Ellington

A. Now that's a full-strength question. It reminds of the tutti fruiti sauce my neighbor Sam Brooks brought me the other day. It was his grandmother's recipe, he said, and when poured over vanilla ice cream would create an "adult dessert." With that introduction, I determined to find out immediately. And may I tell you, Sam Brooks is a man of his word. If you aren't an adult before you eat his grandma's tutti fruiti sauce, you'll be one when you've finished! Believe me, she knew that tutti outranks fruiti any day of the year. If only she were answering the reader's question … .

But alas, it's only me—though I am definitely emboldened by her spirited sauce. So here goes. The answer is both, of course. Both God and the devil are in the details. The devil's always around on the front end when you're sweating and toiling over all those little particulars of the activity in question and wondering why you ever got into it. That's the devil, grinning and hissing and provoking you to you say words your mama didn't even know. But once you've finished the job, it's those details that make a difference, that make your work worthwhile, that make it God's work, you might say. Hmm? Pause over that bit of theology a moment.

Q. Why are the numbers on the keypad of the computer different from those on the telephone? (The telephone numbers start at the top left, and those on the computer keyboard begin on the bottom left.)
— Mathematically Puzzled

A. The computer keypad follows the calculator, of course. And you know the calculator is the offspring of the adding machine and cash register, which looked (and, I think, worked) sort of like an abacus. On those early machines, there were 10 rows of numbers, with nine of the same number on each row, starting with 0 at the bottom. 0 has the lowest value, so I presume that's why it was at the bottom. The first row from the left would add up to nine, the second to 90, the third to 900, and so on. (I sometimes worked the cash register at my uncle's grocery store in Texas.) When the 10-digit system was developed, the creators merely adapted the same bottom-up, left-to-right configuration. But why isn't the touchtone telephone keyboard like that? Well, as you may recall (if you're of a certain age), before touchtone phones, there were rotary dial phones, which had the numbers in a semi-circle, with 1 on top, and 8,9,0 at the bottom. And Ma Bell was a top down kind of girl. Besides, the telephone also has letters on it, and most people read the English language from the top left, across and down—well, if they're Democrats, they do! (Sorry, but it is an election year.) Traditions of all kinds die hard, don't they?