Well-Read Life™

Does Hand-Writing Matter?

Now that that old bloodhound Writing-by-Hand is banished to the doghouse out back, while the twin white poodles named Tapping and Typing are on our laps at the dinner table, should we care? Is there any evidence that taking pen in hand is somehow better for thinking or remembering? At Levenger we have a dog in this fight, since we sell lots of nice writing instruments and quality paper. So I’ll admit we have a bias to seek out such evidence and share it widely.

With that confession, let me also say that we’re attempting to take a balanced look at the evidence. My biggest fear is that we jettison writing by hand on paper prematurely, without considering its benefits. And one thing is sure—we’re all falling more deeply in love with our smartphones and tablets, me included.

So I’ve asked Mim Harrison, editor of Levenger Press, to do a deep dive into the literature and write up her findings. Here is her report:

—Steve

Richard Mason’s novel The Gilded Curve: History of a Pleasure Seeker is not just a digital book; it’s a multimedia, interactive experience known as an eLumination. Tap onto an illustration of a street or building and it comes to life in video. Tap the gramophone icon (gramophone!) and it’s an audiobook, with one of the cast of Downton Abbey reading to you. Historical context of the story, set in Amsterdam in 1907, is just another tap away.

What you’re really tapping into is your imagination, in ways that an electronic platform can uniquely offer.

There’s one other button to tap, and that’s the one where this 36-year-old author tells you why he wrote his novel—by hand.

“I wanted to introduce something physical to the process,” he says in the video clip. Hand-writing, he says, “encourages concision and briskness and quickness.”

Or, as the novelist Mark Helprin  says, “a pen (somehow) helps you think and feel.”

A number of neuroscientists would agree.

It is all in your head

Humans have been writing—putting their hands to something­—since the Sumerians started chiseling away at cuneiforms around 3500 B.C.

“Handedness is uniquely human,” writes the neurologist Frank R. Wilson in his book titled, appropriately, The Hand. We humans are the only one of the evolutionary bunch to favor one hand over the other.

It’s one of those instances where saying “it’s all in your head” has more than a modicum of truth. “Any theory of human intelligence which ignores the interdependence of hand and brain function…is grossly misleading,” Dr. Wilson asserts.

Brain changer

Our brains are wired in ways not only intricate but specific. We use one set of circuits to add, for example, and a different set to subtract.

Much of this wiring begins early. At the Library of Congress’s international summit on books and literacy, Karen Keninger, the director of the National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped, stressed the importance for the blind of learning Braille when they’re young.

“It’s difficult to learn Braille as an adult because of the wiring you have to do between your hands and your brain,” said Karen (who is blind).

Occupational therapist Marion Wilm maintains on her Child and Family Development blog that children who don’t know how to hand-write are compromising the development of their fine-motor skills. These skills provide the kind of dexterity that surgeons and scientists need.

As it is with surgeons and scientists (and plumbers and mechanics), so it is with humans who write: tools matter. Picking up a pen can put in motion a different set of circuits from tapping on a keyboard.

Anne Mangen and Jean-Luc Velay, two European researchers, describe some of these different “neural pathways” in their 2010 study, “Digitizing Literacy: Reflections on the Haptics of Writing.” (Think tactile for haptics; from the Greek for to grasp.)

They cite experiments that showed how Japanese readers would use different sets of circuitry in their brains when they read two different kinds of Japanese writing, kana (used for foreign words, proper names, and grammatical elements) and kanji (which is based on older, Chinese characters).

These different neural pathways were also evident in another study the researchers cite, where some subjects hand-wrote characters and others typed them. Magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI (the f is for functional; it measures changes in blood flow in the brain) revealed that different parts of the brain kicked in, depending on whether someone was hand-writing or typing.

How, then, does this different circuitry affect how we think and remember and execute?

Write, memory

A 2010 study at Indiana University showed, again through an fMRI, that children remembered letters better when they wrote them out than when they merely studied them. Adults have been shown to respond in a similar way, particularly when learning a new set of symbols or characters.

But does hand-writing have the upper hand over typing where memory is concerned?

There is some evidence to indicate that it does.

