Z is for Zero

I was looking at someone’s blog last week. I came across this picture of a large floral clock with its digits in Roman numerals. And it reminded me of something my fifth or sixth grade teacher once told me; the Romans did not have a symbol for zero. As the Wikipedia post suggests, dots and blank spaces might have been utilized.

But, “Records show that the ancient Greeks seemed unsure about the status of zero as a number. They asked themselves, ‘How can nothing be something?’, leading to philosophical and, by the Medieval period, religious arguments about the nature and existence of zero and the vacuum.” Thus, knowing the difference between, say, 16 barrels and 106 barrels was a matter of context. (This rather reminds me of some ancient scriptures that used neither vowels nor spaces.) Here’s another history of zero.

This is utterly fascinating to me! It was not merely the fact that the Arabs created Arabic numerals (0, 1, 2, 3, etc.); it’s that they were “philosophically neutral” enough to give a null placeholder its due.

And some placeholder it’s turned out to be. Add a couple zeroes to 1 to make it a hundred, another to make it a thousand, three more to make it a million. But then it gets complicated. There’s disagreement throughout the world how many zeroes are needed to make a billion, trillion and so forth. That’s probably why one is prone to see designations such as 10 to the 12th power rather than having it stated it as trillion (U.S.) or billion (much of the rest of the world). Check out this link and look for the “add zero” file, for a humorous take on this.

Once zero is given a value, the notion of negative numbers can evolve. In the winter, we use them all the time when discussing temperature, for instance. Unfortunately, there are two popular scales, Celsius (called Centigrade when I was growing up), used by most of the world, and Fahrenheit, in use primarily in the metric-resistant United States. Thus:
0 degrees Celsius is 32 degrees Fahrenheit.
0 degrees Fahrenheit is -17.78 degrees Celsius.
Cold and colder.
The scales are the same at -40; here’s a temperature converter.

Then there is absolute zero, the point at which there is a “theoretical absence of all thermal energy.” By definition, that is at 0 degrees on the Kelvin scale (−273.15 C, -459.67 F).

Collins Helium Cryostat that freezes elements to absolute zero. September 1948

Once the concept of zero and negative number takes hold, then other concepts involving the word “zero” got introduced. Zero sum, for instance, suggests that some people are advantaged, and others disadvantaged in a transaction, and once you add up the pluses and the minuses, the sum is equal to zero. Or to quote John Mellencamp, “there’s winners and there’s losers.” Compare this concept to win-win (or, I suppose, lose-lose.)

Zero hour refers to the end of the countdown to particular event, whether it be planned or unforeseen.

I’ll end this with a song by Joan Armatrading, one of two “name” artists I’ve sactually seen twice (the other being the Temptations), doing Down to Zero.

Jerome McLaughlin buying war bond from rural mailman Mark Whalon making rounds in sub-zero weather. East Dorset, VT, US; December 1942

ROG

The Lydster, Part 53: Room of Many Colors


Lydia is susceptible to allergies, not just peanuts, but also including dust mites. So it is incumbent upon us to scrub her walls thoroughly periodically. Last year, during the process, Carol and her father painted Lydia’s room a peach color that Lydia didn’t like for reasons of design that were lost on me. So this year, when she was asked what colors she would like on her walls, Lydia told them, and Carol and her father complied. The room is now pink. And blue. And purple. And yellow. And green. With a floor that’s a color called Rose Balcony. And now Lydia is very happy with a room that she can call her own. They also painted a white chair pink to match her bedding. Joseph, the 11th son of Israel, would be pleased.
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Other sources of allergies, which I share with her, are grasses and ragweed, which we monitor. Saturday, while I was cutting the grass, Lydia came outside to pick some wildflowers. That afternoon, she had shortness of breath, and that night she coughed for three hours; cough medicine is of no use, but the drugs in the nebulizer eventually did the trick.
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I don’t often say things like, “Boy, is my girl smart!” OK, maybe I do. But it seemed like only a few weeks ago, she insisted that twenty-nine was followed by twenty-ten, my insistence to the contrary notwithstanding. But now she can count to one hundred and beyond. Shades of Toy Story.

Picture #1 courtesy, of Earthworld Comics, May 2008.
Picture #2 courtesy of Uthaclena, August 2008.

ROG

French military victories in the Arabian Gulf

You may recall that Google was, for a time, “fooled”, when typing in miserable failure, into linking to George W. Bush’s biography; now it links to the controversy over that Google bomb.

I have learned recently that the first site that loads on Google when you plug in the term French military victories is a faked Google page offering a “did you mean?” option. Searching for Arabian gulf gives you a site similar to the defused “cannot find weapons of mass destruction” fake IE error page. (Thanks, Amanda from Charleston.)
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Wonder Woman shows that fighting crime is not always easy.

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I went into a comic book store last week and actually bought two items: the Overstreet Price Guide (do people still call it the Overpriced Street Guide?), because my boss has started asking me about prices of old comics; and the magazine Alter Ego (July 2007), featuring a long interview with ’70s Marvel editor, and Alter Ego founder, Roy Thomas. His ascent to editor pretty much corresponded to the time I first started looking at comics again after a large gap when I had “outgrown” them; big-time nostalgia for me, I was surprised to discover.
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There’s a new reality show being developed and I know all about it.
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Numbers lie: I’m loving the Wall Street Journal blog, The Numbers Guy, which I write about here.
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My monthly plug about the Underground Railroad conference here.

Yeah, I’m repositioning my own pieces from my other blogs for this post. Hey, it’s Labor Day weekend; cut me some slack!
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Instead of watching Pedro Martinez’s pitching debut for his beloved Mets, what Fred Hembeck will be viewing (September 2). I’ll be alternating between the Mets and the U.S. Open (tennis), bumped from the local our CBS affiliate by what Fred is watching, but showing up on our CW affiliate.

ROG

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