Numerals in webcomics

Over the past few years, I have been informally collecting and curating a set of comics (mostly online webcomics) relating to my main research interest in numerals, number systems, and numeracy.     While I am led to understand that not everyone in the world appreciates my particularly nerdesque sense of humour, it seems reasonable to suppose that if you’re reading this blog, then you might be like me and find these to be hilarious and/or thought-provoking.    Here are some of my favourites; reader contributions are very welcome (along with suggestions of other comics where I might find good material in the future).

 

Married to the Sea

Card-counting: http://www.marriedtothesea.com/122811/card-counting.gif

Mortgage industry: http://www.marriedtothesea.com/022309/mortgage-industry.gif

Number Two Number Four: http://www.marriedtothesea.com/121506/number-two-number-four.gif

 

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

Balls constants: http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2982

Conversation Trick #57721: Self-referential phrases: http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2448

Fouriest: http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2874

Polish hand magic: http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=1914

Too many zeroes: http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=1768

 

Toothpaste for Dinner

10 types of people: http://www.toothpastefordinner.com/052503/10-types-of-people.gif

Happy New Year 2008: http://www.toothpastefordinner.com/010208/happy-new-year-2008.gif

Swedish binary: http://www.toothpastefordinner.com/022210/swedish-binary.gif

Synaesthesia emergency: http://www.toothpastefordinner.com/111808/synaesthesia-emergency.gif

Unaphobia: http://www.toothpastefordinner.com/110310/unaphobia.gif

 

XKCD

1 to 10: http://xkcd.com/953/

Binary sudoku: http://xkcd.com/74/

Code Talkers: http://xkcd.com/257/

ISO 8601: http://xkcd.com/1179/

License Plate: http://xkcd.com/1105/

Money: http://xkcd.com/980/

Number line: http://xkcd.com/899/

Numerical sex positions: http://xkcd.com/487/

One two: http://xkcd.com/764/

Words for small sets: http://xkcd.com/1070/

Alice E. Kober papers

For those interested in a more in-depth look at the state of Minoan/Mycenean script decipherment in the late 1940s, or more generally in the life of Alice Kober, here is a link to a wonderful digital collection of her papers, held at the University of Texas.  It’s neat stuff, giving a detailed look at the discipline just prior to the decipherment of Linear B, and involving correspondence with many of the luminaries of the age.

Alice Kober’s belated obituary

Yesterday’s New York Times features a much-belated obituary of Alice Kober, a professor of classics at Brooklyn College who in the late 1940s played a central preliminary role in the decipherment of the Linear B (Mycenaean Greek) script.     Although she died of cancer two years before Michael Ventris made the key breakthrough identifying the Linear B script as encoding a variety of archaic Greek, Kober’s work was a building block on which Ventris relied.  Her key insight was to identify certain sets of signs that occurred commonly at the ends of words, and which (correctly, as it turned out) could represent morphology (verb inflections and case endings).

Margalit Fox, who is the author of the obituary as well as the author of a forthcoming book on the Linear B decipherment, presents the case that Kober’s work has been forgotten, in the way that so many other women’s scholarly work has been overshadowed by the work of men.  And this is certainly part of the story.   I should say, though, that John Chadwick’s The Decipherment of Linear B, the central history of the decipherment authored by one of its prominent figures, is generous to Kober and represents her contribution quite fairly.    Kober took some important steps and, if she had lived a few more years, very likely would have played a much more prominent role (although she still may not have been recognized sufficiently had she done so).  What we have from her work is a set of important preliminary steps published in a set of key articles in the American Journal of Archaeology in the mid-1940s.  These ought to be read into the popular history of the decipherment, not because they were a decipherment in their own right, but because they were one of a long series of necessary steps over several decades.

The most important lesson in this case is that script decipherments are complex and full of false starts, and that they are processes rather than events.    Even Ventris’ work, though important, only started a process of decades of discussion, in the same way that the Maya script’s ‘decipherment’ is still ongoing.

Chadwick, John
1990    The decipherment of Linear B: Cambridge University Press.
Kober, Alice E
1945    Evidence of Inflection in the” Chariot” Tablets from Knossos. American Journal of Archaeology 49(2):143-151.
—
1946    Inflection in Linear Class B: 1-Declension. American Journal of Archaeology 50(2):268-276.
—
1948    The Minoan scripts: fact and theory. American Journal of Archaeology 52(1):82-103.
Sundwall, Johannes, and AE Kober
1948    An Attempt at Assigning Phonetic Values to Certain Signs of Minoan, Linear Class B. American Journal of Archaeology 52(3):311-320.

