There was evidently a puppet film or a dimensional animated film that depicted a roman soldier doing long division in Roman numerals. I’ve never seen it, but there were three stills from it in my World Book Encyclopedia when I was a kid. I don’t know if it represented some sort of reality*, or was just meant to illustrate how difficult Roman Numerals were to calculate with.
*I doubt if the Romans would’ve used the rest of our mathematical notation, even without the Arabic numerals.
How do you do long division on an abacus?
Slowly.
Wingnuts of the Week: Friday Roundup. Most of them already covered in this thread, but I think this one is news: Matt Bevin, the Tea Party challenger to Mitch McConnell, says gay marriage could open the way to parents marrying their children.
Well, as long as it’s straight incest and not gay incest…
He needs to be careful saying stuff like that, it might upset his base. He is running in Kentucky. They might be offended
Having their marriages compared to gay ones.
“Juliet, you come down here! You’re mah sister and I love you!” - Romeo of Appalachia
With the simplistic rhetoric that some gay rights supporters use (and I speak as a fellow supporter), I don’t blame them for saying that, even though it’s obviously dumb.
If you’re teaching sex education (to anyone over the age of puberty) without it being at least *pretty explicit *you’re doing it wrong. A certain amount of explicit is required.
Could you provide an example of the rhetoric that would support that correlation?
Marriage is for everyone. Marriage is a right. Anyone who loves each other should get married if they want. Etc. Sure, they’re mere slogans, but sometimes that’s all they had to offer.
Gee, you’re right. In light of that, “someone might want to marry their refrigerator,” all of a sudden makes tons of sense.
The example was marrying children, not refrigerators.
But the argument doesn’t make any sense in the context. The issue of SSM is not the right to have sex, it’s all the related family-based rights, such as inheriting property and making medical decisions - next of kin have those rights, in the absence of a written direction otherwise; unmarried partners do not have those rights unless there is written direction.
Things can get complicated when an n.c.m. parent has several children with opposing wishes, and, now that you mention it, an all encompassing legal agreement like a marriage, rather than several different documents, might be a good idea.
Legal marriage is not about sex; it’s about family.
We nearly always have “consenting adults” in the fine print. We don’t necessarily put the fine print at the bottom of every single SDMB post. Maybe we should, so idiots don’t go around assuming we believe dumb stuff.
(But it still ends badly. Intra-clan feuds are the worstest!)
Nonsense. “This is a dime. When on a date, hold it between your knees at all times. If it drops, use it to call your parents to take you home. No, don’t ask why.” See?
She’ll be a grandmother before she finds a phone booth that still takes dimes.
Or a phone booth, for that matter. 
This might very well be the all-time champion Stupid Republican Idea.
Yes, I know all that, and you know all that - but those dolts out in Kentucky apparently don’t. They need it all explained to them, rather than just having simplistic slogans thrown at them. That’s my point.