Tag: #FunWithFacts

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Women Inventing the Language of Themselves

 

Panel symbolic language representing poem to Inanna
Panel from Nancy Castille’s “Hieratica,” an invented symbolic language, photo by kajmeister.

In honor of Women’s History month, I’d like to highlight the work of two women who are linguists. One toiled for years to decipher a baffling script, though her contributions have been treated as nearly invisible. The other is a friend who recently created a symbolic language to encode a sacred Sumerian text. Both are inspirational examples of perseverance and intuition in unpacking the mysteries of ancient languages.

The Language of the Labyrinth

Alice Kober was a teacher at Brooklyn College in the 1930s who conducted a two-decade odyssey into the mysteries of a pre-Greek language called Linear B. A treasure trove of artifacts on the island of Crete were discovered after the Ottoman Empire fell and the last of the Turks left. Archeologist Arthur Evans uncovered a wealth of tablets in 1903 that suggested a robust culture dating back to 1200 BC, a thousand years before Golden Age of Greece. Attempts to translate the tablets had eluded scholars who had tried to link the symbols to Greek or other languages, and Kober was determined to find the secret.

Alice Kobler deciphers Linear B
Alice Kobler and Linear B, photo from BBC.com

Continue reading “Women Inventing the Language of Themselves”

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Any Old Pi Will Do

Make a joyful noise for today, oh happy day, is Pi Day, 3/14. As you surely know by now, either because you remember some maths or because you don’t live in in the wild, 3.14 are the first few digits of π. And, as we know, Pi are squared. Although, as my 8th grade math teacher Louise Blanchfield told us with a mischievous old-lady I’ve-been-telling-this-joke-for-forty-years grin, “Pi are not squared, Pi are round.” Meanwhile, I am proud to say that the establishment of this august day of celebration first occurred in my neck of woods, a day recognized by Larry Shaw at the San Francisco Exploratorium back in 1988. The rest is a lot of fun history.

Petaluma Pie Company celebrates pi day
Petaluma Pie Company, photo by Karin Kallmaker

Achtung Lieber! It’s a Miracle!

One particularly curious fact about Pi Day is that it also happens to be Albert Einstein’s birthday. He didn’t have anything to say about pi, pier se (see what I did there? that’s not the last pun I am about to inflict on you either)… anyway, Einstein wasn’t a geometer, but he was a brainy guy and did a lot of math. Actually he failed math, which is always used as an example of how you could buckle down and make something of yourself even if you start a failure.

However, I always thought it was a better example of how to successfully buck the establishment, since it’s likely that Einstein failed math because he kept telling the teachers they were wrong. And they were. It’s more like Stephen Hawking crumpling up his physics homework and throwing it in the trash because he didn’t think his proofs were elegant enough. Other students would get them out of the trash so they could understand how to do physics.

RIP Stephen Hawking–who coincidentally passed away yesterday–or maybe it was today since it’s 12 hours ahead in Cambridge. (And you know those smart people always want to be ahead of everybody else.) Stephen and Albert can now argue about the exact shape of the curvature of space-time until infinity or until the end of pi. Maybe they can borrow some of Newton’s apples to use for examples. Continue reading “Any Old Pi Will Do”

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The Yin & Yang of the 2018 Winter Olympics

Jokes about curling are as old as the hills in Pyeongchang. If using a broom is a sport, I’m an Olympian every day. Other fans make light of alpine skiing. How hard is it to fall down a hill? Some sports writers are openly suspicious of new sports, as even one Canadian columnist derided the two gold medals for Canada in mixed-doubles curling and team figure skating. But the Winter Olympics are splendiferous precisely because of all the contrast, across the athletes and among the sports. Hard/soft, high/low, old/young, male/female, fast/slow, down the hill/up into the air, taking off forward/landing backward and always landing upward, as if there was nothing to it.  This is the yin/yang of the Games.

Red Gerard gold medal slopestyle run
Red Gerard, Men’s Slopestyle Final, Photo by David Ramos

Contrast across Olympic Athletes

Take, for example, the gap in age across the snowboarding competitors.  17-year-olds Red Gerard and Chloe Kim of the U.S. are barely old enough to drive, and both now have gold medals to hang on their rear-view mirrors. Kim competed against Kelly Clark who, at twice Kim’s age, was seeking a fourth medal to add to her stack from half-pipe that began at Salt Lake City when Kim could barely walk. Even older than Clark is 39-year-old Brian Gionta, captain of the men’s hockey team, while Cheryl Bernard on the Canadian curling team is 51. Continue reading “The Yin & Yang of the 2018 Winter Olympics”