Update, Thursday 8 April: Language Hat is up and running again. Previously, on Language Hat, The Post:
If you can’t get hold of Language Hat at the moment it’s because the service is temporarily down. Hopefully the problem (caused by the Language Hat domain name having expired) can be resolved today; however, don’t forget that most North Americans don’t get up until after lunchtime–dinnertime, in some cases–so it still might take some hours before service resumes.
Russian soviet-era test card.
Apparently this happened once before. In Language’s own words:
On April 04, 2007, I wrote on LH:
While I’m here, let me apologize for the outage this morning; my domain had expired (warnings were sent to a defunct e-mail address, it’s a long story), and I had some anxious moments before gandi.net, my domain name provider, fixed things, excellent fellows that they are. I was terrified some internet vulture was sitting around just waiting to scoop up my helpless domain and I’d never get it back; I had to contemplate the horrible prospect of Life Without Languagehat. It made me realize how much a part of my life you are, Gentle Readers, in your capacities as charming players of conversational badminton as well as providers of nuggets of elusive fact—and I seek those nuggets as eagerly as my cat Pushkin seeks lost corks and artificial mice, I claw at Google and reference works as assiduously as he claws at the gap under the refrigerator (where such things so often wind up), and I am as grateful to those of you who provide them as Pushkin is to my wife when she fetches the broom, sweeps the handle under the fridge, and pulls out the ardently desired playthings. And if in aught I have given offense, I do heartily repent me. I seem to have lost at least one internet pal of whom I was inordinately fond, owing to some pronunciamento I don’t even remember pronouncing, and I’ve had enough friends and acquaintances drift away in the course of my life not to want to lose more. I grew up arguing with brothers and friends, and self-assured ideamongering is the stuff of lively conversation to me, to be enjoyed as sportier folk enjoy a good game of handball; I tend to forget that when the ball bounces wrong, people can get hurt. If bluff and bluster be a fault, God help the wicked! No, my good readers; banish Kos, banish Wonkette, banish Instapundit: but for sweet Languagehat, kind Languagehat, true Languagehat, valiant Languagehat, and therefore more valiant, being, as he is, old Languagehat, banish not him your company!
A Bad Guide 
Well, a little more explanation might be in order. I expect we’ll see Hat himself hop over here to honor high hopes of hundreds.
Stop Grumbling; the news is turned around as fast as possible in an emergency, we expand our coverage later.
I now see that I am again way behind everyone else. Ceci n’est pas une pipe doesn’t tell the half of it.
[…] is dark, but the usual crowd (minus those who live in countries like China that block WordPress) is over in AJP’s kitchen at The Goat Blog. Hat even showed up there this morning to encourage the disheartened […]
Anxiously looking for any news and wishing good luck to old Languagehat. O.L., we do miss you.
Many thanks for your good wishes! I’m in communication with Gandi and hopefully this will be resolved today. If not, I’ll ask for volunteers to carry out a commando action. Get your black turtlenecks and masks ready.
What kind of hats?
Small hats on the tongue, everyone according to his/her ethnicity, I guess.
What kind of language?
Bad Language. It’s the only good sort. Unlike Injuns.
My wife has tried to get me into a black turtleneck for as long as I’ve known her, but that would make me an architect, not an engineer.
Of course, to trigger an accumulation of new skills it would have to be an evolutionary turtleneck.
Turtles may be in an evolutionary bottleneck. However, there are revolutionary bottlenecks. I think they’re called Molotov cocktails..
What do structural engineers wear, something tweedy? I hate turtlenecks, except on turtles.
What if LH has lost his site name forever? What can we suggest as replacement? I fancy “Language Chapeau”.
If it’s turtles all the way down, let it begin with me.
I’d like something more specific, such as Deerstalker Discourse or Phraseology Fez.
Language Hoot would be close to the original.
“Pizza Hoot” is the way “Pizza Hut” is still pronounced by many Germans. That makes it mean “Pizza Hat”, which I suppose is what Nimble is getting at.
