{"id":3162,"date":"2022-06-28T20:15:47","date_gmt":"2022-06-28T19:15:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/oxfordquaker.com\/newsletter\/?page_id=3162"},"modified":"2022-06-30T17:12:53","modified_gmt":"2022-06-30T16:12:53","slug":"beware-adders","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/oxfordquaker.com\/newsletter\/july-2022\/beware-adders\/","title":{"rendered":"Beware Adders"},"content":{"rendered":"

Anne Watson<\/strong><\/p>\n

Keith Wilson\u2019s article in the June issue of Forty-Three made me chuckle. For a couple of years my laptop has opened to a photograph of this sign \u2018Beware Adders\u2019 found on the Isle of Mull next to a remote honesty shop.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Photo provided by Anne Watson<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I use this because I am someone who thinks mathematically, and adding is a very unimaginative way of proceeding in a calculation and might not get you very far, or even be the sensible thing to do. It is a human tendency because even very young infants seem to understand the ideas of \u2018more\u2019, and counting on fingers is physically easier than subtracting on fingers. Think about how we recite the words for numbers: we encourage children to recite them in ascending order. Rarely, apart from \u2018countdowns\u2019, do we recite them backwards. Keith contrasts adding with reducing: reducing clutter; reducing overload; simplifying; maybe reducing consumption; identifying what can be removed \u2013 all valuable perspectives.<\/p>\n

But as a mathematician I contrast adding with multiplying, which has more power than adding \u2013 power that can be beneficial or can be dangerous. Yes, multiplying can lead to rapid exponential growth that can be worrying, but it can also spread good things faster. Thinking about multiplying can give a better understanding of what is going right or what is going wrong. In Danny Dorling\u2019s book Slowdown he looks at some statistics that we all worry about: more pollution, more disease, more population, more weapons. But he then turns us away from these worrying \u2018mores\u2019 to look at how fast they are growing, and sees some hopeful signs of slowdown by looking at the hidden multiplication rates. Thinking about multiplying can help us be more effective; if I spread a good message to five people, and they each spread it to another five, we have multiplication to multitudes. If instead we only tell one person, and they only tell one person, it will take a long time to reach multitudes, even if the chain is unbroken. In the Bible the number \u2018seven\u2019 is often used to indicate fullness or completion. Jesus is famously reported as thinking of goodness in a multiplicative way, endlessly in Matthew 18 verses 21, 22. Peter asks how many times he should forgive someone who repeatedly \u2018sins\u2019 against him \u2013 seven times maybe? In the King James version Jesus says “Until seventy times seven.”<\/p>\n

These are some of the reasons why I kept the \u2018beware adders\u2019 sign, but I liked Keith\u2019s slightly different point. He gave me a vivid image of how I might say \u2018\u2026 and another thing\u2019 to someone, while knowing from my own experience that the \u2018another thing\u2019 is likely to obscure whatever has gone before.<\/p>\n

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Forty-Three<\/em> Newsletter \u2022 Number 519 \u2022 July 2022
\n<\/strong>Oxford Friends Meeting
\n43 St Giles, Oxford OX1 3LW<\/p>\n

newsletter@oxfordquakers.org<\/a><\/p>\n

Copyright 2022, Oxford Quakers<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Anne Watson Keith Wilson\u2019s article in the June issue of Forty-Three made me chuckle. For a couple of years my laptop has opened to a photograph of this sign \u2018Beware Adders\u2019 found on the Isle of Mull next to a remote honesty shop. I use this because I am someone who thinks mathematically, and adding … Continue reading Beware Adders<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":50,"featured_media":0,"parent":3145,"menu_order":3,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3162","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/oxfordquaker.com\/newsletter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/3162","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/oxfordquaker.com\/newsletter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/oxfordquaker.com\/newsletter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oxfordquaker.com\/newsletter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/50"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oxfordquaker.com\/newsletter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3162"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/oxfordquaker.com\/newsletter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/3162\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3289,"href":"https:\/\/oxfordquaker.com\/newsletter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/3162\/revisions\/3289"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oxfordquaker.com\/newsletter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/3145"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/oxfordquaker.com\/newsletter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3162"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oxfordquaker.com\/newsletter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3162"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oxfordquaker.com\/newsletter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3162"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}