On a keyboard or typewriter, every letter or symbol is exactly the same touch (those haptics again). With a pen or a pencil, as University of Washington educational psychologist Virginia Berninger has noted, your hand is acknowledging each stroke involved in making that symbol or character. Your brain seems to pay more attention when your hand is so invested. Her studies, often conducted with other researchers, have found that schoolchildren who hand-write have better recall.

“The physical act of writing or tracing provides an additional layer of memory,” write three other researchers from the University of Central Florida, Timothy J. Smoker, Carrie E. Murphy and Alison K. Rockwell. Hand-writing involves distinct, specific movements. Typing is the same, repetitive movement. Handwriting, say these researchers, “creates more context, thereby increasing retention.”

This results in more than simply remembering the letters you wrote. It can make you a better note-taker.

Take note

Philip Hensher, the author of The Missing Ink: The Lost Art of Handwriting, is also a frequent classroom lecturer. He can tell you which students do the worst and the best in his classes:

“The students who make no record…do worst….The second worst are the ones who plonk a tape recorder on the desk….The worst ones after that are the ones who get out their laptops, and type furiously as you speak….because typing as someone talks encourages transcription without much thought.”

And the best?

“The very best students are the ones who take out a piece of paper and a pen, and write down the things that they think are interesting as you talk, making sense of it as they go.”

A 2011 study conducted by Tina Weston and Randy L. Newman at the University of Manitoba corroborates clinically what Hensher found empirically. Taking notes by typing on a laptop worked better than hand-writing notes if the students were tested immediately, but this advantage disappeared if testing was delayed.

“Handwriting,” write the Manitoba researchers, “is more likely to withstand the test of time.”

Brain craves

In a virtual world, then, there is still virtue—and value—in the physical. And, says technology forecaster Paul Saffo, “it isn’t just the ink. It’s the interaction of ink and paper and stylus.”

He is using stylus in its ancient reference to a writing utensil. But what about the new definition of stylus—the kind you use to tap an iPad and a smartphone? How will writing and learning and memory change, the more we use a 21^st-century stylus to write on a 21^st-century tablet?

In The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business, author Charles Duhigg tells us that for an activity to become a habit, there must be not just a cue and reinforcement but also a craving.

Many of us came quickly to crave email, then smartphones, then e-readers and tablets. We’re teaching ourselves new habits as far as how we read as well as write. Our brains have apparently readily engaged with the digital.

So does it really matter if we no longer write by hand, even if it can be beneficial? Most of us can’t easily read Middle English, either, but we can readily find a modern-English version of The Canterbury Tales.

True. But here’s the thing: we have a unique opportunity in this decade to use both these skills, hand-writing and digital printing—whether the latter be keyboarding or texting or writing through voice-recognition software. Why not leverage all our assets? Use all of our tools—and more of our brains?

We do eventually lose the skills we don’t use. But why relinquish something that’s so easy to hold onto?

Especially since we now know that the kinesthetics of writing by hand affects how we think by brain.

“I think, therefore I am,” wrote Descartes long ago. Perhaps today he would say:

“I write, therefore I think.”

What think you?

—Mim

We’d love to hear your thoughts on this. Just click on the Comments link below with your submission. (If you’re reading this as an email, click here and you'll connect to Comments).

Feliz Noël

Do you want to learn another language?

As some of you faithful readers know, for nearly five years now I’ve been studying Spanish. I’ve progressed from setting my iPhone and ATM to Spanish to actually conversing with my tutor.

And just recently, I’ve found myself having to grope for a word in English—a reach that sometimes, startlingly, eludes my grasp. Fortunately, my brain’s synapses are not misfiring (at least, not over this). Some scientists now report that for bilingual speakers, both languages keep up a lively buzz in the brain. Where once there was one, now there are dos.

It turns out that all that buzzing is good for you: it gives your cognitive muscles a workout. And though it seems counterintuitive, given that bilingual speakers are more acutely aware of what’s going on around them, bilingualism helps your brain stay focused and better resist distractions.

Muy bueno.

Multilingual learning, anyone?

I doubt that I will ever seriously venture beyond Spanish…and yet. Languages exert a force-field attraction. Language begets other languages—at the very least, an interest in them.

This holiday, then, if you shop around Levenger for brain boosters of a bilingual nature, you’ll find quite a number of languages ready to tease you and teach you and, we hope, please you.

