Doggerybaw

In Defense of Numbers

December 15th, 2006 by scott

A couple people have suggested that maybe I’m using this blog to be a little too anti-math. OK, I love words, and I don’t much care for numbers, and the bias shows. But, I want to make it clear that numbers and math are important to me too. They’re just not as fun to play with.

Let’s face it, without numbers, there’d be no music. And, much to the chagrin of some mathophobes, music not only relies on numbers, it depends on the much-maligned concept of fractions. Practically all musical expression is done through fractions. Sure, notes are expressed by letters, but chords are mathematical patterns made from those letters.

A song is one place where words and numbers live in harmony.

Literally.

You also have to have math in the kitchen. I love to cook, and I love to bake my own bread. I won’t talk too much about cooking since I rarely use recipes, but when I do, I rarely want to make exactly the amount shown in the recipe. To increase the amount you cook, you have to be able multiply fractions. whether you’re simply doubling the recipe or multiplying it a more specific way, such as cooking two and a half times what the recipe specifies.

The math gets far more complicated in bread baking. Once you get past simple recipes, bread formulas are often expressed in percentages, such as the percentage of flour to water. To make your own recipe or even to increase the amount of bread you want to make from an existing formula, you have to be able to work with those percentages. Whether you’re making one pound or ten, the percentages remain the same, and you have to take those percentages and apply them to the amounts of each ingredient to figure out how much of each you need. mess up and you have bad bread.

So, yes, math plays a part in areas of my life that I really enjoy. But it’s still not as much fun as words. Numbers are a practical necessity, and can be a part of fun. But i can’t sit for hours and play with them like I can words.

And they’re boring to talk about, so I’m keeping this entry short.

Posted in Numbers

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