Abacus Quotes

He described the securities - called Abacus - to a girlfriend: I had some input into the creation of this product (which by the way is a product of pure intellectual masturbation, the type of thing which you invent telling yourself 'Well, what if we created a "thing," which has no purpose, which is absolutely conceptual and highly theoretical and which nobody knows how to price?').15 ~ John Kay

Sociologists are those academic accountants who think that truth can be shaken from an abacus. ~ Peter S. Prescott

Yakov spent the whole day playing his fiddle; when it got completely dark, he took the notebook in which he recorded his losses daily, and out of boredom began adding up the yearly total. It came to over a thousand roubles. This astounded him so much that he flung the abacus to the floor and stamped his feet. Then he picked up the abacus, again clicked away for a long time, and sighed deeply and tensely. His face was purple and wet with sweat. He thought that if he could have put that lost thousand roubles in the bank, he would have earned at least forty roubles a year in interest. And therefore those forty roubles were a loss. In short, wherever you turned, there was nothing but losses everywhere.
- Rothchild's Fiddle ~ Anton Chekhov

If you imagine the difference between an abacus and the world's fastest supercomputer, you would still not have the barest inkling of how much more powerful a quantum computer could be compared with the computers we have today. ~ Marcus Chown

We dwell amid pinheaded weasels who know only timid, the generic and the abacus. ~ Danny Baker

Dark furrow lines grid the snow, punctuated by orange abacus beads of pumpkins - now the crows own the field ... ~ John Geddes

I didn't have a computer until I was 19 - but I did have an abacus. ~ Jan Koum

Howard and Shirley were clothed, always, in an invisible layer of decorum that they never laid aside. ~ J.K. Rowling

To look after a medieval estate, one required a map, an indexed account book and an abacus. For its time, this was a highly sophisticated geographical information system. Looking after the earth and each of its parts requires more data, a better index and more data processing. ~ Tom Turner

We should do this on computer," she said, chalking it carefully for the eighty-ninth time. "With a drawing pad."
"Nonsense. You're lucky I don't make you inscribe it with a stylus on a wax tablet, like the old days," Myrnin snorted. "Children. Spoiled children, always playing with the shinest toy."
"Computers are more efficient!"
"I can perform calculations on that abacus faster than you can solve them on your computer," Myrnin sneered.
Okay, now he was pissing her off. "Prove it!"
"What?"
"Prove it." She backed off on her tone, but Myrnin wasn't looking angry; he was looking strangely interested. He stared at her for a second in silence, and then he got the biggest, oddest smile she'd ever seen on the face of a vampire.
"All right," he said. "A contest. Computer versus abacus."
She wasn't at all sure now that was a good idea, even if it had been her idea, essentially. "Um -- what do I win?" More importantly, what do I lose? Making bargains was a way of life in Morganville, and it was a lot like making deals with man-eating fairies. Better be careful what you ask for.
"Your freedom," he said solemnly. His eyes were wide and guileless, his too-young face shining with honesty. "I will tell Amelie you were not suited to the work. She'll let you go about your life, such as it is."
Good prize. Too good. Claire swallowed hard. "And if I lose?"
"Then I eat you," Myrnin said. ~ Rachel Caine

I don't understand people who eat Chinese food with chopsticks when the restaurant also offers silverware. As a tool, chopsticks are inferior to western utensils like the spoon and fork. So why use them? That's like showing up to a math test with an abacus, knowing that the teacher is going to be handing out calculators. ~ Jarod Kintz

The human brain has the computational efficiency of 10^-26. You are an abacus of horse guts and shiny beads beside me. You do not understand. Cannot comprehend. And I have no time to bend the meat inside your skull and make it grasp the simple truth that still somehow eludes you. ~ Amie Kaufman

And there is one disconcerting thing about working with a computer – it's likely to talk back to you. You make some tiny mistake in your FORTRAN language – putting a letter in the wrong column, say, or omitting a comma – and the 360 comes to a screeching halt and prints out rude remarks, like "ILLEGAL FORMAT," or "UNKNOWN PROBLEM," or, if the man who wrote the program was really feeling nasty that morning, "WHAT'S THE MATTER STUPID? CAN'T YOU READ?" Everyone who uses a computer frequently has had, from time to time, a mad desire to attack the precocious abacus with an axe. ~ John Drury Clark

I remain fundamentally optimistic about
Wall Street as a marketplace and as a vehicle for wealth creation. Its
future will rightly depend on several variables, chief among them
being human choices; whether they be rationally, emotionally, subjectively
or objectively made. Financial engineering taught us that if
it could be quantified, it could be qualified. We learned about how
to use leverage and have abused that knowledge for a myriad of
reasons. We became practitioners of the transaction-based model, but forgot that long before the abacus there was trust and integrity,
anchors of relationship-based models common with Middle East and
Asian markets. It goes back to a handshake, the first and enduring
example of mutual consensus. ~ Ziad K. Abdelnour

Well, what we called a computer in 1977 was really a kind of electric abacus, but…" "Oh, now, don't underestimate the abacus," said Reg. "In skilled hands it's a very sophisticated calculating device. Furthermore it requires no power, can be made with any materials you have to hand, and never goes bing in the middle of an important piece of work." "So an electric one would be particularly pointless," said Richard. "True enough," conceded Reg. ~ Douglas Adams

fact, all the other war news was almost disregarded and the population had no way of getting any other news reports, since radios were unavailable. My Russian boss, for whom I prepared all the lists and bread ration cards, was a blond, slim Northerner from Leningrad. When sober, he was distant and quite proper; but when he was drunk, one had a hard time fighting him off. He was very demanding and we were forever writing. In the entire section there was not a single typewriter. Everything was written longhand. The bookkeepers were using the abacus, the only available calculator. ~ Pearl Fichman

Turning to Ann Gower, she smiled. "You're a good woman, Ann Gower."
Ann Gower drew back and looked askance at Mary. "Don't you go ruinin' me reputation, Mary Abacus. I be a real bad woman, but a bloody good whore, and you knows it! ~ Bryce Courtenay

All right. Here's the deal. You're eight," he said. "I'm nine," I said. "Do I look like I carry an abacus with your name on it? Cut me some slack here, son. ~ Justin Halpern

Let's say I will rip your life apart. Me and my banker friends.
How can he explain that to him? The world is not run from where he thinks. Not from border fortresses, not even from Whitehall. The world is run from Antwerp, from Florence, from places he has never imagined; from Lisbon, from where the ships with sails of silk drift west and are burned up in the sun. Not from the castle walls, but from counting houses, not be the call of the bugle, but by the click of the abacus, not by the grate and click of the mechanism of the gun but by the scrape of the pen on the page of the promissory note that pays for the gun and the gunsmith and the powder and shot. ~ Hilary Mantel

The I.B.M. machine has no ethic of its own; what it does is enable one or two people to do the computing work that formerly required many more people. If people often use it stupidly, it's their stupidity, not the machine's, and a return to the abacus would not exorcise the failing. People can be treated as drudges just as effectively without modern machines. ~ William H. Whyte