What's Your Story?

In order to make sense out of anything -- analyzing the past, explaining the present, predicting the future -- the human brain relies on story.

Once, when someone at a party mentioned to me that they were not originally from Los Angeles, I asked, "When did you move here?"

A simple enough question, I thought, but I got a short autobiography in reply. The person framed their decision to move to southern California within (1) the context of the circumstances leading up to the decision to move, (2) the factors going into the timing of the move, and (3) the reason why they ended up where they did.

Far more information than I had sought, but I have to admit that I felt I had gotten to know this stranger a bit better through their story.

More evidence that a story's power lies in its emotional context.

And our strongest memories are those tied to powerfully felt emotions.

For example, I had the good fortune to drive across the country from New York to Arizona with my father at the age of eight. The memory of that trip -- nothing less than an emotion-packed, life-changing adventure for a young boy, especially when he gets to share it with his father -- is still fresh in my mind and I've always attributed my love of travel to that first journey.

And I retain what I call "snapshot memories" of specific happenings of that trip, still very clear in my mind:
* Scrambling into a darkened cave, a known outlaw hideout in the Old West, I can still see the stalactites and stalagmites in the shadowy light, still hear the drip, drip, drip of water onto the stone floor
* I can still hear the yowls of pain when seeing another young boy trip and land onto the spiny thorns of a short barrel cactus outside a motel where we had stopped
* I can still see a large, long-legged dog with half-closed eyes as he saunters up to me and displays a freshly killed Gila monster dangling from his mouth

In the last half century or so, the general sense of our society's "progress" has been largely based on technological achievements, from the moon landing to the invention of the computer, the Space Age to the Digital Age. In the process, science has seduced us with the allure of precise measurement, exactitude in a constantly changing world. As a result, facts have assumed a great importance in the Western world.

At the same time, stories have been dismissed as unimportant, even useless, yet stories remain how we transform facts into knowledge, how we give facts meaning. All explanations are stories. Stories are how we remember facts in the first place.

Oh, and Happy Holidays...

A "LinkedIn Thing" and an End to the Suspense

Curious thing happened a couple days ago--as usual, when I logged on to LinkedIn I was confronted with a short list of "People You May Know."

Normally, I recognize most of the people that LinkedIn proffers, though my desire to click on the "Invite" button varies. This time, however, one of the names was an Assistant Production Manager (at the time) with whom I'd worked some years ago on the four MCA/Universal productions of William Shatner's "TekWar" telefilms.

The two things I've always remembered about Deb Patz was (1) that she is one of the flat-out nicest people I had ever worked with, and (2) that she is one of the most professional, most flat-out competent Production Managers with whom I have ever worked.

Talk about a narrative--try combining "nicest" and "most competent" in a business context without crashing your hard drive.

On top of that, she's a competitive sailor and has written an important industry book, FILM PRODUCTION MANAGEMENT 101. (Learn more about it at www.debpatz.com.)

I immediately invited Deb to link up and tonight she did. Then, in a quick, brief email exchange we began to catch up about the years we've not been in touch. Communication has been restored.

We're both at that point where we measure the passage of time by comparing our children's ages, but still it feels good. We're back in touch--no small thing in this hurry-up world.

And now, an end to the suspense.

My son's team did indeed win the finals of this year's Mock Trial competition put on by the Constitutional Rights Foundation (CRF) and, out of a field of more than 40 area middle schools, has been named the County Champion.

The finals were tense, with the large courtroom in the Los Angeles Superior Court building overflowing, but the defense team came through in the end. After the trial was over (and the judge had pronounced the fictional suspect "not guilty"), the nail biting began as we had to wait nearly an hour before we were readmitted to the room, desperate to hear which team had won the last round of competition.

But first, about an hour of awards presentations--at least my son's teacher/mentor was honored with the Teacher of the Year commendation--before the CRF spokesman announced the middle school and high school countywide champions.

As you might expect, when my son's school was named the middle school champ, we all went crazy.

