Dannymac recently joined us, hopefully he'll enjoy his tenure.

View original postI have to be honest, I have never really understood that whichever direction it went; probably why my SAT Math and Verbal scores were within 20 points of each other. Math is just another language; it simply uses numbers instead of letters, conjugations, declensions etc. instead of addition, multiplication etc. Cryptology is at least as much math as language, even though it primarily deals with the latter, and much the same is true of the dreaded story problems. I am not saying I am some kind of polymath; I suck at pretty much EVERYTHING related to art, can only draw a straight line if you tell me to draw a sin wave, am mediocre at best with foreign languages and have the people skills of a rock (you may have noticed... ) but liberal arts baffling math/natural science whizzes (and the converse) has always baffled ME.

Well I've heard the math/language and also the math->musical composition comparisons but while I acknowledge math is a type of language it's never really seemed to translate haha rdrr to any skill at linguistics or music in me at least.

Well, that's definitely outside my zone but I'd speculate ambiguity about a number vs word thing could in some cases be due to that ambiguity having come to take on extra meaning. If someone conducted a survey and had a sample size of 411 when all was done, they might make a crack 'and with 411 you know you're getting information' that might elude a lot of people even today but not 20 years ago, and is likely to totally elude people 2000 years down the road. "We had 314 applicants to the Pie contest, big surprise!" has a certain level of subtle humor that could send a scholar hunting around a million false trails trying to figure out why it wasn't surprising and the person who raises the Pi/Pie thing might be sneered at as stupid.

There's probably a lot more of that in a language with number/letter shared symbols. For all I know the writer might have meant both, because the dual interpretation is what the writer sought to convey. Considering how often we toss around stuff like "I went on the winery tour with Grape Expectations but didn't find it that a peeling, hahaha" I would expect a lot of wit and humor and deep thought to express themselves in that sort of way with number/letter overlap. That's all purely guesswork though.

View original postHopefully one of our resident Classics and/or Archeological scholars can pop in soon and clarify the matter as much as possible. I, at least, still have far more questions than answers about this, which is much of the fascination, so even the smallest amount of reliable information would be a welcome addition and improvement. Kind of like the guy with the 340,000 year old chromosome (due to my massive mental block with biology. )

Cladistics and MRCA doens't tend to grab my interest much, I'm afraid. On this matter what I'd mostly like to know is if there was any positional notation, you know, for the vitally important question about whether they could use two dice to great a first and second digit.