• Complain

George Shaffner - The Arithmetic of Life and Death

Here you can read online George Shaffner - The Arithmetic of Life and Death full text of the book (entire story) in english for free. Download pdf and epub, get meaning, cover and reviews about this ebook. year: 2001, publisher: Ballantine Books, genre: Romance novel. Description of the work, (preface) as well as reviews are available. Best literature library LitArk.com created for fans of good reading and offers a wide selection of genres:

Romance novel Science fiction Adventure Detective Science History Home and family Prose Art Politics Computer Non-fiction Religion Business Children Humor

Choose a favorite category and find really read worthwhile books. Enjoy immersion in the world of imagination, feel the emotions of the characters or learn something new for yourself, make an fascinating discovery.

No cover
  • Book:
    The Arithmetic of Life and Death
  • Author:
  • Publisher:
    Ballantine Books
  • Genre:
  • Year:
    2001
  • Rating:
    4 / 5
  • Favourites:
    Add to favourites
  • Your mark:
    • 80
    • 1
    • 2
    • 3
    • 4
    • 5

The Arithmetic of Life and Death: summary, description and annotation

We offer to read an annotation, description, summary or preface (depends on what the author of the book "The Arithmetic of Life and Death" wrote himself). If you haven't found the necessary information about the book — write in the comments, we will try to find it.

Whether you realize it or not, numbers are everywhere--and integral to almost every facet of your life . . . from your next raise in pay to the inevitable rise of inflation, your weekly family budget to your end of the national debt. And as George Shaffner amazingly reveals, there are discerning answers (and a great measure of comfort) in numbers. In The Arithmetic of Life, he applies the basic principles of mathematics--addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division--to some of the most profound and just plain puzzling questions of our time.
Illuminated with anecdotes, humor, and insight, each chapter explains a unique part of life that can be understood only through the magic of numbers. Whether its an unconventional theory on why more things go wrong than right, a simple calculation of how much it will cost you to smoke for a lifetime, why crime (accumulatively) doesnt pay, or a glimpse into the probability of life after death, this enlightening and lucidly reasoned book will forever change the way you think about numbers--and the world around you.

George Shaffner: author's other books


Who wrote The Arithmetic of Life and Death? Find out the surname, the name of the author of the book and a list of all author's works by series.

The Arithmetic of Life and Death — read online for free the complete book (whole text) full work

Below is the text of the book, divided by pages. System saving the place of the last page read, allows you to conveniently read the book "The Arithmetic of Life and Death" online for free, without having to search again every time where you left off. Put a bookmark, and you can go to the page where you finished reading at any time.

Light

Font size:

Reset

Interval:

Bookmark:

Make
More praise for Living by the Numbers An appealing mix of common sense and - photo 1
More praise forLiving by the Numbers

An appealing mix of common sense and solid reasoning Written in lively style, with sly wit Shines light into several interesting corners of everyday life, often with surprising results.

Kirkus Reviews

Shaffners writing is clever and clear. Its highly probable that many readers will learn from it.

Publishers Weekly

A Ballantine Book Published by The Ballantine Publishing Group Copyright 1999 - photo 2

A Ballantine Book
Published by The Ballantine Publishing Group

Copyright 1999 by George Shaffner

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by The Ballantine Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

Ballantine and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

www.randomhouse.com/BB/

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 00-193407

eISBN: 978-0-307-77574-0

v3.1

For Grace, our children, and their children

Contents
Acknowledgments

I wish to thank the following for their instrumental contributions to The Arithmetic of Life and Death:

  • Anya Karavanov, for her diligent research;
  • Bill Brastow, for checking and rechecking the calculations;
  • Pat Brown, for being the devils advocate in the details;
  • Jane Dystel, my agent, for having the courage to take me in;
  • Cheryl Woodruff, my editor, for slapping me around; and
  • Grace, for listening to it all, over and over, without (much) complaint.
Preface:
The Refugees from Math

and the different branches of arithmeticAmbition, Distraction, Uglification, and Derision.

LEWIS CARROLL

T he Arithmetic of Life and Death began by accident in 1997 when I noticed a change in my octogenarian mother-in-law. Normally a cheerful, bright woman, her mood began to darken as her brother-in-law, also in his eighties, slowly lost his fight against cancer and its complications. Certainly, my mother-in-law was sad for him and for her older sister. But there was something else gnawing at her from within. For the first time in her life, she was afraid of dying. Though a devout, lifelong Catholic, she was afraid because she wasnt absolutely sure that there was another life waiting for her on the other side of this one.