Language and Societies abstracts, vol. 5 (2013)

The abstracts below are summaries of papers by junior scholars from the 2013 edition of my course, Language and Societies, and presented at the course blog of the same name. The authors are undergraduate and graduate students in anthropology and linguistics at Wayne State University. Over the next few weeks, some students will be posting links to PDF versions of their final papers below their abstracts. Comments and questions are extremely welcome, especially at this critical juncture over the next week, when the authors are making final revisions to their papers.

Heather Buza: An Analysis of Driving Contracts for Persons with Dementia

Darlene Pennington-Johnson: The Verbal Art of Bribery:  Going Further than Detroit’s Front Door

Stephen Teran: Aviation English and Communication Problems

Hind Ababtain: Saudi Arabic Diglossia and Code-Switching in Twitter: Education and Gender Effect

Kaitlin Muklewicz: Physician communication with women who have multiple sclerosis

Jennifer O’Hare: Irish or English? An Irish Parent’s Decision about a Child’s Education

Michael Thomas: Fixing and Fixing: Literal Language and Perceptual Relevance in High-Functioning Autism and the Less Wrong Community

Georgia Diamantopoulos: The Linguistic Expression of a Greek-American Identity

Kelsey Garason: Exploring Language and Gender through Blood and Combat

Brenna Moloney: The Dialectics of Pronoun Use in Modern Russia

Elspeth Geiger: Anishinaabemowin Animacy:  The Metalinguistic Beliefs in Language Revitalization Websites

Jeri L. Pajor: Can Sacred Spaces Reveal Clues to Wyandotte’s German Ethnic Heritage and Show Status?

C.A. Donnelly: I Want to Convince You to Believe: Discourse and Authority in the Moon Landing Hoax Conspiracy Theory

Kelly A. Johnston: The Invisible Majority: Language as a Means of Education in the Context of a German-American Historic House Museum

Talia Gordon: Beyond the Board: Metalinguistic Awareness and Language Beliefs Among Expert Scrabble Players

Leah Esslinger: Greeting Patterns in Midtown Detroit

Kimberly Anne Shay: Indigenous Language and Assimilation: Navajo and the Workplace

Sarah Carson: Black Nerds in the Media: A Linguistic Analysis

Monica Mieczkowski: “She may have wanted it”: Discourse of Consent in Online Accounts of the Steubenville, Ohio Rape

Julie Haase: Judging a Wine (Or Winery) by its Label

Kimberly A. Compton: A Community of Practice and Constructing Children’s Agency

Katherine Korth: AKC: Ravelry’s Impact on the Language of Knitters

Number Writing: All the Ways Humans Did It

I just used the fascinating Up-Goer Five Text Editor, named after this XKCD cartoon, to write an abstract of my book, Numerical Notation: A Comparative History, using only the ‘ten hundred’ most common words in the English language.  It was a bit of a challenge since I couldn’t use ‘history’, ‘numeral’, ‘system’, or ‘math’, but it seems to be pretty sensible and complete:

Number Writing: All the Ways Humans Did It

There are a lot of different ways to write numbers, but you can put them all into five types. Let’s look at about a hundred different ways that humans have written numbers. Some people think that over time, bad ways of writing numbers die and good ways live, so that the way we have now is the best one. But when we look at all the different ways together, we see that lots of ways that are now dead actually were used for hundreds of years. Were people just stupid back then, to use such a bad way of writing numbers? No, that is a stupid idea. The only way to know if a way of writing numbers is good is to see whether it is good for the things it was actually used for, not what people today think they were used for. It does matter how the human mind works, so there are lots of ways of writing numbers that you can imagine, but that no one has ever actually used. This is why there are only the five types, and this tells us a lot about the way that the mind works. And it’s true that some ways let you write big numbers with only a few signs, and others let you write bigger and bigger numbers. But that doesn’t matter as much as people think. As it turns out, most number writing was used to write down answers, but not to use numbers to figure out the answers. Only in the last five hundred years, when numbers were really important for big states that like money, did our way of writing numbers beat the others. One of the best ways to know if a way of writing numbers is going to live is whether lots of important people use it already.

