Things that were not immediately obvious to me

Accounting can be a little counterintuitive. It’s important that the accounts sum to zero, but the question of how credits and debits are assigned to a transaction can be a little obscure. For instance, if you’re purchasing a long-term asset, you:

• debit your asset account
• credit your bank account

and if you’re depreciating an asset, you:

• debit your depreciation expense account
• credit your accumulated depreciation/contra asset account

in other words, as you accumulate cash, or assets, or expenses, you debit the accounts tracking those things. As you accumulate liabilities or income, you credit the accounts tracking those things.

The key is that, contrary to what you might expect, “credit” means “to take away from”, and “debit” means “to add to” (well, sort of, to a first approximation, for asset and expense accounts, at any rate). Wikipedia has a passable explanation.

Some random thoughts on Twitter.

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There are a lot of blogs out there, and most of them die young. That doesn’t mean they’re not entertaining. For instance, here’s a blog that seems to have only gotten a single post, but it’s an interesting one: an analysis of David Copperfield’s “Portal” illusion.

Here’s some video of the trick (valid until Copperfield’s lawyers find it, I suppose):

There’s a great little speech in the (flawed, but not without its charms) movie “Last Man Standing“; the part I’m interested in today goes like this:

Two gangs is just one too many. I’m not an idealist. I know a lot of things that people do are awful low, but that’s between them and God. … But what I’m concerned with is keeping a lid on things, and what we got here in Jericho is just way out of hand…

People don’t think about it much, but that can happen. Consider the banknote to the right.

According to a flyer stuck in my door, my neighborhood Togo’s sandwich place has a “full bar”. Not a salad bar, a booze bar. Despite what the rather idiosyncratic spelling of the flyer might lead you to believe, this is not a practical joke. It really is a Togo’s with a bar. Or, rather, a bar with a Togo’s along one wall. It’s the weirdest thing I’ve seen this week.