After a frenzied moment of howls and hugs, though, I noticed that the kids on his team were as dignified in victory as they'd been through the whole series of court cases--they each made a point of approaching the defeated team's members and offering their hands in congratulation.

Nice.

GET YOUR STORY STRAIGHT

I'm happy to say that my son's prosecution team won three Mock Trial competitions in a row over the past month, sending the school into the final round. The original field of about 40 schools has been winnowed down to two, with the final contest to take place this Monday. The semifinals took place in one of the larger L.A. Superior Court courtrooms, as will the final round, so we know there will be no shortage of space to accommodate what we expect to be a big turnout of support for both schools.

The semifinal contest was, of course, close, but I believe what enabled our team to prevail was a solid week of practicing both objections and redirects. Objections can be voiced to probe the consistency of a witness' story, and redirects are an opportunity to repair your witness's credibility after the opposing side has tried their best to undermine it.

As such, objections and redirects are two of the most difficult weapons in a trial attorney's arsenal. They both demand an ability to react in the moment and instantly form--and articulate--a logical reaction to what has just been said. One must be able to nail the inconsistencies and immediately point them out to the judge.

Watching both sides verbally joust over the fate of the suspect in a fictional murder case, it was easily apparent that, on one level, that's what the legal system boils down to--keeping your story straight. The attorneys on both sides construct a narrative to explain a suspect's innocence (or guilt) with relation to a criminal act, and do their best to undermine the story offered by the other side.

And that is the essence of many forms of writing, as well, whether it's persuasive writing (like Op Ed pieces), traditional journalism, magazine feature articles, industry white papers, whatever.

Telling a story remains the best way to illustrate your point, report the news, explain an industry trend, or argue the need for a particular service or product.

Pardon my Shakespeare, but, "What can saying make them believe when seeing fails to persuade them?"

NARRATIVE PROVIDES A HUMAN CONTEXT

The power of narrative is evident when dealing with a range of topics, from history to technology.

Back in my college days studying International Affairs at the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service, I had the good fortune to take a course called "Modern European History" with a certain Professor Christopher Dodd, now the respected Senator from the great state of Connecticut.

I remember it as being the most interesting course I took at GU, no small feat considering the rest of the faculty and the overall course of study. It was clear to me even then that Professor Dodd's great strength as a teacher lay in his ability to bring history alive, as though we were getting an insider's view of the larger-than-life characters and the great events that had helped shape our world.

Looking back, it's easy to see why his presentation was so powerful. Professor Dodd knew his subject so well that he was able to relate the ambitions and fears of people at various crossroads in historical events in a very immediate way. He knew their stories. The result was that, however one judged the actions taken at any given point in history, those decisions were at least understandable within an historical context. And that, of course, was the purpose.

With that in mind, I tried to personalize the narrative when I was recently called on by the Pasadena Educational Foundation to tell the story of the breaking of the German military's "unbreakable" Enigma I coding machine just prior to the start of World War II:

"On a brisk fall morning in 1932, Marian Adam Rejewski, a 23-year-old Polish mathematics student, carefully wiped off his glasses, then leaned over a growing stack of papers in his small office located in the Polish General’s Cipher Bureau.

While studying mathematics at Poznan University with an eye toward a career in insurance, Rejewski had attended a secret cryptology course for German-speaking math students given by the Bureau, and decided to accept a job offer after graduation. Over the next year, he would change the course of history.

One of his early assignments was to tackle the German Enigma I machine, which had baffled British cryptanalysts for six years.
Though Germany had been defeated in World War I, the Poles wisely kept an eye – and an ear – on its neighbors. To the east lie Russia, anxious to export its communist philosophy, and to the west Germany, which had ceded lands to Poland after its defeat and likewise seemed intent on someday taking them back.

The Enigma I was an electro-mechanical device with a 26-letter keyboard and 26 lamps, each corresponding to a different letter of the alphabet. Inside were a plugboard that swapped pairs of letters, and three wired rotors, or “scramblers,” that scrambled each letter as it was input.

