unit conversion is trivial. The different measurements are all
connected - 1 litre = a 10 x 10 x 10 cm cube, and that much water is
1kg. Freeze it, that's 0?C; boil it, that's 100?. It all interlocks
like clockwork, no fooling around with 24 of this makes 1 of those but
three-fourteenths of one of them, and a unit of weight depends on what
you're weighing and suchlike nonsense.
It's about as sensible, practical and useful as Roman numerals.
Actually, I think Roman Numerals are pretty cool.
The primary snag with them is that they not only do not facilitate
arithmetic, they actually hinder it, as a non-positional system with
embedded calculations - e.g. MMIX for 2009, where you have to mentally
take one from the final ten to yield nine.
You could always avoid that problem by using an aternative notation (e.g.
MMVIIII)!!
Positional notation works much better, and for
it, you really need a
zero, which Roman numerals never fully adopted.
This is why most of the world quickly adopted Arabic numerals, which
themselves borrowed the Hindu invention of zero. Not only the West -
the Chinese, Japanese, Koreans and other users of non-alphabetic
scripts have also adopted modern Western-style Arabic numerals.
> Ok, I only understand the
> particular format usually used for dates (e.g. MMVII = 2007), but I am
aware
> there are (atleast) two other formats for
Roman Numerals (neither of
which I
have
learnt to understand yet - as I haven't tried to).
Oh really? Such as?
I'm aware of using lower-case letters but this doesn't really change
anything.
> Without Roman Numerals, would we ever have had sexadecimal /
hexadecimal??
I don't follow. Hex is a straighforward modification of Arabic
numerals for base16 instead of base10. (As is octal). There is no
influence in it from Roman numerals that I'm aware of.
I was thinking that Roman Numerals was the first time (I knew of) numbers
being represented by letters, and that would have influenced whoever thought
up the sexadecimal system (I can't find any reference to them on wiki - I'm
sure it used to be there). Perhaps I was wrong.