Wiki Friday: "one and the same" or holidays and numbers

December 25th

My favourite suggestion for how the date of Christmas was decided: nine months after Annunciation, i.e. God knocking up Mary, we'll celebrate a child being born. Conveniently coinciding with winter solstice and the Roman festival of Saturnalia.

Saint Nicholas

Early Christian bishop of Greek descent from Patara in Turkiye (I've been to the beach!). He evidently rescued three girls from lives of prostitution by... dropping off presents! Specifically sacks of gold coins through their windows so their fathers could afford their dowries. Ho ho ho. 

Lesser known feats include chopping down a tree possessed by a demon and resurrecting three children murdered and pickled in brine. A painting of Saint Nicholas with the barreled children seems to have been misinterpreted, and has led to Saint Nicholas being adopted as the patron saint of brewers. 

Illustration of Saint Nicolas from the French book "Les Grandes Heures d'Anne de Bretagne" (Grandes Heures of Anne of Brittany in English)

Numbers

Numbers! I'm so interested in numbers! Do numbers exist without humans? What is the deal with representing numbers? Where did words for numbers ("three") come from?

My Wikipedia reading did not exactly answer the questions, but did provide more fodder for thought:

Numerals or symbols are the written or visual representation of numbers. "Number words" came first. We spoke before we wrote. Right.

A raised finger for "one" seems to elemental. "Just one," I say to Maya. "Take one." "Only one". Of course this becomes a tally, become a symbolic slash. The original line. There is some evidence we are neurologically wired to think in numbers with our hands.

Base 8 systems use the spaces between our fingers. Base 12 systems count the segments of our four fingers. There have been base 4 systems, base 5, base 60. Egyptians brought us base 10. 

Did you know that the near-universal system we accept as the norm is called the Hindu-Arabic numeral system?

The mathematician Aryabhata had a system of Sanskrit consonants for small numbers (1-9) and vowels for powers of 10 (10, 100, 1,000). It was discontinued because it made unpronounceable phrases. Just remember we once had such a multiplicity in systems.

The assumed naturalness of math, its neutrality, bothers me. Re-historicize math! How did we get here? To counting to 10? To using a zero? "How can nothing be a thing," was a legitimate debate.

Finally, let us not lose the historical linkages of spirituality and numbers. Numerology influenced Greek mathematical questions. "Medieval computists" had the job of calculating when to celebrate Easter. The Hindu-Arabic numeral system that you and I probably both use has roots in Hindu cosmology, specifically calculating the lifetime of the universe.

Oh, and "one and the same" is a funny phrase when we know that "same" comes from the Proto-Indo European root *sem- meaning "one". We see the root in assemble and assimilate. "One" and "the same" are truly one and the same.

Am I into anarchism?

I think so. Thank Urusula Le Guin and her novel The Dispossessed. Here are passages that capture the two planets of comparison:

Odo wrote: “A child free from the guilt of ownership and the burden of economic competition will grow up with the will to do what needs doing and the capacity for joy in doing it. It is useless work that darkens the heart."

[...] There was an undercurrent of joy, in that sense, in Abbenay that summer. There was a lightheartedness at work however hard the work, a readiness to drop all care as soon as what could be done had been done. The old tag of “solidarity” had come alive again. There is exhilaration in finding that the bond is stronger, after all, than all that tries the bond. (247)

vs.

Everyone was very polite and talked a great deal, but not about anything interesting; and they smiled so much they looked anxious. But their clothes were gorgeous, indeed they seemed to put all the lightheartedness their manner lacked into their clothes, and their food, and all the different things they drank, and the lavish furnishings and ornaments of the rooms in the palaces where the receptions were held. (83)

Wiki Friday: criminalized colour schemes, bonsai kittens, and more

Where to even begin. I guess with hello. It's nice to be back. Nice to be writing a Wiki Friday.

Today is the first day my daughter is in daycare. She's barely there for a few hours, but wow, the spaciousness I feel in this toddler-free home. Even with a head cold I can imagine, for the first time in a while, completing the writing process involved in a Wiki Friday. 

Composing Wiki Fridays is, believe it or not, one of my great joys. I haven't read Thinking, Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman, but I think I get the gist. Most day to day activities, these days anyway, ask us to think quickly, to give opinions quickly, to react quickly. Thinking slowly, deliberately, while living with a smart phone strapped to one's hand, seems nigh impossible. Pausing from reacting, to pursue my own line of inquiry, is a true refreshment to my mind and spirit. Let us begin.

Red, yellow, green – a criminalized colour scheme

The book Gardens of Water, by Alan Drew, had been sitting on my shelf for years. I knew the novel was set near Istanbul after the devastating 1999 earthquake, but I guess I hadn't read it through to the end. It's quite gripping, and really goes deep with the perspectives of different characters, from a Kurdish teenage girl to an American father who can't resist proselytization. In one plot point, a Kurdish boy in Eastern Turkey is shot by the Turkish military because he appears to be wearing red, yellow, and green, which make up the colours of the Kurdish flag, above. 

Folks on the internet debate whether this colour scheme, or the flag itself, is technically illegal or banned in Turkey, but suffice it to say, the colours have been dangerous for many. I am personally drawn toward red, yellow, and green, in art and nature, and as a result have been thinking about these colours together a lot. As we go into fall in the northern hemisphere, we will see them everywhere, in berries, leaves, dried grasses, and vegetation made lush by rain. Perhaps more on this another time.

Grapes

This search was generated by the fact that I couldn't picture grapes vines having flowers. But as with all fruits, they do flower. The flowers are just small.

While scanning the Wikipedia pages, I learned that Concord grapes are named so because they come from the city in Massachusetts. They were cultivated from wild grapes there by farmer Ephraim Wales Bull. I only tried Concord grapes as an adult, and my first response was, "Oh, this is 'grape flavour'". And indeed it is! Concord grapes spawned an entire industry of grape-flavoured products, from candy to soft drinks.

Bonsai kittens

I tentatively brought up 'kittens in jars' to David. Did he remember this urban legend that was floating around when we were kids? It was an urban legend, right? No one was actually growing kittens in jars to stunt their growth, surely. David looked at me with bemusement. He had never heard of such a thing.

Wikipedia confirms that this was a big hoax around the year 2000. An MIT student created a website that described the "lost art" of bonsai kittens, and the internet, particularly animal rights people on the internet, went nuts. Somehow the hoax even reached me.

Tolkien

Good old J.R.R.

We're watching the news Lord of the Rings: Rings of Power series, or, as I call it, 'Ring TV'.

Maya will be home soon, so I'm just going to share some quick little zingers:

Tolkien worked for the Oxford English Dictionary, on Germanic words starting with W.

We have his mother, Mabel, to thank somewhat, for she homeschooled him, including in botany and Latin.

He was bitten by a large baboon spider as a child.

He served in World War I and it is understood that Mordor is based on scenes from the trenches.

He was very into Beowulf.

In a letter, he said that the purpose of life is to know God and be moved to thanks.

He may have been the first to use the term 'phonoaesthetics', regarding the relative beauty and pleasantness of certain words or sounds within words.

Until next time.