What made the Enigma so difficult to crack was that the code was advanced with every keystroke. The only way to decipher the message was to set a second Enigma machine to that day’s code settings.

At the beginning of each message, however, the Germans added day and key settings to transmit a new three-letter (one for each rotor) message key. These message keys contained different scrambler orientations, though the plugboard settings and the scrambler arrangement remained the same as in the day-key settings.

Had the Germans not added the message keys, then each day’s messages – thousands of them – would have been encrypted in the same day key, and the sheer volume of messages would have revealed patterns in the letters, making the cipher much easier to break.

By adding a new message key for each message, it was as though sender and receiver had agreed on a main cipher key, but then only used it to encrypt a new cipher key for each message. No wonder it had cryptanalysts stumped.

Working alone and in secret, Rejewski focused on the one point of the Enigma’s weakness that he could identify – the three-letter message-key setting, which was always transmitted twice at the beginning of each message. The first three letters would establish the setting and the next three would translate the first three into that new setting.

Without knowing the day key or the message key, Rejewski could only track the relationships of the letters in the hope that they would reveal a pattern that might lead to the day key. The relationships he found established chains of letters, and he created tables to monitor and record these relationships, and note the links in each one.

Thanks to the successful efforts of espionage, he eventually received a replica of an Enigma machine, so Rejewski put together a team and assigned them the grueling task of checking – by hand! – each of the more than 100,000 scrambler settings and cataloguing every letter chain that was generated by each.

In the days before computers, it took his team more than a year to accomplish the task with only pencil and paper, but eventually Rejewski was able to compile a complete catalogue of Enigma’s scrambler settings.

Then, in a moment of genuine insight, an inspired Rejewski realized that the parts played by the scrambler settings and the plugboard settings could, to some extent, be disconnected. By removing the cables from the plugboard in the replica machine and entering intercepted ciphertext, Rejewski was able to recognize certain phrases that resulted. The plugboard settings were then easy to deduce.

Solving the mystery of the day/key settings and the plugboard settings together was impossible, but, by separating the two, each was solvable. In a little more than a year – without the use of a computer – Rejewski cracked the Enigma code."

The result, of course, was that the Allies, thanks to the efforts of one inspired Polish cryptographer, broke the "unbreakable" Enigma and were able to intercept and monitor German communications throughout the war.

THE POWER OF NARRATIVE

Last evening found me in the L.A. Superior Court Building to watch my son's prosecution team in their debut effort at trying to nail a suspect accused of murder in this year's Mock Trial competition -- GO LIONS!

Mock Trial provides the opportunity for high school and middle school legal teams to both prosecute and, separately, defend a fictional suspect accused of a fictional crime. Each team goes up against another school, citing evidence, grilling witnesses on the stand, voicing objections and delivering final arguments. Ever since 1980 the Constitutional Rights Foundation has sponsored these yearly competitions, wherein students of opposing schools portray prosecutors, defense attorneys, suspects, witnesses and even bailiffs in the proceedings. Thousands of judges and attorneys volunteer their time to give students a direct lesson in our legal system.

Students prepare for weeks with teachers and volunteer attorneys, but in the courtroom they're on their own. The case is decided by the real judge sitting before them and, separately, their performances are graded by a small team of lawyers who score the individual participants. The total scores of each team determines who wins that evening's trial.

My son's team did well and won a guilty verdict, and today we learned that they had also won the evening's competition by outscoring the other team. Next week, on to the quarter-finals.

An impressive performance by all, and what I remember particularly well is that, in his closing remarks, one of the scoring attorneys complimented both teams on their ability to create and convey compelling narratives, noting that the ability to tell a convincing story is what a trial is, in essence, all about.

That was another reminder that the narrative is one of the writer's most powerful tools, and that a good writer always looks for ways to use it.

Even in many forms of business writing, narrative is useful.