“Language Chapeau”
Or just Language Chap. Or Lingopappy.
I’m not sure Nimble mentioned pizza.
I like Lingobeanie.
(S)he didn’t mention hat either. But the logotechnical roof of the p…a hut does resemble a rakish hat.
– So what does empty wear under his turtleneck?
– Another turtleneck.
Might be how he got his name.
(s)he
My prophetic soul ! I just knew that you knew who Nimble was, don’t ask me how. I even thought it could be your daughter.
Mm, no, unrelated female in Kansas. Hi!
Vernacular Cap…
Dorothy !
My wife has tried to get me into a black turtleneck for as long as I’ve known her, but that would make me an architect, not an engineer.
Back in the 60’s we tried to get my dad to wear turtlenecks, because they were the ultimate cool back then, but at work he always wore a freshly ironed white shirt with a pocket protector. He always had several slide rules too; I think there was a tiny one he kept in the pocket.
Away from the desk I’m sure black turtlenecks are completely kosher for ninja action. Should that become necessary, I will obtain one, along with the requite black sneakers and a program for hiding my IP.
Speaking of turtles, for those who are going into withdrawal, I have tried my hand at a language post about Chethlonian (not Chelonian):
http://camelsnose.wordpress.com/2010/04/06/chethlonian/
as well as posting the languagehat sidebar links to the dictionaries and so forth as a sort of public service:
http://camelsnose.wordpress.com/2010/04/05/languagehat-watch/
That’s the best I can do for now; we shall have to accustom ourselves to shortages and ersatz products for The Duration.
Language Hat ‘s watch? Has he lost that too?
If I knew as little of life as that, I’d eat my hat and swallow the buckle whole.
I lost my watch in 1995, just as I was getting divorced; I considered it a Sign, and haven’t worn a watch since. It’s worked out well for me.
Discussions with Gandi are ongoing.
requisite black sneakers.
More like Ray Bradbury’s “death watch beetle” type of watch.
When I tried to quit smoking in 1980 my then-fiancé blew smoke in my face. I interpreted that as a Sign and started smoking again. Over time, I have gradually come to think these Signs are prone to grievous misinterpretation. El corazón tiene razones que no tienen razón and all that.
I haven’t worn a watch since about 2000, when the strap broke on my Swatch and the replacement price seemed absurd. I then discovered that there is no need to wear a watch. Just as almost everyone is within twenty feet of a rat, so are we all within twenty feet of a display of the time. Rats have very thin wrists, so don’t expect to see both together.
That’s about how long I haven’t worn a watch either. Unfortunately, despite their reputation of being analytic, Germans don’t go for wall clocks everywhere – unlike the States, as I remember. Not even the bloody train stations have enough clocks.
Also, they hide the wastepaper baskets under the desks. At every new project, I have to fight an indirect battle with the cleaning personnel to leave my basket out in the open (the battle is indirect because they work at night). Then I can toss worthless business specifications into it with a flick of the shoulder, without having to bend down and peer into the dustball darkness.
My wife has what’s called a “virtual” wastepaper basket, meaning she throws virtually nothing away.
Watches: In my youth I observed that the clocks and watches in my life tended to come to bad ends. I interpreted this to mean that they were natural enemies, or that I had an unconscious urge to fight them. It has now been years since I wore a watch. I sometimes try to use my cell phone as a timepiece, but the digits are too small for my naked eye and my reading glasses are as likely to be out of reach as my phone.
Wastebaskets: There’s the old joke about the time the dean chided the physicist for needing such expensive equipment. “Why can’t you be like the mathematicians? All they need is a desk, a pencil and paper, and a wastebasket? Or the philosophers: they don’t even need a wastebasket.”
While everybody is moping about razed hats, there is ample opportunity to vist Grumbly’s blog. He seems to have emerged from his recent torpor.
torpor
Imaginary numbers, huh. I never heard about imaginary numbers before in my life and this is the second time in an hour I have seen the phrase. The first was at Teh Log,
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2214
from a series of jokes on an endtimes blog about the number of the beast:
The “Imaginary number of the Beast” is the 7th one down. I didn’t get the “Number of the Pentium Beast” either, otherwise it does contain a few good giggles.