Not the spontaneous hugging sort, I decided to write Life after Death, a brief essay that uses common sense, along with rudimentary chaos theory and a little inferential logic, to establish a secular case for life after death. I do not claim to have cracked the mystery of the ages, but my mother-in-law seemed to feel a lot better after she read it.

If a little chaos could help my mother-in-law believe in life after death, I dared to believe that a little arithmetic could help my twenty-year-old son understand why he was involved in motor vehicle mishaps with such consistency. The result was a short, arithmetic essay called The Odds of Getting Caught. The speeding tickets stopped. That success inspired The Value of Education, which compares the career earnings of a high school dropout, a high school graduate, and a college graduate using earnings data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. My son finished high school.

Shortly thereafter, a personnel problem at work motivated me to write Prima Donna Effect and Teamwork, both of which use simple arithmetic models to show why people have to work together. My success in implementing the lessons learned from those two essays later prompted the writing of Common Cause and Why More Things Go Wrong, by which time The Arithmetic of Life and Death had taken on a life of its own.

As the chapters increased in number, I began to discover that many of my relatives, a few of my friends, and practically all politicians seem to live their lives in a sort of innumerate blissa state in which virtually all remnants of mathematical thought have been exorcised since high school. These people are the Refugees from Math.

Now is not a good time to be a Math Refugee. This is the Age of Information; numbers are everywhere: time and temperature, height and weight, speed and distance, power and capacity, prices and discounts. Principal, interest, taxes, and insurance. Dealer prep, transportation, licenses, and fees. All of these are numbers. They represent information that is different from words. Each and every one of them can be applied, analyzed, and manipulatedespecially manipulatedin thousands of ways that words cant.

It is important to preserve this distinction between words and numbers. For example, although the word ten can be subtracted from the word twenty, the result is the rather difficult to express wty. And even if it were possible to settle on a standard pronunciation, it might be somewhat harder to agree on how to multiply wty by eleven. For similar reasons, it was essential that Roman numerals, which look exactly like letters of the alphabet, were replaced by the distinctive and elegant Arabic number system sometime prior to the creation of NASA. (Skeptics and the innumerati should consider a simple example, such as dividing MMCCLXV by CCCLXIII, before appealing the matter to the Roman Catholic Church.)

Astronauts and rocket scientists notwithstanding, there seem to be a lot of Math Refugees out there. How else can one explain tailgaters, who cause one-sixth of all traffic accidents in return for getting to work about two seconds sooner (from The Tailgaters Advantage)? Or teenagers who leave high school just before their senior year, when a diploma could be worth half a million dollars more to them in future income (from The Value of Education)? Or that coworker (and every office seems to have at least one) who apparently feels no personal obligation to perform actual work (from Why You Must Produce)?

These arent nickel-and-dime mistakes. They are limb-threatening, self-impoverishing, or employment-ending errors. None of them should be made by someone who understands how to apply arithmetic to everyday problems. Plain old arithmetic. Differential calculus, number theory, finite geometry, and every other form of advanced mathematics are not at all necessary. That is because every discipline of mathematics is constructed on the four corners of arithmetic: addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. Intelligent application of these four simple tools, which everyone understands, can solve almost any problem.

Except one. Every year in every high school, when the last bell rings after the last class of Algebra II, in a moment of unrestrained group euphoria, the Refugees from Math shut down their left brains, and another small exodus from math begins.

After twenty-eight years of paternal observation, eighteen years of math and statistics education, and a day or two of nostalgic reflection, I concluded that the continuing exodus from math remains rooted in the way that it has always been taught: too much abstraction, too much symbolism (the equations), too much complexity, too much rigor (all those proofs!), and lessons that were and are too damned long. Thus, the design criteria for The Arithmetic of Life and Death became: Use real-life examples, use actual words and numbers, keep it simple, keep it short, and exterminate all equations with unknown stuff in them (okay, theres one in Are We Alone?).

Next page
Light

Font size:

Reset

Interval:

Bookmark:

Make

Similar books «The Arithmetic of Life and Death»

Look at similar books to The Arithmetic of Life and Death. We have selected literature similar in name and meaning in the hope of providing readers with more options to find new, interesting, not yet read works.


Reviews about «The Arithmetic of Life and Death»

Discussion, reviews of the book The Arithmetic of Life and Death and just readers' own opinions. Leave your comments, write what you think about the work, its meaning or the main characters. Specify what exactly you liked and what you didn't like, and why you think so.