Proto-Elamite decipherment-oid potentially in progress

I’m the first to advocate for computational tools in script decipherment, and for crowdsourcing-style work in aid of such efforts.  But is it just me, or is this account of current steps towards a proto-Elamite decipherment not really a story?  The phrase ‘could be about to be decoded’ and the lack of any published work (so far) does not give me hope.   Don’t get me wrong: I do think that Proto-Elamite is decipherable, although I’m not sure what to make of the (new-ish?) claim for the absence of scribal training as an explanation for apparent errors.     Anyway, I will of course be following this actively, but I’m not holding my breath.

09/27 report (!)

And, as evidence that my speculation yesterday that the job market was better than the numbers indicated, there were 10 (!!) new postings on the AAA site today, all of which are tenure-track or tenured anthropology jobs and one of which actually is two separate jobs. 

09/26 report, 2012 edition

Every year, for the past several years, I’ve been tracking the number of jobs listed on the American Anthropological Association job postings as of September 26. That date is somewhat arbitrary and I chose it for historical reasons, but a slightly different date wouldn’t really change much with the overall trends. As a proxy for the health of the job market in anthropology, though, the AAA listings are ideal, since, at least historically, most tenure-stream positions in the discipline get listed there (but see below). So here we have it, including the 2012 figure:

2006: 190
2007: 186
2008: 168
2009: 78
2010: 112
2011: 117
2012: 109

While this looks like a slight decrease from last year, I actually think that actually there are around the same number of jobs, or possibly even trending slightly up, for several reasons:

First, there are definitely fewer postdocs or nationally-advertised one-year positions listed on the AAA site than in the past.    In the past, upwards of 20% of jobs posted were postdocs or visiting positions or jobs outside the academy; this year, fewer than 10% of the posted jobs are non-tenure-track.  So that’s a good sign.

Second, I’ve noticed a lot more institutions posting tenure-track anthropology jobs on more general sites (like the Chronicle of Higher Ed or Inside Higher Ed) rather than the AAA.  One possibility is that this may reflect a decline in the AAA’s prestige, but I don’t think that’s too likely.  Alternately, I’ve heard that the their AAA’s job listings are quite pricey, so maybe they’re just getting priced out of the market. 

Third, my sense (anecdotal, admittedly) is that while formerly many if not most jobs were posted in September, now lots of tenure-track positions get posted in October or later.  This may partly be because deans/provosts don’t approve searches as early, although I’ve heard that jobs in English lit are decidedly up already by this point, which would work against that idea.  More significantly, anthropology departments are definitely less likely in the past to interview candidates at the November annual meetings (relying on Skype or phone interviews instead), because of the cost of national searches and the ease of video interview.  Thus, positions can be advertised later and with a later closing date.   This will be confirmed or refuted within a few weeks as we see how many new postings come in October.

Chasing Voices

Check out this fascinating trailer for a forthcoming documentary: Chasing Voices: The Story of John Peabody Harrington.  Harrington was one of the most enigmatic and interesting anthropological linguists of the 20th century and a recorder of data on hundreds of California languages.   Obviously most of us don’t do work quite like this anymore, collecting and documenting virtually for its own sake, but you can’t possibly dismiss its value.   I will be interested to see how much his ex-wife, the anthropologist Carobeth Laird, whose memoir Encounter with an Angry God (1975) recounts much about their troubled marriage and Harrington’s own troubled personality, features in this new film.    I know of Harrington’s work most directly not through his work on California, but from his ethnographic comments on modern Maya numeration (Harrington 1957), published late in his life.  Martha Macri at UC Davis is the PI of an NSF-funded project on his life and work.

(H/T: Mr. Verb)

Harrington, John P. 1957. Valladolid Maya enumeration. Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 164, no. 54, pp. 241-278. Washington: United States Government Printing Office.

Laird, Carobeth. 1975. Encounter with an Angry God: Recollections of My Life with John Peabody Harrington. Banning, CA: Malki Museum Press.

Language and Societies abstracts, vol. 4 (2012)

Reblogged from Language and Societies:

The abstracts below are summaries of papers by junior scholars from the 2012 edition of my course, Language and Societies. The authors are undergraduate and graduate students in anthropology and linguistics at Wayne State University. Over the next few weeks, some students will be posting links to PDF versions of their final papers below their abstracts. Comments and questions are extremely welcome, especially at this critical juncture over the next week, when the authors are making final revisions to their papers.

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