I'd put stars at your feet, put Mars at your head
Rabbit, rabbit!
In case you have not yet seen that a geometrical method of astronomical calculation thought to have been invented in Western Europe in the fifteenth century CE was in reality employed by Babylonian astronomers before the first century BCE, here is the original article by Mathieu Ossendrijver and here are the supplementary materials, including the published texts of the five relevant tablets. They are not simply tables of planetary positions from which conclusions can be drawn about the astronomers' ability to predict the movement of Jupiter; they provide the algorithms and tell the user where to plug in the numbers. All of these abstract calculations are taking place in base sixty, by the way.![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
yhlee alerted me. It makes me incredibly happy.
I have been awake since dawn; I had an orthodontist's appointment very early in the morning, but afterward I had a soothingly cold milkshake and since then I have spent my afternoon surrounded by cats. Autolycus has been incredibly affectionate, climbing over my computer to flop himself down in my lap, purr noisily, and occasionally reach up to bat at my face while I work on the couch. Hestia played at a distance for most of the afternoon, but she just came over, rubbed her head against my wrist and all the edges of my computer until it was covered with a fine shading of bear-black fur, and purred with intent. They are now posed in opposite quarters of the living and dining rooms, Hestia in watchful Egyptian mode, Autolycus slung over a table corner and affecting not to care, playing what![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
derspatchel has correctly identified as hauissh, but which I always think of as cat shifgrethor. Further bulletins as events warrant. [edit] Autolycus may have forfeited. I think he's fallen asleep.
Reading the latest issue of Poetry, I was very struck by Franny Choi's "Choi Jeong Min." There are certain poems which I look at now and think of as Stone Telling poems; this is one, which I mean as a compliment to all concerned.
In case you have not yet seen that a geometrical method of astronomical calculation thought to have been invented in Western Europe in the fifteenth century CE was in reality employed by Babylonian astronomers before the first century BCE, here is the original article by Mathieu Ossendrijver and here are the supplementary materials, including the published texts of the five relevant tablets. They are not simply tables of planetary positions from which conclusions can be drawn about the astronomers' ability to predict the movement of Jupiter; they provide the algorithms and tell the user where to plug in the numbers. All of these abstract calculations are taking place in base sixty, by the way.
yhlee alerted me. It makes me incredibly happy.I have been awake since dawn; I had an orthodontist's appointment very early in the morning, but afterward I had a soothingly cold milkshake and since then I have spent my afternoon surrounded by cats. Autolycus has been incredibly affectionate, climbing over my computer to flop himself down in my lap, purr noisily, and occasionally reach up to bat at my face while I work on the couch. Hestia played at a distance for most of the afternoon, but she just came over, rubbed her head against my wrist and all the edges of my computer until it was covered with a fine shading of bear-black fur, and purred with intent. They are now posed in opposite quarters of the living and dining rooms, Hestia in watchful Egyptian mode, Autolycus slung over a table corner and affecting not to care, playing what
derspatchel has correctly identified as hauissh, but which I always think of as cat shifgrethor. Further bulletins as events warrant. [edit] Autolycus may have forfeited. I think he's fallen asleep.Reading the latest issue of Poetry, I was very struck by Franny Choi's "Choi Jeong Min." There are certain poems which I look at now and think of as Stone Telling poems; this is one, which I mean as a compliment to all concerned.
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You're very welcome!
And base 60? That's a LOT of number symbols before you start repeating!
We were actually taught how to read them at Yale! There are two symbols, one for single units (𒁹) and one for tens (𒌋), which are combined into increasingly dense little waffles of numerals, in the description of which I am hampered by being confined to Unicode rather than able to show you on a piece of a paper or clay. If you accept that 1 is 𒁹, 2 is 𒈫, 10 is 𒌋, 20 is 𒌋𒌋, then 𒌍𒈫 is exactly what it looks like: 32. This example does not take into account the fact that as both of these symbols build up, they become stacked grids rather than side-by-side repetitions, but you can get an idea of that from this chart. It's a positional system, like our own, so you must imagine all single units in the right-hand column and all tens in the left. There is no Babylonian numeral for the number zero. Scribes leave an empty space for it. When you get to 60, therefore, it's a left-hand 𒁹 with an implied zero on the right, no different from the zero we don't write in [0]6 to differentiate it from 60. Let me know if any of this explanation makes sense, or if I should try to find a table somewhere on the internet.
[edit] Here; this person has columns and more variety of symbols, because they're using gifs rather than Unicode. Enjoy!
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Cuneiform has a very scaled look. I don't actually believe it's one of the reasons I like it, but aesthetically I'm sure it doesn't hurt.