I never heard about imaginary numbers before in my life
C’mon, Nijma, you must be imagining things. With your technical background, you surely must have encountered the idea of “the square root of 1”.
I didn’t get the “Number of the Pentium Beast” either
I didn’t particularly notice that one until you wrote that you didn’t get it. My competitive spirit thus aroused, I dredged up a memory of a problem with rounding errors in a Pentium chip. The internet yielded the rest of the answer. In 1994 there was an embarassing incident for Pentium. It was demonstrated that one of their chip models had a flaw in the division algorithm. As I remember, Pentium dragged its feet for a while about replacing the chip for free. They put the onus of proof on the consumer – he had to demonstrate that the kind of processing he did on his computer was in fact seriously affected by the flaw. Here is “the original email” describing the problem.
I meant “the square root of -1”. The square root of one is i^4.
I just discovered a serious flaw in my semiotic algorithms. The chip was a Pentium model, the actant was the Intel company.
Here is the WiPe account of the Pentium bug. It contains this chuckly detail:
6.66 am – Beast Express (guess the destination)
666 – electoral majority of the Beast
6.6.6 The mighty locomotive of the Beast Express
Boeing 666 – executive jet for the Beast
the Pentium bug
Too funny.
is accurate to 8 places. Thanks for unearthing the joke.
“Square root of -1” I would think would just declare an error. I just tried it on an online square root calculator and it said “invalid”. Of course the square root has to be a positive number since you get a positive number whether you multiply two positive numbers or two negative numbers (or the same negative number times itself).
But what’s this i^4 notation? My computer’s internal calculator doesn’t have square root but it does have x^2 and x^3….”eks carrot three”??!!? Is this The New Math?
I belong to the era of tracking and the era of experimental math. The experimental math, I later found out from an education textbook, came about because of the Cold War. This War would not be won with numbers or armies, it was thought, but with technology. Some children were put in accelerated math and some like me in experimental math. They didn’t know what kind of world we would have at graduation but they knew computers would be part of it (our university didn’t have one yet), so we studied number systems (base seven), logarithms, and a 3D classroom tool called “space spiders” that had three boards with holes and various colors of elastic thread for creating 3-dimensional designs, I suppose to develop spacial thinking.
The “tracking” part means identifying some children as gifted and putting them in special classes. Our school did it by home room, so I was with the same group of kids for every class during all of junior high. They don’t do it anymore–too controversial, but in my part of Wobegon, children were expected to be “above average”.
Numbers of the Beast:
The joke compounding the joke at is that the site with all these numbers was linked to by the ill-fated Hutaree group, whose members believe in the coming of the Beast but are probably quite unable to understand even the simplest numerical references in the list.
But what’s this i^4 notation? … I belong to the era of tracking and the era of experimental math.
OK, I think I understand now, Nijma. Sort of the math equivalent of learning to “read whole words as a gestalt” instead of phonetics and the principles of spelling. This became a pedagogic fad in the early 60s, I think it was – just after I learned to read the old way, thank goodness. Recently I read to my surprise that Pragmatism Dewey was a prominent proponent of that donkey-headed approach to teaching readin n ritin.
The imaginary number business is this: suppose we use the symbol “i” as if it were a new number with a special property. Sort of like “x” in algebra, except “i” has the property that “i squared” is -1 (in the ascii-text notation many people use in the internet, i^2 = -1 ). Playing around with expressions like “a + i*b”, where a and b are any real numbers – say multiplying and dividing them like algebraic expressions – one finds that one has a “consistent extension” of the real numbers, called the complex numbers. So i^4 = i^(2+2) = i^2 * i^2 = -1 * -1 = 1.