Our popular Crossword Picante Spanish-English crosswords game, which sold out last year, is back, and this year we’ve added a French-English version, Crossword Santé. Since the games are set up so that you can spell a word in either language, proficiency is not a requisite. We also encourage players to use dictionaries. ¿Por que no?

We learned a lot while developing our Multilingual Learning Blocks. Each block spells the same word in six languages: Mandarin, French, German, Spanish, Latin and English.

We gave each language its own color and design. And how did we choose which six languages? We put on our research hats and selected those languages most commonly taught in American schools today. (Latin? A pleasant surprise.)

Next, how to choose the words? We turned to our friends at the Long Now Foundation, who spearhead The Rosetta Project, a critically important effort to preserve the world’s endangered languages.

Laura Welcher of The Rosetta Project turned us on to the Swadesh List, named after the linguist who compiled the most commonly used words across different languages. We then winnowed the list to 28 words whose meaning in English was limited to one definition.

I find it fascinating to turn these blocks in your fingers to see not just how different the words can be from one language to the next, but how similar some of them are. It made me rethink the idea that Latin is a dead language when I saw cor (heart) beating strongly in the Spanish corazón and the French coeur (and in the English coronary).

The price for these multi-language blocks is higher than the single-language blocks we offer (Chinese,  Hebrew,  Greek), but there’s good reason: they’re a custom-made set, made just for Levenger customers.

A written language with no alphabet

One of the many languages UNESCO has marked as endangered is Cherokee. We were intrigued by these Cherokee language blocks because the written Cherokee language has no equivalent of our A, B, Cs. Instead of an alphabet, Cherokee has a syllabary.

These are characters that represent syllables, and a Cherokee named Sequoyah created them in the early 1800s. Until then Cherokee, like most world languages, was not written but oral. Sequoyah recognized that having a written syllabary would give the Cherokee a chance to communicate through writing. They called their syllabary “talking leaves.”

How to learn 10 languages as easily as uno, due, très

For a fast and fun survey course of ten languages—Arabic, Danish, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Spanish and Swedish—pocket a pouch of our ten-sided dice, each one with 1 to 10 in one of ten languages. It comes with a cheat sheet of simple phonetics (compiled with the help of native speakers), while listing the spelling of each number in the language. Seeing these spellings side by side helps to show the similarities among several of the languages.

The number six in English is the Danish seks, German sechs, Swedish sex, French six, Portuguese and Spanish seis, Italian sei. The same ribbon of familiarity runs through the word for nine: ni, neun, nio, neuf, nove, nueve, nove.

H’mmm. Maybe multilingualism isn’t as daunting as I thought.

How admiring I am of people who are fluent in three, four, and more languages—people like Steve Kaufmann, who helps so many others learn. How lucky they are—just imagine how toned their cognitive muscles are.

Are you one of them, dear reader? Or is there another language you’d like to learn? I’d love to hear. Just click on the Comments link below with your submission. (If you’re reading this as an email, click here and you'll connect to Comments).

Meantime, if you’d like to read a couple interesting pieces on benefits of bilingualism, try these:

http://www.npr.org/2011/04/04/135043787/being-bilingual-may-boost-your-brain-power

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/18/opinion/sunday/the-benefits-of-bilingualism.html

Dedicated to Handwriting

On 24 August, in the 12th year of this 21st century, an unusual monument was unveiled in front of the Ashtabula County Courthouse in Geneva, Ohio. That the monument was dedicated to a citizen who passed away 148 years ago was unusual enough, but what is hard to believe, in this age of digital texting and tapping, was that this man’s claim to fame was handwriting.

Steve Leveen and Michael Sull at the Platt Rogers Spencer dedication

The monument is in the shape of an obelisk and is crowned by a bronze quill. Adorning one side is an image of Platt Rogers Spencer, America’s founding father of handwriting.

Spencer is credited with inventing and disseminating Americans’ own form of handwriting. (Before Spencer, Americans made do with daunting manuals from England and a British script.) Spencerian Script, as it is known among the aficionados who carry on his work today, was the basis for all subsequent forms of handwriting and handwriting instruction taught in the United States, including the Palmer and Zaner-Bloser methods. The latter is still taught in some schools today. Yet Spencer, and his legacy, was all but forgotten a generation ago.

