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Comment by MarcusBrutus | Hacker News Reader

> John H. Lienhard is Professor Emeritus of Mechanical Engineering and History, getting his PhD from UC Berkeley.

Close enough for me. Frankly I doubt that he honestly believed every word he wrote. People in high places have to routinely perform public worship of the PC god, "all cultures are equal", etc.

Regarding the "ingenuity" see me reply above: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6502665

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You're taking a cute fictional story and running wild with it to somehow fit your weird anti-PC agenda. No one here, including the original article's author, is claiming that this is evidence of cultural equality. Way to waste your energy.

The article:

> So how do we and that Ethiopian shaman differ? Very little, I reckon. > Very little indeed. Of course, I wouldn't be surprised if he makes fewer mistakes than we do.

The article clearly dumbs down (or misunderstands)the algortihm, insulting the audience's intelligence to make a feel-good claim about the arithmetic talent of "uncivilized" Ethiopians, and is accidentally racist in the process.

Give Lienhard a break. IIRC He's a mechanical engineer; so, prior to learning of Ethiopian Multiplication, he probably used hammers to count with.

Good grief. Lienhard's "Engines of Our Ingenuity" is a series of short (<5 min) radio monologues that are played every weekday morning and afternoon on KUHF public radio in Houston, (and other places I'm told). I would imagine that Lienhard simplified the bit to get it in the allotted time, and to make it understandable and interesting to a radio audience. I've met Lienhard several times and I can tell you that he is a quite personable guy for an old engineer. It is pretty funny to imagine Lienhard, or much else of KUHF as if it were some enclave of PC progressive liberal influence. And, if you'd ever been to the UH campus, especially the College of Engineering buildings, you probably wouldn't be stricken by the grandeur of the place.

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