names

I read a lot of books on the history of religion and most of them deny a historical David and Solomon, well they don't deny it, they just say they can't find them in history outside the bible.  They say well there is this excavated fort here and mention of some king there and maybe they are the sources of the story of David and Solomon.  I guess it really doesn't  matter whether they existed or not any more than it matters whether or not Shakespeare wrote those plays.  I'm sorry I brought it up.  Sometimes I am too argumentative. 

I remember Dick and Jane but not John and Mary.  I don't remember at all the prohibition on nicknames.  I'm not sure if nickname is the proper name for different forms of a name, I always thought of nicknames as something with no relation to the name like Curly or Lefty, and that the diminutive, Kenny, and the short, Ken were just different forms of the same name of equal standing with the formal name, Kenneth.  But maybe I missed that because it seems like I spent most of my time in class pretending my pencil was a rocket ship and it was blasting off from its launching pad which was the defunct inkwell.  And when I think back to my grade school buddies, Robert McVey, Edward Puls, Michael Weber, they all seem to have formal names

When I was subbing there was usually a seating plan or sometimes the names were written on the desks, but some of them were Hispanic and Black people's names aren't always the same as White people's names, and even White people don't name the kids the same way we were named way back then.  And how well are you going to remember the names of thirty kids?  In my case not likely at all so early on I gave up on that.  I used the expression Hey a lot, so much that at the end of the day I could hear the kids mocking me for it. 


I generally don't feel like I am giving a full post if I stop writing before I get to the bottom of the box and begin to scroll down.  I would like to go on about math, but the dawgs have indicated little interest in the subject, but then, as Beagles is fond of saying, that has never stopped me before. 

The Greeks got the beginning of their math from Egypt and Mesopotamia, but that was all practical stuff like measuring fields and crude commerce.  It was just a tool and not a delight.  The Egyptians and Mesopotamians knew there was a number that expressed the ratio between the diameter and the circumference of a circle, but they didn't know exactly what it was.  They used some expression like 3 1/7 and that was close to enough for their purposes.  It took the Greeks to determine what its true value is, and not only that but it was a totally different kind of number, which led the way to a discovery of a whole new order of infinity two thousand years later. 

3 1/7 was fine of you are working with the wheel on your ox-drawn cart, but it will never take you to the moon.