I am currently looking at my life as recorded in journals from around 20 years ago so I took note when this book crossed my path. I missed it in its heyday when the title was so prevalent and so many people had read it. "Who Moved my Cheese" even became a conversational term describing people, the "Who Moved My Cheese" people. Years earlier, I missed the ONE MINUTE MANAGER, written by Kenneth Blanchard Ph.D. who wrote the introduction to this edition. I was a manager then and constantly exhausted by my job. I remember having the book and having it fall out of my hands as I fell asleep a few times. WHO MOVED MY CHEESE? suffered the same fate as far as my reading path was concerned. Too busy for pop culture and bestsellers but older and wiser, I never even attempted to read it. Working hard as I was, I couldn't pay attention to the shifts in technology and culture that were born in that era, shifts that have completely altered our world. That said, it seems that now's the time for me and this pristine hardback, a Christmas gift thoughtfully inscribed back in the year 2000. I found it all these 19 years later at Goodwill. What will this archaeological find tell me?

On that note, it's interesting that it is Google's 21st birthday is today; they have posted a "doodle" portraying this up on their screen, a screen I consult just about daily. Googling, I found an interesting article in Forbes that analyzes this fairly new word that is used umpteen times by umpteen people every day. I confess I'd never really even considered this. So I was grateful that Forbes Science contributor Kiona N. Smith taught me about the origin of the word google today.

Smith says, "Google is old enough to drink, but what is a “google”, anyway? It’s a very, very large number:

10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.

That’s a one, followed by a hundred zeroes, which is what you get if you multiply ten times ten and keep multiplying by ten until you’ve done it a hundred times. In scientific notation, the mathematical shorthand for dealing with staggeringly large numbers, a googol, is written 10100. To give you a sense of how big a googol is, it’s about 20 orders of magnitude bigger than the number of subatomic particles in the universe, which is “only” 1080. It’s also about the lifespan of a supermassive black hole like the one at the center of our galaxy."

Google the word actually did come from somewhere. Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who founded Google back in 1998, used a variant of the term googol to name their company. They wanted to suggest the "unfathomably large number of results their new search engine could provide," Smith relates. They were exaggerating and "took a bit of poetic license with the spelling."

Smith observes that if "Google’s name sounded like a nonsense word made up by a small child, that’s because it actually was: then-9-year-old Milton Sirotta, whose mathematician uncle Edward Kasner asked him to pin a name on the enormous number for a book Kasner was working on: MATHEMATICS AND THE IMAGINATION, published in 1940. Kasner died in 1955, and his nephew Sirotta died in 1981, 17 years too early to see the word he’d invented become the name of a California startup that grew into the 17th largest company in the world."

Smith concludes:

In 2004, Kasner’s great-niece told the Baltimore Sun that she wasn’t sure what her uncle would think about Google’s use of the word, says Smith. “Obviously it's only brought attention to the name; it hasn't brought attention to his work, so I'm not quite certain what he'd think,” she said. “They're not using the concepts, but just capitalizing on the name.” She added that she had written to the company in 1998 to introduce herself and the family, but received no response.

Wow! 2004 was 15 years ago, before the Smart Phone. So, I'm looking forward to finally understanding that conversational term "who moved my cheese people" from nearly 20 years ago. And I will read Kiona Smith. Smith is, as it happens, an archaeologist! Besides writing for Forbes, she has an online column and a twitter account. Troglodyte that I am, I don't look at twitter. But I will certainly read Smith's column in the future:
https://arstechnica.com/author/ksmith/

I cautiously decided to read this book this morning so it wouldn't fall out of my hands as I fell asleep. It's an insightful fable of mice and tiny humans who need cheese. Mice are better able to follow their instincts and find the cheese with less trauma. The tiny humans however are chained by belief systems and the need for justice. It's really not fair when the cheese moves. Still, Haw, the tiny human with a sense of humor, is able to see the writing on the wall and find his way to the cheese. The people at the high school reunion that precedes and ends this book, discuss the fable of Haw and Hem and the mice, before and after the tale's appearance, and evaluate the fables' pertinence to their own lives and paths. My cheese was moved recently. In my case, anger is a waste of time though I can't help feeling it. It's time to find new cheese. That's usually the case in these sorts of things.

Hello! You've received this book from BookCrossing, a random community of book lovers. If you'd like to join the BookCrossing story of this book, please make a journal entry at our site with the BCID (bookcrossing ID) on the bookplate. BookCrossing is free to join and confidential. Tell us anything you'd like to share about this book.

Visiting the Little Free Library at Dancing Goats yesterday, I noticed this book was claimed by a reader. May it have a great reading adventures.