For example, when I first began researching and writing industry white papers I quickly developed what I call a straightforward "challenge/solution" narrative structure.

By that I mean simply describing the issue to be addressed in a narrative form, then proposing the solution as a possible "ending" to the story. The deficiencies of inadequate solutions, or failing to address the challenge in the first place, can also be spelled out as alternate--and less satisfying--conclusions. The "moral" is simply contrasting the benefits of a satisfactory solution with the price of not dealing with the challenge successfully.

Before I sign off, I'd like to draw your attention to a great Profile of legendary (and award-winning) storyteller Horton Foote, who passed away in March of this year. It's in the October 26th issue of THE NEW YORKER, and it's by John Lahr, who at one point describes Foote's writing style when he was starting out in the 1940s:

"In Foote's plays, the big dramatic events happen offstage. Foote examined the ripple, not the wave. He was a quiet voice in noisy times."

I also particularly enjoyed a quote that Foote gave in an interview just this past January: "If I ever teach writing again, I guess the first lesson is to listen."

MAKE 'EM LAUGH - the (st)art of the interview

I have always looked at interviewing as an art as well as a science, because no matter what the topic may be, the first thing you've got to do is establish a level of rapport with your interviewee. Rapport enables trust, trust can lead to relaxation, and relaxation can result in spontaneity.

And if you have an opportunity to share a laugh with your interview subject early on, great. Don't force it, though, because most interviewees have little patience for being interviewed by a would-be stand-up comic.

The value of (guided) spontaneity is that it can unearth the offhand facts or opinions that add depth to your writing. The interviews I've done that have been the most productive are those where it was apparent the interviewee felt relaxed enough to engage in some free association.

Every interviewer, of course, has an advantage in that most people respond positively when asked to talk about themselves or something important to them, but it's also important to find something that genuinely interests you about the topic and the interviewee.

My collaboration with Rory Flynn on her book THE BARON OF MULHOLLAND: A Daughter Remembers Errol Flynn was that rare combination of a subject that I found utterly fascinating -- a personal look at one of the film industry's greatest icons and adventurers -- and an interviewee I genuinely liked. Like her father, Rory is strong-willed and passionate on the subjects that matter to her.

And we laughed a lot -- always a good sign.

The series of conversations we had over a period of nine or ten months for the book drew out a number of little-known facts and stories, surprising since there have been more books written about Errol Flynn than almost any other Hollywood celebrity.

One of our discussions started with her father's love of animals and led to Rory's recalling the largely unknown fact that Errol had been recognized by a fledgling ASPCA as an early protector of animals used in filming decades before the animal rights movement took hold in Hollywood:

"One of the reasons my father built Mulholland Farm similar to a ranch in Australia was because of his love for animals. There was a barn on the property and we had a fulltime caretaker tend to the livestock. The animal population on the farm, in fact, continued to grow over the years because my father often adopted some of the livestock after working with them in some of his films.

Horses, sheep, ducks, pigs, chickens, dogs, cats -- even a particularly cheeky monkey named Chico that he brought home after working with him in THAT FORSYTE WOMAN. Chico had the run of the Farm -- though he had a cage, he was rarely locked inside it -- and spent many days tearing up and throwing things around inside the house. Rather than get my father upset, though, his wild antics would merely inspire gales of laughter.

Errol's devotion to animals even led him to take actions on behalf of the animals used in certain films he made. When filming began on THE CHARGE OF THE LIGHT BRIGADE in 1936, for example, he objected to the use of trip wires on the horses and refused to take part unless precautions were taken to minimize any injuries to them. For this he received a letter of appreciation from the ASPCA, a newly formed association that had not yet fully examined animal rights issues within the context of filmmaking."

THE BARON OF MULHOLLAND: A Daughter Remembers Errol Flynn

The delightful Ava B -- yes, that's her legal name -- called me a few years ago and told me that she'd informed her friend Rory that she needed to collaborate with me on a memoir about life with her father.