The real numbers now appear as just complex numbers without an “imaginary part”, that is the “i*b” part. One could dsay that complex numbers were the next giant step into the unknown, following on irrational numbers. They are immensely helpful not only theoretically, particularly in technical fields having to do with wave motion such as electrical mechanics, radiology, imaging.
m-l: the site with all these numbers was linked to by the ill-fated Hutaree group
Stranger than that. It was on the website of the group itself, and plainly marked as “humor”, alongside apparently non-tongue-in-cheek references to implantable bio chip conspiracies and “pre-trib rapture” which they conclude “just isn’t biblical”.
http://www.hutaree.com/ezrafiles.htm
How can they understand straight science and even make jokes about it, but have such poor judgment? Unless you believe there is some money behind it from some organization with other (political) motives.
Grumbly Stu: i^2
So i^2 is “i squared” or i² or “i two prime”, and i^3 would be “i cubed” or i³ “i three prime”?
You’ve got Dewey all wrong, he was one of the good guys, got rid of all that rote learning and started teaching people how to think for themselves, anyhow I’m not that old. Also, Dewey decimal system, which I much prefer to LOC.
Yes, we had “phonics”; it was after my time they got rid of it. I’m surprised anyone can still read.
Also in foreign languages, back then they had “audio-lingual method” with expensive language labs, then “roughly tuned input” which got rid of repetitive drills but doesn’t work, and finally back to something with “model sentences” which is dumbed down enough for students who don’t have compulsory education and only show up for every other class.
Did somebody ask me what engineers wear? When I was in school I thought they wore white shirt, leather jacket and helmet, because every non-computer engineer who was ever shown on TV was dressed like that. Still is. But I’ve never worn a white shirt to work, and I don’t own a leather jacket. I do on occasions wear a helmet, though.
Yes, that was me. Okay. Construction helmet and pyjamas, then.
Imaginary numbers were correctly named, but has become more and more real ever since. Or is this putting Descartes before the horse again?
Mathematicians need more adjectives, or maybe access to a thesaurus.
“Imaginary” is an unfortunate term.
If x and y are real numbers then x+iy is called a complex number, presumably because it is a combination of numbers of the two kinds, real and imaginary. So x is real and iy is imaginary, right? Well, maybe that’s how the terms were once used, but it’s a little silly because if your view is that i is a made-up number, not truly a number, then you must think the same of, for example, 2+i.
People have much more occasion to refer collectively to numbers of the kind x+iy than to refer to numbers of the restricted kind iy. The former are called “complex” – the term stuck a long time ago, for better or worse — and the latter are sometimes called “purely imaginary” for emphasis.
Oh, and by the way, for a complex number x+iy it is completely standard to refer to x as its real part and y (not iy) as its imaginary part.
Crazy, but that’s life. I’d say it’s because mathematicians are human, not because they are different from other humans.
I could gripe more about math words. Maybe I will someday. The worst for me is when someone with a new concept to name calls it something like “differentials of the second kind”. Really, pick an adjective, not a number!
Oh, I get it that “i” is just a placeholder in order to manipulate equations.
But does it have to be “i^3”? Can you use “2^3” instead of “2 cubed” or 2³ or “two to the third power”?
666
They’re behind times, the new number of the beast is 662.
Or else 616.
But does it have to be “i^3?? Can you use “2^3? instead of “2 cubed” or 2³ or “two to the third power”?
you can use any one of the forms you mention, since they are all different notations for the same thing.
I didn’t say anything about “have to be”. What I wrote was
By “ascii-text notation” I merely meant notation that uses only ascii letters and symbols (like ^), no html formatting stuff. This remains readable even when output to a Dos box – you don’t need a browser or email software. I know professional mathematicians who read and write emails in a Dos box, because they hate fiddling with formatted email software. I know the feeling.
You’ve got Dewey all wrong, he was one of the good guys
No, I’m not “all wrong”. Dewey was in some respects one of the good guys, but in this matter he was one of the bad guys. I see nothing problematic in this take on Dewey, or on anybody else. You may have forgotten that men, as they come out of the box, are usually not addicted to harmonious, let’s-all-be-nice-to-each-other world-views – in contrast to women. We men take the good with the bad. Over the centuries, the major exceptions to this general principle were philosophers, priests and hairdressers.
