Monday
Yesterday, I attended a most enjoyable Sunday lunch, with an old school friend and his wife . It began at a civilised time, 2pm, which enabled me, before departing, to hear the winner of CD Review's pick of the best available recording of Haydn's Symphony No. 88 on Radio 3. This delightfully sunny piece is one of my favouries, and Colin Davis and the Concertgebouw played it wonderfully. As I walked across the Thames to Vauxhall Station I took photos, in the perfect early February yet spring-like weather. The train I travelled on arrived at Vauxhall exactly when I reached the platform it stopped at, and was agreeably uncrowded. The walk from Wimbledon Station to my friend's home was most pleasant. So I was in a good mood when I got there, and nothing happened from then on to spoil my enjoyment in any way.
Anyway. One of those present was a rather rich man, and I now know how you can tell a rich man. Ask him how many houses he owns. He hesitates, and then he starts counting on his fingers.
Someone (Buncker ?) said: "if you can still count them (let alone on your fingers) you're not that rich".
Posted by Jacob at February 5, 2007 10:33 PM
If he was counting in Binary on his fingers , on one hand he would have 31 houses and if using 2 hands he could have up to 1023 homes. That sounds pretty rich to me.
Posted by tranio at February 6, 2007 01:57 AM
Binary, BAH!
A REAL man would need hexadecimal:
FFFFFFFFFF = 1,099,511,627,775
Now that's rich by GALACTIC standards!
Posted by tomWright at February 6, 2007 02:17 AM
When I saw the headline for this post, I thought, "Oh no, a morality play."
Materialism - what a pleasant surprise!
Posted by Adam at February 6, 2007 04:17 AM
I like the way the Koreans (and now how I) can count very simply to 100 using just their hands, and no binary tricks either...
Posted by TimC at February 6, 2007 10:55 AM
I always thought a rich man was someone who could afford to live on the other side of the Thames from Vauxhall tube (as opposed to on the same side).
BTW, how do Koreans use their hands to count up to 100?
Posted by smallwit at February 6, 2007 12:43 PM
I always put the definition of a rich man as someone of my acquaintance who can look at a clock and smile, in the knowledge that in that second he has just made another £100 ...
Posted by Julian Taylor at February 6, 2007 02:45 PM
"In the 1920's [Spencer] Penrose negotiated the sale of Utah Copper to the Kennecott Copper Company. He emerged from the lists with approximately $40,000,000 in profits despite the fact that along the way he had lost what most men would consider substantial fortunes in such ventures as real estate in the city of Penrose, just north of Florence, Colorado, and Alaska gold stocks. It cost him $500,000 to have a town named after him and he never gave it a thought. On one of his ranches he experimented with burning the range grass annually until one spring the fire got out of hand and burned up most of El Paso County. Penrose paid for the county and told his foremen to be more careful in the future."(Lucius Beebe, 1966, "The Big Spenders", p. 222)
"[Gene] Fowler was present at a meeting between [William Randolph] Hearst and Henry Ford where, over the after-dinner coffee, the conversation took a turn to money matters. Mr. Ford took a dim view of the current state of the stock market, prophetically as it turned out, and suddenly asked the master of San Simeon: 'Mr. Hearst, have you got any money?'
'I never have any money, Mr. Ford,' replied Hearst, who had just purchased a Spanish monastery and was having it knocked down stone by stone and loaded in a freighter for reconstruction in California. 'I always seem to have spent any money I have coming before I get it.'
'That's no way to conduct your affairs,' Ford said. 'You ought to get yourself four or five hundred million dollars in cash. Tuck it away and forget about it. It'll come in handy sometime for a rainy day.'"
(ibid, pp. 58-59)
Posted by Billy Beck at February 6, 2007 03:40 PM
The "Buncker" I refered to above was Nelson Bunker Hunt
He was questioned in an official US Senate hearing, about his attempt to corner the global silver market (now - that would be "rich"). He was asked by one of the Senators:
- Could you kindly tell this distinguished commitee how much money you have ?
Bunker Hunt:
- I haven't counted lately. Those who constanlty count their money, probably don't own that much.
Posted by Jacob at February 6, 2007 03:59 PM
Back when I lived in South Africa, travel to Europe was hideously expensive (not to mention the cost once one arrived).
I was talking about Paris one day, whereupon one young lady commented: "I hate Paris. I've never been there when it wasn't raining."
On one wall of her house were about two hundred pieces of paper, each mounted in its own picture frame. They were letters written to one of her great-great aunts by one Charles Dickens...
Posted by Kim du Toit at February 6, 2007 06:03 PM
smallwit: Two hands. One is 0-9, the other 0-90 in tens.
4 Fingers are 1-4, thumb is 0 (down) or +5 to the fingers (up).
Thus, 63 is one hand: three fingers up, no thumb (3), other hand: thumb and one finger up (6, i.e. 60).
It (almost) mimics the abacus with the thumbs being the "upper deck".
You can then count to 99 (ok, I lied, it is 0-99, not really 100) and most people in the UK get stuck at 9...
Posted by TimC at February 6, 2007 06:09 PM
TimC,
I used to count hexdec on my fingers all the time back in the early 1980s when I would calculate file blocking and stuff like that. Once I looked up from counting on my fingers to see a room full of people. The president of the company was bringing through a tour (the board?) to show them our wonderful state of the art computer center. Oops.
My method only went to 256. Fingers of each hand are 1,2,4 & 8 and the thumb was the memory. Saved converting to dec and back.
Posted by Midwesterner at February 7, 2007 12:01 AM