"Who's her father?" was, of course, the first question to ask.

"Errol Flynn."

"When can we meet?"

Flynn, eminent swashbuckler and bon vivant, film idol and under-appreciated classical actor, whose devil-may-care attitude and lust for life made him an easy target for contemporary morality boards, not to mention J. Edgar Hoover, has been the subject of more books than just about any other Hollywood personality.

And for good reason. While these days the announcement of each year's Number One Box Office personality usually means that an actor was lucky enough to be cast in that year's blockbuster hit, Flynn was Number One Box Office worldwide every year for nearly a decade. He presented a rather large target, especially to those looking to fling a handful of mud that might just stick long enough for their books to make the bestseller list.

When I learned that Rory had a large private collection of her father's writings along with numerous family photographs, I could hardly wait to help her mine the trove for treasure.

Rory I found to be intelligent and sophisticated, and with a great sense of humor -- well, we laughed at each other's jokes, at least -- and very much her father's strong-minded daughter. Rory made it clear that she wanted to write the book she wanted to write. When talks with publishers revealed that they were only interested in what as-yet-untold scandals Rory could share, those talks were short indeed.

"No one knows the story of my father as a family man," she said. "But he put a lot of energy and a great sense of adventure into that, too. That's the story I want to tell."

I proposed that we begin by meeting once a week for 3 or 4 hours and just sharing stories. Eventually, I assured Rory, the structure of the book would reveal itself.

Rory decided to give it a try and thus began several weeks of me sharing very personal, behind-the-scenes stories about the greatest film legend of the Golden Age of Hollywood. Not bad. In the end, she convinced me that I would have really enjoyed knowing her father -- though I am also pretty sure it would've been hard for me to keep up with him.

Rory also spent time debunking many of the scurrilous yarns that have been circulated about her dad over the years, the sorts of things that have always prevented his recognition by leading industry groups like the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, even long after they were proven to be complete fabrications.

"For one thing, they all said he chased every skirt in Hollywood -- Not so!" exclaimed Rory with a laugh, pulling out a close-up of the beatific Errol gazing off dreamily into the distance. "Look at that face. The truth was, my father never had to chase anyone. He had to beat them off with a stick!"

In my next post I'll share an excerpt about the advantages of living in the house that Flynn designed after a typical Australian ranch. More information on the book can be found on Rory's web site at http://www.inlikeflynn.com.

A Brief History of Addition, Part 1

Here is the first part of the Project I student text narrative I recently wrote for a new project-based computer programming course. The course was developed for Pasadena public high school students by the Pasadena Educational Foundation under the leadership of PEF Executive Director Joan Fauvre in Pasadena, California. As I've already mentioned, it was written to provide an historical context for the development of a desktop calculator.

The rest of the narrative will follow in future postings, but in my next post I'll introduce the work I did in collaboration with Rory Flynn on her recent book, THE BARON OF MULHOLLAND: A Daughter Remembers Errol Flynn.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF ADDITION

For thousands of years, almost all scientific innovation has come from the work of inspired individuals. History has shown repeatedly that one person can indeed make a difference. The development of the computer is no exception – its story is a fascinating tale tracing contributions from a wide range of innovative thinkers over many years.

The computer today is everywhere, and is involved in most transactions of daily life, from buying groceries to connecting a telephone call, from sending an email message across the country to watching a movie on DVD at home.

Computers also enable governments and huge corporations to accomplish large-scale tasks that would be impossible without them, like providing Social Security checks on time, distributing daily newspapers around the country or running large factories efficiently.

Another way to think of the power of a computer, like all important scientific advances throughout history, is to examine its ability to introduce a greater sense of intellectual order to a chaotic and difficult-to-understand universe.

Mankind has probably always sensed that there is a good deal of order in nature, but it was not until Galileo “mathematized” the physical sciences around the year 1600 that scientists could begin to explore exactly how the world worked. His ability to develop formulas in order to explain a range of phenomena, from the rate of acceleration of bodies falling in space to the paths of planetary orbits, demonstrated that the world around us is something that can be understood through observation. In this way Galileo helped pave the way for modern science.

