Share Spotlight: The Story of One

This week's share spotlight is a BBC documentary.
The Story of One

Something a little different this week for the Share Spotlight: a documentary. This documentary is a bit silly, but still one of my all time favorites. Terry Jones, a former member of Monty Python (which explains the silliness) takes the viewer through the journey to our modern number system. From notching marks on  a bone to the binary system that underlies all our modern technology, this documentary explains the major steps in the history of numbers.

My only real complaint is that Terry Jones fails to mention that the zero was actually invented twice. Once in India and once in Mesoamerica by the Mayans. The Mayan number system is fascinating and on my list of things to write about.

Other than that, what a great way to bring a little bit of History into Math! As much as I love math, this documentary really helped me get a good handle on why we use the numbers we do.

What did you learn about the history of numbers in school? What do you think about bringing a little bit of History into Math? Or vice versa?

Letters from the Seams of a Skull

Devanagari is one of the widely used scripts in the world

Devanagari is used for Hindi, Sanskrit, Marathi, and Nepali languages and so is used all over the Indian subcontinent and the surrounding areas.

Devanagari is an abugida alphabet or alphasyllabary, which means that there are distinct vowels and consonants, but that vowels are also used to modify the consonants, which unmodified have a certain syllable sound.

Devanagari is most easily recognized by the bar that runs across the top of the script, from which all the letter seem to descend.

Some consonants in Devanagari. (Wikimedia)

Devanagari has been used from about the 12th century CE. There are about 50 letters in the Devanagari script, not counting the numerous derivations caused by combining the consonants with vowels. Devanagari is read from left to right.

The Vedas, the Hindu scriptures are generally written in Devanagari and the word "Devanagari" derives from deva, deity, and nagari, city.

In Hindu myth, the Devanagari script comes from Brahma. When Brahma went to write down his teachings, he found that there was no system to record them with. In order to share his teachings, he invented writing, using the seams of the skull as a pattern for the letters.

In some forms of the myth, it is Sarasvati, Brahma's wife, who invents the letters. Sarasvati (sometimes Saraswati or Saraswathi) is the goddess of knowledge, music, and arts, so writing would fall within her purview.

Svarasvati, holding a string of crystals, a book of the Vedas, and playing the veena (Wikimedia)

For the first post in my Writing Systems series, see The Beginning of History.

The Beginning of History

While time may stretch forever, history has a very definite starting point: the invention of writing.

Think for a moment about what you are reading. Words made of 26 little characters that allow me to convey my thoughts to you, despite our distance in time and space.

Writing makes this possible. And that is why the start of "History" is also the start of writing, anything prior to writing is Prehistory.

Before writing, clear communication beyond the person standing in front of you was impossible. Once writing took off, communications could be read hundreds or thousands of years later with only minimal loss of meaning.

Historians rely on primary sources, those that come directly from the people who said them. Without writing, historians would need a time machine to talk to each person who was involved in or experienced an event. Without writing, there would be no history.

Writing has been invented in several places around the globe and every system is a little different.

Wikipedia in scripts around the world.  (Wikimedia Commons)

There are three main types of writing systems.

Alphabets are the most familiar to the readers of this blog, as that is what they are using to read it now. In an alphabet, each symbol stands for a sound. There are separate vowel and consonant symbols and they average between 12 and 50 letter symbols.

Syllabaries have symbols for a combination of a consonant and a vowel. So "ba" would be one symbol while "be" would be another. These systems average between 50 and 400 symbols. Ancient Mayan hieroglyphics are generally considered to be primarily a syllabary, as are the Hiragana and Katakana in the Japanese writing system and the Cherokee writing system.

A Stop Sign written using the Cherokee syllabary. (Wikimedia Commons)

Logographies use symbols to stand for words. Since each word has to have its own symbol, these systems can have hundreds or thousands of symbols. Chinese entirely uses and Japanese mainly uses a logographic writing system. Reading Chinese requires knowledge of 3 to 4 thousand characters.

Japanese uses all three of these systems, which makes it a great example.

In Japanese, the word for

(red)

in Romanji (alphabet): 

aka

in Hiragana (syllabary): 

あか

in Kanji (logography):　

赤

Imagine What You'll Know Tomorrow

I'm swamped with end of semester work, so this week, y'all get a post about... my homework.

