Here are some personal experiences from my diary as a global traveler.
Simple Math — in Roman Numerals!
On a visit to Granada, Spain I toured the Alhambra, the palace originally constructed as a small fortress in AD 889 on the remains of Roman fortifications, and then largely ignored until its ruins were renovated and rebuilt in the mid-13th century. After the conclusion of the Christian Reconquista in 1492, the site became the Royal Court of Ferdinand and Isabella (where Christopher Columbus received royal endorsement for his expedition), and the palaces were partially altered in the Renaissance style.
I must admit that I was on the lookout formy Spanish guide to express any anti-Muslim remarks since it was not long after some terrorist against had occured in the larger Spanish cities. Instead, I was not only pleased but enlighted by his remarks about the great benefit that came for all of the West from cooperation between the Moors and the Spanish.
He pointed out that the numbers we use everyday were brough to Spain by Arabic people who had little difficulty showing how much better they were for doing math than Roman numerals. All those Ms, Xs and Ls were fine for labeling things, but not for doing addition, subtraction, multiplication or division. The power of the demical which reides in Arabic numbers has probably done more for engineering, science, accounting and so many other fields.
Numbers Don’t Lie
A German colleague relayed to me an interesting experience on his first trip to a large American city. He was booked into a high-rise hotel and on check-in received his coded key card in a small jacket on which the desk clerk wrote his room number. Standing in front of room 512 he discovered that his key did not work and so he returned to the front desk. From time to time the coding of the magnetic stripe on those entry cards fails to work properly. So the clerk programmed a new one and gave it to him. But upon returning to the door to room 512, he found that he still could not get in.He was becoming a little annoyed when he returned again to the lobby. So the hotel sent a staff member with him to try out the third key. But the staff member did not go to the door of 512. He went to the door of 572 because Americans write the 7 without a little bar in the middle the way Germans do.
German 1 and 7
The English 7 looks a lot like the
German 1 when written hastily
Similarly, an American had best be aware that when a German suggests they meet on the first floor, the American must go up one level from the ground floor. It is customary in Germany and some other European countries to consider the ground floor as floor 0. Thus the ninth floor would actually be the 10th level.
I once encountered a situation where the German system caused a very strange anomaly in the telephone system of hotel. In order to provide transparency for room to room calls the hotel wanted their in room extensions to be numbered the same as the room number itself. But they also had rooms on the ground floor and the phone system was not designed to allow numbers beginning in zero. So all first floor (one level above the ground) rooms had phone numbers starting in one. Second-floor rooms began with two, third-floor rooms with three. But the ground floor rooms had telephone extensions beginning with four and the hotel decided to give room numbers that matched the telephone numbers. And so it occurred that if you wanted to go to room 307 you would go up three levels to the third floor but if you wanted to go to room 403 you would stay on the ground floor since all ground floor rooms began with four in order to match their telephone numbers.
So, don’t take your numbers for granted!
Herb