Base Eighteen on a Chinese Abacus

For the sake of simplicity, my use here of number words (ten, hundred) instead of digits (10, 100) will refer to decimal values. "Ten" =

I've been interested in arithmetic on the abacus for a while now, although I'm still quite the amateur. Last year I wrote a (not yet officially adopted) plugin to the Khan Academy Exercises engine to allow practice exercises on a 4x1 soroban, which helped me improve my speed and accuracy with basic addition, and I've acquired these two real-world abaci:

The top abacus is a cheap Chinese 5x2 Suanpan I bought in Chicago's Chinatown a few years back when my wife and I vacationed there, and the bottom abacus is a better quality Japanese 4x1 Soroban that Liberty ordered for me as a Christmas present last year (along with a book on the Haskell programming language I've been wanting - best wife ever!). "Suanpan" and "Soroban" are language variants on the same word, which roughly translates to English as "counting tray", and neither name implies a specific number of beads.

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Stripping a UTF-8 byte order mark with Go

Recently I've been watching some videos on the Go programming language, and I was impressed enough to go install it and start tinkering. Right out of the gate, I ran into trouble getting the code on tour.golang.org's first page working locally. The code is simply:

Google's goal in this case seems to be illustrating to seasoned coders on their first visit that the language has UTF-8 support built-in. Notepad on Windows 7 does display CJK characters correctly out of the box, without needing to play around with language options in the control panel. It also lets you save files in a few unicode-friendly formats, one of which is UTF-8. Unfortunately, Notepad always writes a byte-order mark (BOM) at the beginning of files saved in UTF-8 format, and this can't be disabled:

The UTF-8 standard is ambiguous about whether the BOM should be accepted in all cases, but regardless of how you read the standard, the Go compiler does not support them, and throws this error when I attempt to compile the same program:

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