Today, my 12 to 14 page paper is due. It's the last major project of the semester and, Praise be to God, it's written. I still need to edit it before four o'clock, but at least I have something to turn in.

This paper has been a long and bumpy road for me. I have an anthropology background and I'm writing for a history professor. I've learned that we don't always think the same way and communication has been a consistent problem (seems to be a theme this semester, in fact).

There are some good things, though. I love my topic.

I'm writing on how archaeologists (and historians, and museums) look at how people got to the Americas. That theory you learned in school? That people walked across the Beringia Land Bridge roughly 14,000 years ago and then came down the ice free corridor into lower North American and eventually all the way to Tierra del Fuego?

Yeah, it's wrong.

Turns out people have been in the Americas for a lot longer than that and the archeological community can no longer deny the mounting evidence.

But what's really fascinating is what's happening now. The Beringia theory has been around for more than fifty years with virtually no opposition. That means that archaeologists are working almost from scratch to create new theories and widening their net to collect new evidence. It's the scientific theory in progress!

Sorry, minor geek out there. I find it fascinating.

If you want to learn about these new theories, I would suggest 1491 by Charles C. Mann for a good general Pre-Columbian history of the Americas. Mann is a personable writer that has pretty much made his living interpreting science history for the public.

If you are a little braver, try Across Atlantic Ice by Dennis Stanford and Bruce Bradley. It's a good bit more technical, though they do attempt to explain their terms, and really meant for archaeology students. However, their theory is fascinating and well worth the investigation.

Find any other neat books or theories? Let me know!

"Fifteen hundred years ago everybody knew the Earth was the center of the universe. Five hundred years ago, everybody knew the Earth was flat, and fifteen minutes ago, you knew that humans were alone on this planet. Imagine what you'll know tomorrow." --Kay, Men in Black

Senior Thesis

How can I have more than 35 pages of combined writing, outlines, and sources and still feel as if I might not make my draft deadline next week?

Welcome to senior thesis.

Whereas the rest of the country is on Spring Break, I have just retreated into the Thesis Hermitage, where all I do is research, write, and edit. Why? Because, to quote the dean of my college, “Your Spring Break will suck and mine won’t.”

Want to know what writing a thesis is like? Check out this Tumblr. It’s pretty darn accurate.

My thesis is on a topic near and dear to my heart: how the museum experience is affected by the physical structure of a museum. And now you see the problem inherent in theses. They are, by and large, boring to the majority of the population. Which means that roommates, classmates, and random strangers all begin to get glassy eyes after about 2 minutes of conversation on a thesis topic. Theses are long, in depth, well researched bodies of literature. At least they are for liberal arts majors. Other disciplines have creative theses that take other forms, but for me and most of the people I know, it comes as a long, long, paper. 40 pages is pretty average. And that’s just the writing, not the sources, miscellaneous direction pages, or figures, tables, and graphs. It’s a lot. And it will tear you down and remake you.

Thesis writing goes something like this:

1. You begin in the excited stage where you love your topic and are convinced that everything that you write is amazing.

2. Then you calm yourself into the working stage where you know that what you write is going to need editing, but is still basically good (this is the ideal stage).

3. Next, you find yourself falling into the pessimistic stage where you are writing because you know you need to, but you’re sure you’re going to have to scrap just about everything and write it over.

4. This is followed by the denial stage where you don’t know why you are writing a thesis because obviously you don’t know how to write and this topic is stupid anyway (this is the bottom of the barrel).

5. At the bottom of the barrel is the pity stage where you know that, despite hating your topic and your thesis, you know you’ll still have to write it (this stage often involves tears).

6. Then begins the upswing stage where you start to talk to someone about your topic and get animated again because you remember why you chose this topic in the first place (this stage often involves a breakthrough overcoming a major brain block).

7. Which brings us back to the excited stage where you remember why you wanted to write a thesis in the first place, and begins the cycle all over again.

The run time of this cycle varies from person to person, but I’ve found I tend to run about a week and half. Which means I have one weekend of serious work where I get tons done and then a week where I can’t hardly get anything done because my topic doesn’t even really make sense to me anymore.

It’s vicious and not for the faint of heart.

However, should you attempt it, here is some advice my advisor gave me that is still the best advice on thesis writing I’ve ever heard: 

“There are two types of theses. Good ones, and finished ones.”