Some thirty years ago, a singular man named Michael Sull became interested in researching the history of handwriting during his quest to become a certified Master Penman, a trade and certification nearly as extinct as the passenger pigeon. Michael wrote the definitive history of Spencer and began, twenty-five years ago, a project called The Spencerian Saga, which, every summer on the shores of Lake Erie, convenes teachers and students intent on passing on the techniques of their master. Through Michael’s untiring efforts and the enthusiastic cooperation of the citizens of Geneva—many of them graduates of the Platt R. Spencer High School—this monument was dedicated on a windy, punishingly hot summer afternoon amidst the roar of passing traffic and periodic blasts of passing train horns.

Michael Sull before Spencer gravesite

Along with Michael, representatives of the Zaner-Bloser Company and the official calligrapher of the White House (no, I didn’t know we had one either), a few people were asked to speak. I was one. In the spirit of authenticity, I wrote my speech by hand—first as ideas on notebook paper, then winnowed down to speaking points on index cards.

First draft of Spencer speech

Below is that speech, or what I meant to say. In the interest of time and temperature, I omitted the story of my grandfather. A few of the other sentences were obliterated by the roars of tractor-trailers and motorcycles.

Second draft of Spencer speech

 

 

....

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for inviting me from hot Florida to come enjoy your summer in Geneva, Ohio. I feel right at home.

As I traveled to attend this event, I couldn’t help wonder what Spencer would think were he among us today. Surely he would be pleased by the accolades, the monument, especially that it is placed in front of the old library that he helped found, and that is now your courthouse. He would, I’m sure, be pleased by the outpouring of enthusiasm for handwriting.

But...what would he think of the iPad?

After the handshakes and embraces, one of us would have to sit down with the great man and an iPad, and show him what’s up.

Anyone want to volunteer for that job?

Spencer Program, Name Tag, and Sample

I suggest you move inside so as not to be distracted by the automobiles and occasional jets flying overhead. Remember, he did pass away in 1864.

On the iPad, you might show him the voice-recognition feature and how he can watch his speech become words on the screen, and then, with a few touches of the glass, how those words can change font and size and color, and, finally, be sent, without a wire, to a printer.

Yet the great man was no stranger to disruptive technological change. Living as he did from 1800 to 1864, Spencer saw the advent and explosive growth of the railroad, and how it utterly transformed the country. Alongside the railroad, literally, he saw the telegraph, which miraculously transformed the letters of the alphabet to dots and dashes sent over unimaginable distances at unimaginable speeds.

In his own field of handwriting, Spencer witnessed the advent of metal dip pens. After two thousand years of writing with bird feathers, his generation saw the arrival of machine-made metal facsimiles of quills that were made with such precision that their delicate tips flexed and spread in a most uniform fashion. These steel nibs were made possible by the same advances in machine technology that made the precise, interchangeable parts needed for the mass production of guns, which were having such devastating effect in the final years of Spencer’s life, coinciding, as they did, with the Civil War.

My guess, being the visionary he was, is that Spencer would adapt fairly quickly to the iPad.

What I think Spencer would have trouble with, however, is...my handwriting.

Yes, I’ve a confession to make—a confession all the more awkward in front of this audience and on this, of all days:

I only print.

Yet I know I am not alone. I frequently hear this admission from our customers, even customers who love pens and paper. They admit it in hushed, apologetic tones.

And that’s not all. Despite their regression to printing, they often pronounce their handwriting unreadable, even to themselves. Usually they compare their handwriting unfavorably with that of their parents, and even more unfavorably with their grandparents’.

This is true in my case in the extreme, for my grandfather was a penmanship instructor.

George W. Knock was born in Frederick, Maryland, in 1898. Tragically, he contracted rheumatic fever as a child, which weakened his heart. This prevented him from serving in the military in World War I, and led eventually to a shortened life. But he was an energetic and enterprising young man.

George W. Knock, Class of 1918 Frederick High School

I have in my home office the framed photograph of his high school graduating class from Frederick High School in 1918. It was an all-male school and as they posed in their uniforms, his face stands out with a watch-out-world-here-I-come expression.

George was interested in new technology and so learned photography and set himself up with a photo studio in New York City. Unfortunately, it failed. He then tried a more established field and enrolled in the Zaner-Bloser school of handwriting in Columbus, Ohio, and set out to become an instructor.