I was once told (by my pastor in confirmation class; part of why I’ve always been fond of my denomination) that “666” wasn’t so much the mark of a supernatural adversary as it was the number (in Roman numerals, I suppose) that early persecuted Christians used to refer to Nero, using a cipher common in those days. Wikipedia for “number of the beast” seems to offer some corroboration.
Concerning Cardano, there’s a fascinating story about the cutthroat world of mathematics in his day surrounding his discovery of the solution to the cubic equation, and how mathematicians would keep their techniques secret for the prestige of being able to solve problems no one else could in contests and competitions. If I recall correctly, there’s a discussion in Pesic’s book Abel’s Proof: An Essay on the Sources and Meaning of Mathematical Unsolvability.
DCLXVI: The Roman number of the beast.
I’ve simply thought that the point was one-of-each in Romans, but it’s somewhat embarrassing that the explanation works better for 1666.
One of each in Roman and all the same in Arabic.
I’m back!
Well, praise the Lord!
Dewey:
Leaving aside for the moment whether “all x are y” generalizations can leave someone open to the appearance of bigotry/inaccuracy, the Dick and Jane sight reading materials were used well into the 60’s. The landmark phonics stuff didn’t start happening until the 50’s. John Dewey died in 1952 at the age of 92.
Nijma, on the one hand hand (speaking of accuracy) he didn’t say “all ___ are ___”. On the other hand, what he did say does leave him wide open to charges of wrongness, wrongheadedness, misogyny, misanthropy, whatever — in my opinion. I myself was somewhat offended. But not very much, because I don’t think he was particularly serious.
What are you trying to prove with this chronology? Do you classify “sight reading” with the “whole word, gestalt” method or with the “sound it out, phonics” method, or what?
My horse sense says there’s no one right way to teach or learn reading. Some people really do learn whole words. Some English words have to be learned as special cases, because their spelling follows no rule worth learning.
Stu, if you were at all serious: what kind of “take the good with the bad” did you mean? Did you mean such things as having room in your awareness for apparent contradictions like Dewey being both one of the good guys and one of the bad guys? I do not see that as an antithesis of the “let’s-all-be-nice-to-each-other” world view, especially.
the number (in Roman numerals, I suppose) that early persecuted Christians used to refer to Nero
There used to be an article about the Nero thing that everybody linked to, but it’s been taken down and replaced by links to “how to argue with a liberal.” There are vague hints on the Intertubes that the Nero theory is now in disrepute.The best links I can find now are this:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/apocalypse/revelation/white.html
which considers Revelation to have been written much later, during the reign of the emperor Domitian or even after his death, which would make Domitian the Beast.
Also, the website of the archaeological team that made the original discovery:
http://www.csad.ox.ac.uk/POxy/beast616.htm
says the number itself is in Greek (the papyrus fragment was found in a garbage dump of a Greek colony in Egypt). The number looks something like “xic”— chi, iota, stigma— 600, 10 and 6, (although Trond’s wiki link to the Oxyrhynchus Papyri says stigma is 200) and are in the third line of the fragment.
What did John originally write in? I suppose it was Greek, although maybe a different form of Greek from the NT? I know this garbage dump had a lot of utilitarian grocery-list type inscriptions, and added a lot to the knowledge of everyday Greek of this era.
AJP, can you find my comments?
what kind of “take the good with the bad” did you mean?
<sigh> In that paragraph I suggested that men are unfazed by contradictions, and that women aren’t. Who wins in that comparison ? The expression “men as they come out of the box” was intended to amuse, the expression “addicted” to annoy, and both together to induce confusion about what I “really” meant. The final enumeration “philosophers, priests and hairdressers” was to give the impression that I was JOKING, somehow and on the whole. Standard bear-baiting Grumbly stuff, actually.
Un soupçon de sel dans une soupe de conneries.
