I’ve just completed a thorough housekeeping of my blogroll (‘Other Sites’ to the right), deleting sites that are apparently defunct and adding some new ones that have come to my attention. If I’ve deleted something in error, please let me know – sometimes it’s hard to know the difference between a long hiatus and stopping entirely (as I know all too well). And, of course, I always welcome suggestions for new blogs focused on linguistics, anthropology, archaeology, the history of science, etc.
Good graffiti?
There’s a neat article in Slate this week on the defacement of a panel on the Luxor Temple by a teenaged tourist from China. What interests me most is that instead of the typical ‘woe is me, vandalism’ narrative, the article (without defending the most recent episode) presents the broader social history of tourism-related graffiti and vandalism in Egypt. Not only is it not unusual (or new), but for decades there was apparently a virtual trade in graffiti tourism in Egypt among wealthy Europeans. And, of course, when we analyze ancient graffiti on ancient monuments (though alas, never ROMANES EUNT DOMUS), we learn far more about the everyday lives of individuals than would otherwise be possible: about travel practices, literacy rates, informal linguistic registers, naming practices, and so on. Because Greek and Roman soldiers and traders, two thousand years ago, hastily placed inscriptions on Egyptian monuments, we now have access to thousands of voices that would otherwise be lost. If the present activity of a tourist at Luxor is so much worse, why is it worse? Because it’s newer? Because it’s prohibited now?
Because Allen Walker Read, in his travels through the western U.S. in the early 20th century, thought to record often-crude bathroom graffiti, we now have Classic American Graffiti: Lexical Evidence from Folk Epigraphy in Western North America
Thinking about the production and consumption of these informal texts starts us on an interesting line of thinking about what sorts of textual productions we value, which we ignore, and which we stigmatize as befouling spaces that should remain pure. There’s no easy answer. In any case, the superficial scratches made at Luxor have already been repaired with no long-term damage. I’m hardly saying that we should tolerate all forms of vandalism (on public monuments or otherwise), or that there is nothing problematic with writing on ancient temples. But it’s worth pondering on what principles we decide what types of writing are authorized, and how they become authorized.
Not the earliest zero, rediscovered
A rather unfortunate effort in Discover by Amir Aczel, ‘How I Rediscovered the Oldest Zero in History’ more or less effaces his solid legwork with shoddy theorizing and ahistorical claims. Supported by the Sloan Foundation, Aczel (a popular science writer) went to Cambodia and tracked down the location of the Old Khmer inscription from Sambor, which is dated 605 in the Saka era (equivalent to 683 CE), which obviously contains a zero. While the Hindu-Arabic-Western numerical tradition is seen to emanate from India, all of our earliest unquestioned examples (the late 7th century ones) of the zero are from Southeast Asia, and Sambor is the earliest one. Because things have been rough in Cambodia for a long time, his work tracking it down and ensuring that it would be protected deserves a lot of credit.
If he had stopped there it would have been fine. Unfortunately, in an effort to bolster the importance of his claim, Aczel spends quite a lot of time justifying this as the first zero anywhere, ever, neglecting Babylonian and Maya zeroes from many centuries earlier. To do that he needs to whip out all sorts of after-the-fact justifications of why those zeroes don’t really count, because Babylonians didn’t use their zero as a pure placeholder, or because Maya zeroes, well actually he just ignores those until the comments (but don’t read the comments – really, folks, that is the first rule of the internet). Just for kicks, and regardless of the fact that it has nothing to do with zero, he starts off with a lengthy diatribe about how the Roman numerals are ‘clunky’ and ‘cumbersome’ and ‘inefficient’, which as long-time readers of this blog, or anyone who has read Numerical Notation, will know, is an utterly ridiculous, ahistorical claim that is divorced from how such numerals were actually used over two millennia.