George W. Knock's signature inside his Zanerian Manual

Judging from his work that survives, and from the gold Zaner-Bloser lapel pin I’ve inherited, George excelled at his new field. But I’ve also inherited his gold lapel pins from The Underwood and Remington Typewriter companies, so George learned that technology, too, and went on to a career of teaching both penmanship and office machines in high school in Syracuse, New York.

Like Spencer, my grandfather also saw disruptive technological change in general, and in handwriting in particular. Not only did the typewriter inexorably tap away at the foundation of handwriting’s preeminence, but another technology was responsible for even more undermining. That technology, which went from zero penetration at George’s birth in 1898 to over 75 percent of American homes and virtually all American businesses by the year George died in 1958, was the telephone.

My only memory of my grandfather was straddling his knee, and his only writing addressed to me was his inscription in my copy of Now We Are Six, which he gave to me early, probably knowing he would be unlikely to see my sixth birthday. He died the year I turned four.

I think Spencer would have smiled at my grandfather’s hand, but the great old man would be dismayed at the degraded state of handwriting in America, especially among the young who today are hardly taught at all with pens and paper, while their parents hand iPads over the railings of cribs.

Spencer knew how handwriting naturally promoted reading and learning and provided necessary mind-body awareness and control to children that would pay all dividends for the rest of their lives.

Yet since we’re imagining Spencer being here with us today, let’s go ahead and imagine him hanging out for a few years. For if he did, I’m seeing a smile gradually form and then broaden. I’m seeing all of our smiles broadening, too. For in some years not too distant, we will witness—almost inevitably—a Renaissance in Handwriting.

The truth is: obsolescence is overrated.  And, borrowing from Mark Twain, the death of handwriting is exaggerated.

For analogies, all we need to do is look at bicycles and candles.

The fastest form of human transportation in the early 1900s

Bicycles, after a brief period around 1900 of being the fastest form of human transportation, were made obsolete by the automobile. But nobody told the bicycle designers, engineers and marketers who have created a renaissance in two-wheeled transportation. A veritable explosion in specialization, design and technology is delighting billions of people around the planet today.

And candles, which were made obsolete by electric lights more than a century ago, are today everywhere. None of us depend on candles to light our homes, but all of us have candles in our home. Why? Because we understand that we see not only with our eyes but with our hearts, and candles are one of the things that make a house a home.

Older technologies must spend their time in the attic before they are rediscovered. This is happening now with wholesome, heritage foods, and, through the Slow Foods movement, helping us understand that in so much of life, real living isn’t about speed but about savoring.

Mark my words: handwriting will come looping back.

It will be young people who bring it back. Digital Natives is what we call them—these young people who grew up with smartphones and iPads. Sooner or later they will discover that their hands can do things beyond thumb a text message and tap on glass.

Michael Sull's Spencerian script

Thanks to your efforts—the living trustees of our precious human inheritance of handwriting, an inheritance symbolized in this monument to Spencer—young people will be able to rediscover what is theirs. And they will conclude that it is good.

They will assure that beautiful handwriting—and all its many blessings—shall long endure.

And now to you, dear reader: if you could improve or enhance your handwriting—despite texting and tablets and voice-recognition—would you? I’d love to hear. Just click on the Comments link below. (If you’re reading this as an email, click here and you’ll connect to Comments).

To learn your second language, it helps to do the math

When people hear I’m studying Spanish, they often are bemused. Seeing the middle-aged man that I am, they ask, “Why?” And then, “How?”

I answer the “why” question differently, depending on my mood. I might say it’s because I want to visit Miami. Or, if I feel like being serious, I tell them that someday, if I can talk Lori into it, I’d like to live for a time in a Spanish-speaking country and pursue an expanded life. I’d like to help with things I’m passionate about here at home, like literacy, entrepreneurism, and libraries.

As for the “how,” I’ve created a virtual Spanish immersion experience by setting all my devices and media to Spanish. These are surprisingly many: iPhone, iPod, iPad, camera, computer, radio, television, websites, music, movies, ATM, and self-checkout at Home Depot.

I’ve also discovered that one of the joys of learning a second language is learning new proverbs. No te ahogues en un vaso de agua. (Don’t drown in a glass of water.) That’s a funny way of saying, Don’t make a mountain out of a molehill.

And now I want to share a secret. Learning a second language is both harder—and easier—than you might think.

