Maggie's Farm

We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.

Our Recent Essays Behind the Front Page

Much Sorry with Delays
Birth, Death and All That Stuff in Between
How to Honor Labor Day, Every Day
My Yom Kippur Miracle (Repost from 2010)
Good intro to fly casting
Peach update, with pie
NYC update
Easy for you to say: To the elites on mass immigration
For NYC on 9/11, Sailors' Snug Harbor
Pickled Peaches
Water Shoes
Labor Costs in U.S.
Your "identity"
Good news about The Great Courses
Uses of Hot Pepper Jelly/Sauce, Chutneys, and Jams
A Saturday Drive to Litchfield County, CT
How to Pick a Kayak
Civilized: Fruit forks and knives
Loads of kayaking on Cape Cod
Psychology Experiments' Questionable Results

Categories


All categories

Quicksearch

Links

Blog Administration

Open login screen

RSS Readers

Add to Google

Subscribe with Bloglines

Saturday, August 31. 2013

Who was Fra Pacioli?

Accountants know who he was. He was a pal of Leonardo, and the inventor of double-entry bookkeeping.


He wrote treatises on chess, math, and other things too. Imagine what sort of website he could have had, had he only invented the intertunnels too. Everybody knows that Sippican invented the intertunnels.


Double entry sounds like tax cheating, but it is not. It is about credits and debits. (It does not refer to the private, personal books for cash receipts that many unscupulous Lefties use to dodge Uncle Sam and rip off their neighbors.)


Image is Luca Pacioli, b. c. 1445.

Posted by The Barrister in History, Our Essays, The Culture, "Culture," Pop Culture and Recreation at 13:51 | Comments (7) | Trackbacks (0)

Trackbacks
Trackback specific URI for this entry

No Trackbacks

Comments
Display comments as (Linear | Threaded)

Way back in the dark ages of PC time, there was an accounting package marketed under the Pacioli moniker. By the mid nineties they were just giving the thing away.
#1 JimK on 2010-07-10 18:17 (Reply)
Just as a matter of curiosity, does everyone know about Blaise Pascal, a fascinating mathematician who died in 1660?

Marianne
#2 Marianne Matthews on 2010-07-10 19:22 (Reply)
OMG--how could it be that THE man who gave us a two sided ledger(not for corruption, but rather to verify truth) could be so forgotten?

One you have studied accounting with the Jesuits you not only understand mathematics and accounting, but you also understand rhetoric!!
#3 apple pie on 2010-07-10 22:24 (Reply)
Double-entry is also an old vaudeville joke from a routine about accountants. Bert Lahr could apparently stop a show with his timing and double-takes on that one.
#4 Assistant Village Idiot (Link) on 2010-07-11 01:38 (Reply)
Fra Pacioli figures prominently in Alfred Crosby's The Measure of Reality: Quantification and Western Society, 1250-1600. This is a fascinating read on how Western Europe remade itself in the centuries that followed the collapse of the Western Roman Empire and ultimately achieved global pre-eminence. I don't often finish a book and then start it over right away, but with this one, I did. Most highly recommended.
#5 Michael J. Kubat on 2010-07-15 08:12 (Reply)
Without Pacioli, we would not be able to cook our books.
#6 Jim on 2013-08-31 14:55 (Reply)
even if you're cooking the books, you still need a separate, accurate set.
#6.1 wirraway on 2013-08-31 20:14 (Reply)

Add Comment
(Your e-mail will not show in your comment)

By commenting on this site you agree to the site rules listed here. Email
addresses will not be displayed and will only be used for email notifications.

Quick reference guide: [i] italics [/i], [b] bold [/b], [u] underline [/u],
[url] (web address) [/url]. More tips here.

Enclosing asterisks marks text as bold (*word*), underscore are made via _word_.
E-Mail addresses will not be displayed and will only be used for E-Mail notifications.

To prevent automated Bots from commentspamming, please enter the string you see in the image below in the appropriate input box. Your comment will only be submitted if the strings match. Please ensure that your browser supports and accepts cookies, or your comment cannot be verified correctly.
CAPTCHA

BBCode format allowed
 
 
A Chris Southern Consulting website.