I have come to terms with the fact that I will probably be spending the rest of my career pointing out that absolute judgements of the efficiency of numeral systems run the gamut from ‘missing the point’ to ‘completely ahistorical’ to ‘rabidly ethnocentric’. While Aczel’s piece is not the worst of the sort, it certainly doesn’t deserve much praise. Which is a shame, since that Sambor inscription really is the first known zero in the Indian tradition (to which our own Western numerals owe their origin) and it’s great that he’s been able to reconfirm its location in a politically perilous part of the world.
It’s just ones and zeroes: the representational power of binary notation
This recent Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal strip illustrates a ridiculous, but ultimately profound, issue around how we think about numbers and computers:
Most of us who use computers, regardless of age, do not actually think that there are little physical tokens that look like ‘1’ and ‘o’ physically bouncing around inside the CPU or residing on the hard drive. We know that that can’t be true. In some sense, we (hopefully) understand that ‘1’ and ‘0’ are symbols of ‘on-ness’ and ‘off-ness’, conventional representations using binary (a two-state numerical system) of the foundation of modern electronic circuitry. And yet, when we talk about how computers ‘think’, we inevitably end up talking about 1s and 0s. Which is why we chuckle when the same idea is used in the Onion article ‘Microsoft Patents Ones, Zeroes‘ or in the Futurama movie Bender’s Big Score, which relies on the conceit of a series of ones and zeroes tattooed upon someone’s butt that, when read aloud, opens up a time-travelling portal.
We laugh because, at some level, we know that computers are not really reading ones and zeroes off a page. But if not, what do we think they’re doing? I think it would be fascinating to figure out what the cultural model is that underlies this – that it would be a nice ethnographic question to ask, “What does it mean when people say that computers use 1s and 0s?” You would surely get a lot of responses from computer scientists that talk about switches and logic gates, and some blank stares, but it would be very interesting to see how ordinary, average, computer-literate users talk about binary as a language that computers understand.
Like any good geek dad, I spend a lot of time trying to stop my son from spending all day watching Youtube videos of video games, and the solution, fortunately, seems to be that he also likes watching a lot of Youtube videos about science and technology, and so he introduces me to some cool ones, and we watch them together. So take a few minutes to check out this recent video from the fantastic Computerphile channel, where James Clewett talks about the importance of abstraction as a means of allowing us to talk about what’s going on in everyday computing in an understandable way:
Let’s focus on the segment starting at around 0:59: “Look, a transistor is just a switch, and that switch can be open or closed, and the electrons travelling down the wire, they’re either there or they’re not there, which is a 1 or a 0, and in Numberphile we talk about 1s and 0s a lot, so we won’t go back into that, but it’s just numbers travelling down a wire.”
Clewett, who obviously does understand exactly what is going on, starts with a discussion of switches (real objects) which can be in one of two states, on or off, and then moves to electrons (real objects) either being present or absent, then makes an abstracting discursive move to talking about 1s and 0s, which are not real physical objects, but an abstract representation of the states of switches or the presence/absence of electrons. And then, within twenty seconds, he’s moved to ‘just numbers travelling down a wire’, which is a highly concrete representation indeed, but clearly not a literal one. And even though we and he know that numbers are abstractions of the properties of the world – that the numbers are not actually little objects moving down a wire – this seems to be a very central way of thinking about how computers think. We can’t seem to do without it for very long.
I wonder whether this is tied in to the metalinguistic idea that entities need language to communicate or to think – that we need a metaphorical, language-like understanding of how computers process information, and so we build up this understanding that is close to how we imagine a thinking entity must process information, even though we understand at some other level that it cannot actually work this way. It may be the most apt metaphor for understanding off/on switches (or digital information generally) but it is still a metaphorical understanding constrained by how we think entities that process information analogously to humans must work.
Back on track
As you may have surmised, it looks like I’m back on track here, posting regularly. My summer is looking pretty light (I’m not teaching this year, and I’ve just prepared my tenure file) and I have some new content that I’ve been meaning to get to for a while. I’ve already revised my Numerical Notation book page and updated some of the side links and the blogroll (although I have some cleaning up to do). For those loyalists who have been waiting for my return, or for any new readers, please feel free to suggest other appropriate blogs or sites that I might link to. Thanks for bearing with me!
Glossographia 