What makes learning a language hard

When people ask me how I’m learning Spanish, they wonder if I’ve stumbled upon the single best program, as if knowing this would provide a magical key to  learning quickly and painlessly. Here’s the bad news: there is no single course, software or method that will be so easy, so compelling, and so effective that you’ll be smiling all the way to rapid fluency. While all of the major language- learning courses are pretty great, the bad news is that learning your second language will take time—lots and lots of time.

Michael Masterson, a bestselling author on self-improvement, says it takes 1,000 hours to move out of incompetence in nearly any valuable skill, and 5,000+ hours to step into mastery and beyond.

Malcolm Gladwell has described the phenomenon in Outliers as the 10,000-hour rule. People are inclined to think it’s just natural talent that makes a Paul McCartney or Bill Gates, and tend not to be interested in the hours they put into their craft.

And so many people asked Lance Armstrong about his equipment that he found it necessary to title his memoir, It’s Not About the Bike.

Likewise, it’s not about the language course. In fact, if you want to really learn your second language, plan on taking all of the language courses you can find. Let’s do the math.

300…Rosetta Stone Spanish currently has five levels in Spanish. A company representative told me that most customers report that by spending 45 minutes to an hour a day, seven days a week, it takes them about two months to complete a level. Using an hour for easy arithmetic, that’s 60 hours times 5 levels, for a total of 300 hours of instruction, or about one-third of your way out of incompetence.

+ 150…I enjoyed Rosetta Stone myself and did the course through level 2 in Spanish before my computer died (of unrelated causes). I have yet to reinstall the software on my new one. I found it easier to switch to an audio program that didn’t tether me to my computer and discovered Pimsleur, which I recommend highly. I went through all 100 lessons they offer in Spanish. Each lesson is 30 minutes, and I’d guess I’ve listened and repeated each one three times—mostly while doing dishes, washing cars, and walking my dog, Ladi—so that’s 150 hours. By the way, Ladi now responds to ¡Venga aqui! (Come here).

+ 24…Then I listened to Michel Thomas Spanish, which is only 8 hours, but they are exceptional hours, teaching the backbone of the language: verbs.  I’ve listened to it four times, for a total of 24 very valuable hours. (By the way, Michel Thomas is the fellow who taught Doris Day how to sing Que Sera, Sera.)

+6…Then for a change of pace, I downloaded Spanish for Restaurants, which includes such useful phrases as Limpia todas las mesas (Clean all the tables) and ¡desenchufe lo! (unplug it!) . I’ve listened and repeated that three times, for another 6 hours.

= still not a thousand. I’ve been studying Spanish now for two-and-a-half years in my spare time, and I’ve yet to reach my 1,000 hours necessary to emerge from incompetence (although I enjoy flashes of understanding, and can provide some high amusement for Spanish-speaking friends.)

When you complete different language courses, one after another, they will reinforce each other. You gain confidence knowing the answers ahead of time. At the same time, they will take you in new directions that can be delightful.

Should Gladwell’s 10,000 hours really be any surprise? Not when you think back to how each of us learned our native language. Most babies take two years before they begin to speak (in my case it was three). Multiply 14 waking hours of language immersion, times 365 days, times two years, and you get 10,220 hours.

The good news is…

So what’s the good news I promised? It comes from within you, once you learn the simple math and accept the fact that it will take you thousands of hours to become conversational, and several thousands more to become fluent.

Enjoy the journey that will take you years, even if you’re naturally good at languages, and even if you’re lucky enough to be able to immerse yourself. Don’t have unrealistic expectations that after taking a course, you’ll be confident enough to pass for a local.

Often I encounter people who are exasperated with themselves and say something like, “Yeah, I took four years of French and now can hardly speak at all.” But when you do the math of actual time spent listening, speaking and writing, four years of classroom study add up to relatively few hours.

Be patient, my friend. Take courses. Use technology and media to provide exposure here and there throughout your day. Watch a movie on weekends. Do what you can to get your hours.

Take satisfaction in your small steps, the flashes of understanding, the phrases, the little triumphs. Enjoy your journey. ¡Buen viaje!

Are you immersed in learning another language? Tell me how you do the math. Just click on the Comments link below with your submission. (If you’re reading this as an email, click here and you'll connect to Comments).