Computers today are so integral to our daily lives that it’s hard to believe that the first computer was only unveiled in 1946. ENIAC – the acronym stands for Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer – was 100 feet long, 10 feet high, and three feet deep. It contained 70,000 resistors, 18,000 vacuum tubes, 10,000 capacitors and 6,000 switches…not exactly a model for today’s personal computer.

Because ENIAC was developed in secret during the Second World War, few people have heard of John Mauchly, who developed a fascination with electrical devices at an early age, or Presper Eckert, a young genius who was winning science fairs by the age of twelve and applied for his first patent before the age of twenty-one.

Together, Mauchly and Eckert created the ENIAC, and though the entirety of its computing capacity could today sit on a single integrated circuit, Mauchly and Eckert’s invention made all future computers possible.

More than six decades later, we now live in the age of the supercomputer, and most such machines today are actually composed of highly tuned computer clusters capable of astonishingly fast speeds. The world’s fastest supercomputer is the IBM Roadrunner, located at Los Alamos Laboratory. It was built for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration. Operational since 2008, the Roadrunner is about twice as large as the ENIAC and accomplishes feats such as simulating how nuclear materials age in order to keep the United States’ aging nuclear arsenal safe and reliable.

For all the extraordinary things that a computer can do, it remains a machine whose basic task is the collecting, processing, tracking, comparing, retrieving and storing of information, and its capabilities are still based on mathematics and the primary calculations of addition, subtraction, multiplication and division.

To trace the beginnings of the computer, then, let’s take a look at how those basic mathematical operations first developed, made their way around the world and eventually led to the machine we call the computer.

Back to the Beginning
There is some evidence that primitive man perceived numbers as a quality rather than an abstract representation. In other words, if primitive man saw six horses, then later saw four horses, he would certainly be aware of the difference, even though he never saw those differences in terms of numbers.

Once communication of specific numbers became necessary, the hand became the first counting tool, as children everywhere still demonstrate by learning to count “on their fingers.”

Most likely the necessity for mathematics first arose because of the basic transactions of buying and selling. As societies developed, taxation and the need to measure land also became important.

Historians agree that the earliest man-made counting tool was the abacus, and the earliest version of the abacus, a flat stone covered with sand on which letters and numbers were formed, has been traced to Babylonia, around 2400 BC in the ancient land of Sumer. Located in present-day southern Iraq, Sumer flourished in the region known as the Cradle of Civilization.

Interestingly, the Sumerian numeral system had sixty as its base; this base-60 system was passed down through various civilizations and a form of it is still used today in computing time (sixty seconds to the minutes, sixty minutes to the hour), measurement of angles (360 degrees in a circle), and mapping coordinates (a total of 360 degrees in latitude and longitude).

Figure This
What made the Sumerian system so useful is the fact that sixty is the smallest number that is evenly divisible by every number from 1 to 6.

This means that concepts like hours, angles and mapping directions can be evenly divided into small portions. Most other counting systems are based on ten, probably for the simple reason that that’s how many fingers humans have. One exception, however, is the base-20 numeral system of the Mayan civilization. Historians believe the Mayans used a base of 20 because the huarache sandals they wore exposed their toes, thereby giving them 20 digits with which to count.

The abacus – think of it as one of the earliest forms of man-made technology – was created in various forms throughout many different parts of the world, including Egypt, Greece, Rome, India, China, and even among North Americans of the Western Hemisphere:
• In ancient Babylon, an early form of the abacus was used primarily for the operations of addition and subtraction
• A description of the round abacus used in ancient Egypt was written by a Greek historian, and archaeologists have uncovered a number of discs that are thought to have indeed served as Egyptian counting tools
• Archaeological evidence going back to the 5th Century indicates that the Greek abacus was a wooden table into which small counters made of either wood or metal were set. This style was passed on to ancient Rome and was used even later in the West, right up to the time of the French Revolution in the late 1700’s
• The Incas used a yupana as a counting tool and a series of knotted ropes, called quipu, to record the sums

Perhaps the greatest refinement, however, came with the development of the Chinese abacus. Though the earliest written mention of the abacus in China dates from the 14th Century, an illustration of an early abacus, called a suanpan, can be found in a famous painting by Zhang Zeduan that was completed about a thousand years ago in the early 11th Century.

