Different Ways of Doing Things

One thing that has always interested me is different ways of doing things. This is particularly so when the current way of doing something is inefficient for example the qwerty keyboard system or dysfunctional such as Argentina's political system during most of the 20^th century.

Today, I learned that there are many different ways to write numbers. Through my Spanish classes I had become aware that instead of writing a million and one hundredth 1,000,000.01 like we do many countries write the number 1.000.000,01. At work this came up as Microsoft Word kept suggesting that I change my decimal points into commas. Assuming that this was a language based difference I took MS Word's suggestion and changed all my numbers in my paper only to find out that its actually a regionally based difference and that Panama and Central America write the numbers like we do in the United States while South America and Europe mostly write numbers the other way. In doing some research I also found out that apparently the Swiss would write the number 1'000'000.01, the Russians 1 000 000,01 and the Indians 1,00,000.01. Who knew?

In the food category of different ways of doing things, the follow up from Chile of mixing wine with Coke is that in Panama they put banana's on the grill and cook them peel and all. This is actually becoming my favorite way to eat bananas.

I would say that one of the cool things about traveling is the ability to see different ways of doing things, but I am not coming up with too many examples that don't involve food, driving, or street performers to back up this argument.

In the historical edition of different ways of doing things, while reading the Atlantic magazine online I ran across this photograph of a town crier reading England's declaration of war for WWII. Talk about antiquated! (and by that I'm obviously referring to declarations of war). I knew that town criers used to be common but I figured the practice died out by the 20^th century as literacy rates rose and people no longer needed to get there news orally. According to Wikipedia a couple of towns even have town criers today though the role seems to have changed to mostly ceremonial.