Trond’s wiki link to the Oxyrhynchus Papyri
That was Studiolum.
In that paragraph […]
Stu, I should probably have left it alone. I think I already understood that the annoying parts were meant to annoy and that the whole was meant to be funny.
If I were Nijma, I might well be offended by your generalization that women are (not un-)fazed by contradictions. I say that because I am often offended by generalizations about men — even generalizations which are not meant to annoy — especially when these generalizations are offered as explanations of my own behavior.
In my experience women are at least as likely as men to be unfazed by contradictions. Nijma seems to me to be an exception.
empty: What are you trying to prove with this chronology? Do you classify “sight reading” with the “whole word, gestalt” method or with the “sound it out, phonics” method, or what?
If you’re serious, look at the wiki article for phonics (not the same as “phonetics”) and scroll down to the history section, then click through the “look-say” link to “sight words” and click through again briefly to the “Dolch word list”. (For an interesting derailment, back at “phonics” click through the “Why Johnny can’t read” controversy and peek at “Flesch–Kincaid readability tests”.)
The reason for the my chronology was Stu’s statement upthread:
My point was that by the early 60’s Dewey was long dead. AFAIK, he never participated in the phonics debate, not because he (presumably) had a Y chromosome and whatever social baggage was assumed to go with it, but because it was after his time; certainly the watershed studies were done much later. But this isn’t really my field anymore, and I certainly haven’t read everything Dewey ever wrote. By now Dewey’s writings should be in the public domain, so maybe Stu can point out what he’s talking about, if it wasn’t supposed to be a joke.
That was Studiolum.
Sorry, Trond and Studiolum. This thread is getting too long for me to keep track of.
The error in the wikipedia article (here it is again)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number_of_the_Beast#616
is because the link is to the Greek letter “sigma” and not to “stigma”.
Sorry, Trond
Don’t be. I’m flattered.
and Studiolum.
He’ll never speak to you again.
If the subject was either Norwegian or Hungarian I wouldn’t have had to stop and think, but the subject was a Greek inscription at a British university, so I suppose that makes it a toss-up.
Of course Studiolum always does seem to know how to put his hands on interesting manuscripts.
So this is LanguageHat in exile! Never lurked here before. I’ll look around–it seems like a comfortale place and I know most of the commenters.
Gary? *wracks brain* I suppose this is my cue to say that with this venue when you make a comment you can put the URL of your blog where is says “website” and it will create a link from your nom de guerre to your blog, as a sort of introduction.
Gary Brecht, I presume !
and Studiolum.
He’ll never speak to you again.
Perhaps not if I had found the manuscript in Oxyrhynchus. But finding it in Wikipedia is not such a unique glory.
Studiolum, do you know bulbul? He’s an erudite & amusing Roman Catholic linguist who speaks Hungarian like a native, but lives in Bratislava. He describes himself as a Semitic philologist.
Gary! How very nice that you’re here, I always find your LH comments interesting. Do, please, hang around.
Certainly! and I’m an avid reader of his erudite and amusing posts (what a pity he keeps so long pauses among them!) Some of his comments (like the one here on November 26, 2008 10:44 PM) show him indeed as a quite refined speaker of Hungarian, and from a remark in this post I also guess he is partly Hungarian in origin. Certainly more than me.
I see he’s posted a couple recently. I’ll put him back on my blogroll.
what a pity he keeps so long pauses among them!
Yes, I frequently have to force myself not to send him e-mails nagging him to write more. Nobody likes being pestered, and I’m sure there’s a lot going on in his life (unlike mine, I just sit here and watch the desultory street life of Hadley go by outside my window). But I do so enjoy his posts!
Yes, same here (but no streetlife).
Oh, that Gary.
Never mind.
desultory Hadley
There was a tragedy in the Hadley area last week that went national, a teen who killed herself over internet bullying.
That was South Hadley, an entirely different town. Not that that stopped idiots from sending abusive e-mails and death threats to the Hadley Superintendent of Schools.