Instead of using loose beads, the Chinese designed an abacus with beads strung on several parallel rows of thin rods. The beads are used by simply moving them up or down, and sophisticated techniques have been developed to accomplish the operations not only of addition, subtraction, multiplication and division, but also that of square root and cube root, all at a pace that would amaze users of other mechanical counting devices.

In many parts of the world, especially throughout Asia, the abacus is still in widespread use. In Japan, for example, instruction in using the Japanese abacus known the soroban is still taught in elementary school classrooms.

It All Adds Up
The study of these different methods of performing mathematical computations suggests that the process of developing number systems around the world has evolved in similar ways over the past several thousand years, and different number systems even affected each other as civilization grew.

For example, the writing of numbers in columns in order to depict the values of units, tens, hundreds, etc., is common to all of them. Even the Mayan base-20 system has corresponding columns that represent fives, tens and fifteens.

Another example that illustrates how numerical systems evolved in similar ways involves the concept of zero. Originally, zero was used only to represent a number that has no value. This has evolved over time, so that, as a digit, zero is today used primarily as a placeholder. In other words, in the number 2,046, for example, the zero is a placeholder in the hundreds column because there are no hundreds in this number.

The use of zero as a placeholder came about because a number of systems, beginning with the Sumerian, simply left a space or a non-numerical symbol where no value was to be indicated in a larger number, as in the hundreds column of the number “2,046” cited above.

The problem was that this made computations very difficult. The Greeks, too, were puzzled when considering the concept of zero, and scratched their heads over “whether nothing could be considered something” right up to the Middle Ages.

Fractionally Speaking
Fractions, too, illustrate the development of number systems through history.

The earliest known use of the fraction was in ancient Egypt, dated by historians to about 1800 BC. Since all Egyptian writing, even for numbers, was done using hieroglyphs, or pictures that represented concepts, any calculations were extremely difficult to do.

In ancient Rome fractions were also express in words, another sign that they were originally devised as a way to express the relationships between whole numbers, rather than to be used as numbers in their own right.

The Sumerians were the first to devise a more useful way to express fractions within their base-60 number system. Because they didn’t use a zero as a placeholder, however, their numbers and computations were often open to interpretation.

Then a breakthrough happened in India about the year 500AD. It was at this time that several key developments in the Indian number system led to the number system we use today:
• The concept that each numerical figure is represented by a symbol that does not resemble that figure as a picture in the way that hieroglyphs did
• The notion that the value of each numerical figure depends on its placement within the whole number (think units, tens, hundreds, etc.), and
• The idea that zero, besides meaning a value of nothing, can also be used as a placeholder

The Indians developed our current method of writing fractions by placing the numerator over the denominator, though without the horizontal line we use between them.

Due to the trade between India and Arab countries at that time, the use of the Indian number system soon spread to Arab nations. The Arabs were the ones who added the line to separate the numerator from the denominator, sometimes a horizontal line, sometimes a diagonal one.

Once a reliable system of numbers was established, it led to the development of the world’s first mathematicians, often brilliant minds who used numbers in various ways to measure – and help make sense – of the world around them.
In the 9th Century, the caliph of Baghdad, Harun al-Rashid, established the House of Wisdom, a major intellectual center of the Islamic Golden Age. Within it were gathered many of the world’s brightest scholars of the day, devoted to gathering and translating all the knowledge of the known world.

