Quotes About Abacus

...dark furrow lines grid the snow, punctuated by orange abacus beads of pumpkins - now the crows own the field...

In 1930, when I was three and my sister was four, my father sent us to Miss Tracy's, a little 'dame's school' in Ipswich. I do remember playing with an abacus. He took us away after a term because he thought we weren't learning anything.

Play is also part of developing trust. Play opens the heart and gives delight and focus, like an abacus did when we were young.

I'd performed numerous calculations on the abacus of my soul concerning the price of the room and the loveliness of the slipper tub.

If you look through the history of wearables, I was named the father of wearable computing, or the world's first cyborg. But the definition of wearable computing can be kind of fuzzy itself. Thousands of years ago, in China, people would wear an abacus around their neck - that, in one sense, was a wearable computer.

Sociologists are those academic accountants who think that truth can be shaken from an abacus.

Zero was the solution to the problem. By around 300 BC the Babylonians had started using two slanted wedges, , to represent an empty space, an empty column on the abacus. This placeholder mark made it easy to tell which position a symbol was in.

But when you want to mark a number on an abacus, what do you do if there are no stones in a column? The number 60 is one wedge in the sixties column and no wedges in the ones column. How do you write "no wedges"? The Babylonians needed a placeholder that represented nothing. They had to, in effect, invent zero. And so they created a new character, with no value, to signify an empty column. They denoted it with two slanted wedges.

the annual presentation of a county's accounts by its sheriff to the Exchequer, so named because a chequerboard was used as an abacus by the royal treasurer to check the figures while the sheriff watched

She sold silk at the Ben Thanh market and possessed the eyes of an experienced negotiator, smooth and unreadable as the beads of an abacus.

Just as an abacus can put two and two together to produce four without having thoughts about arithmetic, so brains can add past to present to make future without ever thinking about any of them.