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/

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.

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

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.

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.

(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.

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