One such scholar, a Persian mathematician named Al-Khwarizmi, spent most of his adult life at the House and made significant contributions to the fields of mathematics, astronomy, geography and cartography.

It was Al-Khwarizmi who took the Indian invention of using zero as a placeholder within a positional number system – a positional number system is one in which each digit derives its value from its position in the number – and went on to establish the new field of algebra, advancing mathematics far beyond the Greeks’ main contribution of developing the principles of geometry. Among Al-Khwarizmi’s major works is a book entitled AL-JABR, named for the operation used to solve quadratic equations that he described in the book.

Some three centuries later, Leonardo Fibonacci of Pisa (c. 1170) was born the son of a state official in charge of the trading customs house in the city today known as Bejaia, Algeria, in North Africa. As a boy he traveled there with his father and there became fascinated with Hindu-Arabic numerals. Because they were so much easier and efficient than Roman numerals, he made a study of them for some years.

At the age of 32, Fibonacci wrote and published LIBER ABACI (BOOK OF CALCULATIONS) and with it introduced to Europe all that he had learned of Hindu-Arabic numerals.

In LIBER ABACI Fibonacci wrote of the nine Arabic numerals we use today. He also presented the concept of zero as a placeholder in numbers. In addition, the book demonstrated the usefulness of the new system in a variety of applications, such as its use in weights and measures, in general bookkeeping and in calculating interest.

Fibonacci’s LIBER ABACI was very well received and eventually caught the attention of Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II, who was a major patron of science and the arts. In this way, learning made its way around the world.

Part 2 is entitled "A Revolution in Ideas."

Computer Programming I...the background

The last project I completed was writing the student text and Teacher's Guide for a new "Computer Programming I" course for the Pasadena Educational Foundation. Aimed at Pasadena public high school students, it was an interesting challenge for several reasons.

First, it was a project-based course. Students would learn to program by working out a number of projects that ran the gamut from creating an on-screen calculator to writing a program that could code and decode messages, from creating a program that could translate messages into (and from) Morse Code for long-distance communication, to writing a program that simulated the construction and launch of a rocket.

It was decided early on that for the student text I would write a narrative for each project that would place it within an historical context, and since I have always had a considerable interest in the study of history--as well as studied it while attending Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service--I looked forward to researching and writing it.

Before I began, though, I decided that each narrative must accomplish three things:

1. It must be interesting enough to engage the students
2. It must highlight the obstacles that stood in the way of innovation at different points and recount how innovators used logic to overcome them
3. It must reinforce to students that innovation most often occurs due to the efforts of inspired individuals

I should also mention that I knew very little about the art and science of computer programming. What I did have going for me was the fact that I have a lot of experience in writing about technical subjects in a way that makes it understandable to business decision makers. Or, as I said in my initial interview when asked why they should hire me with no background in computer programming: "I can translate technology into English so that it's understandable by both students and teachers."

Fortunately, I had as my partner in the project a passionate teacher (and former programmer) named Javier Andre. Together we spent many hours talking through the step-by-step processes that formed the structure of the course; I also spent a lot of time in the actual classrooms listening to both Javier and his students in order to further clarify the Teacher's Guide.

I knew that the first challenge, an on-screen calculator project, would be formidable since the topic itself made me yawn every time I thought about it. I knew too that a title like "A History of Calculators" would probably ensure that the texts were never even opened, much less read.

In the end, I opted for taking a slightly larger view of the topic and wrote "A Brief History of Addition."

I'm just starting to put this blog together, so please be patient.

Let me start by telling you a bit about who I am and about what I intend to write.

My name is Bill Bremer and I'm based in Los Angeles. I've been a marketing writer for some time, serving a variety of industries--from entertainment to education, telecom to IT infrastructure, among others--often with a focus on various types of technology. I mean to share what I hope are helpful tips to others who are interested in the writing process and the power of the written word.

I'll also post some samples of my work, and would appreciate (and respond to) any comments readers might like to share.

Writing is, after all, a solitary task, and dialogue is always helpful.