Posts Tagged ‘fingers’
“Many of the things you can count, don’t count. Many of the things you can’t count, really count”*…
Still, we count… and have, as Keith Houston explains, for much, if not most of human history…
Figuring out when humans began to count systematically, with purpose, is not easy. Our first real clues are a handful of curious, carved bones dating from the final few millennia of the three-million-year expanse of the Old Stone Age, or Paleolithic era. Those bones are humanity’s first pocket calculators: For the prehistoric humans who carved them, they were mathematical notebooks and counting aids rolled into one. For the anthropologists who unearthed them thousands of years later, they were proof that our ability to count had manifested itself no later than 40,000 years ago.
…
Counting, fundamentally, is the act of assigning distinct labels to each member of a group of similar things to convey either the size of that group or the position of individual items within it. The first type of counting yields cardinal numbers such as “one,” “two,” and “three”; the second gives ordinals such as “first,” “second,” and “third.”
At first, our hominid ancestors probably did not count very high. Many body parts present themselves in pairs—arms, hands, eyes, ears, and so on—thereby leading to an innate familiarity with the concept of a pair and, by extension, the numbers 1 and 2. But when those hominids regarded the wider world, they did not yet find a need to count much higher. One wolf is manageable; two wolves are a challenge; any more than that and time spent counting wolves is better spent making oneself scarce. The result is that the very smallest whole numbers have a special place in human culture, and especially in language. English, for instance, has a host of specialized terms centered around twoness: a brace of pheasants; a team of horses; a yoke of oxen; a pair of, well, anything. An ancient Greek could employ specific plurals to distinguish between groups of one, two, and many friends (ho philos, to philo, and hoi philoi). In Latin, the numbers 1 to 4 get special treatment, much as “one” and “two” correspond to “first” and “second,” while “three” and “four” correspond directly with “third” and “fourth.” The Romans extended that special treatment into their day-to-day lives: after their first four sons, a Roman family would typically name the rest by number (Quintus, Sextus, Septimus, and so forth), and only the first four months of the early Roman calendar had proper names. Even tally marks, the age-old “five-barred gate” used to score card games or track rounds of drinks, speaks of a deep-seated need to keep things simple.
Counting in the prehistoric world would have been intimately bound to the actual, not the abstract. Some languages still bear traces of this: a speaker of Fijian may say doko to mean “one hundred mulberry bushes,” but also koro to mean “one hundred coconuts.” Germans will talk about a Faden, meaning a length of thread about the same width as an adult’s outstretched arms. The Japanese count different kinds of things in different ways: there are separate sequences of cardinal numbers for books; for other bundles of paper such as magazines and newspapers; for cars, appliances, bicycles, and similar machines; for animals and demons; for long, thin objects such as pencils or rivers; for small, round objects; for people; and more.
Gradually, as our day-to-day lives took on more structure and sophistication, so, too, did our ability to count. When farming a herd of livestock, for example, keeping track of the number of one’s sheep or goats was of paramount importance, and as humans divided themselves more rigidly into groups of friends and foes, those who could count allies and enemies had an advantage over those who could not. Number words graduated from being labels for physical objects into abstract concepts that floated around in the mental ether until they were assigned to actual things.
Even so, we still have no real idea how early humans started to count in the first place. Did they gesture? Speak? Gather pebbles in the correct amount? To form an educated guess, anthropologists have turned to those tribes and peoples isolated from the greater body of humanity, whether by accident of geography or deliberate seclusion. The conclusion they reached is simple. We learned to count with our fingers…
From an excerpt from Houston’s new book, Empire of the Sum: The Rise and Reign of the Pocket Calculator: “The Early History of Counting,” @OrkneyDullard in @laphamsquart.
* Albert Einstein
###
As we tally, we might send carefully calculated birthday greetings to Stephen Wolfram; he was born on this date in 1959. A computer scientist, mathematician, physicist, and businessman, he has made contributions to all of these fields. But he is probably best known for his creation of the software system Mathematica (a kind of “idea processor” that allows scientists and technologists to work fluidly in equations, code, and text), which is linked to WolframAlpha (an online answer engine that provides additional data, some of which is kept updated in real time).
“I’ll bet my autopsy reveals my mouth is too big”*…
MIT Press, with an excerpt from François Caradec‘s Dictionary of Gestures…
We might believe that the seat of speech (without considering ventriloquists and flatulists) has no need for the assistance of hand gestures when it comes to expressing emotions and sensations. Numerous adjectives confirm this to be true: foul, open, loud, smart, foaming, pouty, watering — the mouth can be all of these things and many more still…
The mouth also knows how to keep quiet: It is upon the mouth that the monkey of Chinese wisdom places its hands to signify that silence is always worth more than an imprudent word.
…
5. to bring one’s hand toward one’s mouth without quite touching it
Modesty. A gesture of eloquence employed by the great orators of antiquity.…
9. to insert the index finger into the mouth and use it to make the cheek “pop”
To make a face. Mockery. “Panurge bobbed and made mouths at him in token of derision” (Rabelais, “The Works of Rabelais, Book IV,” trans. Motteux, 1708). Called la babou in French, named for a witch with great big lips…
So much more at : “An Illustrated Guide to Mouth Gestures and Their Meanings Around the World,” from @mitpress.
* Calvin (Bill Watterson)
###
As we gesticulate, we might note that today is National Secretaries Day (more lately known also as Admin Day and Administrative Professional’s Day). It was created in 1952 by the National Secretaries Association, with the help of a variety of office products manufacturers, to recognize those office workers who, back then, made much of their contribution with dancing digits.
“Right now I’m having amnesia and déjà vu at the same time. I think I’ve forgotten this before.”*…
Before humans stored memories as zeroes and ones, we turned to digital devices of another kind — preserving knowledge on the surface of fingers and palms. Kensy Cooperrider leads us through a millennium of “hand mnemonics” and the variety of techniques practiced by Buddhist monks, Latin linguists, and Renaissance musicians for remembering what might otherwise elude the mind…
In the beginning, the hand was just a hand — or so we can imagine. It was a workaday organ, albeit a versatile one: a tool for grasping, holding, throwing, and hefting. Then, at some point, after millions of years, it took on other duties. It became an instrument of mental, not just menial, labor. As a species, our systems of understanding, belief, and myth had grown more elaborate, more cognitively overwhelming. And so we started to put those systems out into the world: to tally, track, and record by carving notches into bone, tying knots in string, spreading pigment on cave walls, and aligning rocks with celestial bodies. Hands abetted these early mental labors, of course, but they would later become more than mere accessories. Beginning roughly twelve hundred years ago, we started using the hand itself as a portable repository of knowledge, a place to store whatever tended to slip our mental grasp. The topography of the palm and fingers became invisibly inscribed with information of all kinds — tenets and dates, names and sounds. The hand proved versatile in a new way, as an all-purpose memory machine.
The arts of memory are well known, but the role of the hand in these arts is often overlooked. In the twentieth century, beginning with the pioneering work of Frances Yates, Western scholars started to piece together a rich tradition of mnemonic practices that originated in antiquity and later took hold in Europe. The most celebrated of these is the “memory palace” [see here]. Using this technique, skilled practitioners can memorize vast collections of facts by nesting them in familiar places (or “loci”): the chambers of a building or along a well-known route. (To make these places more memorable, a bizarre image is often added to each one, the more jarring the better.) It is an odd omission that hand mnemonics are rarely mentioned alongside memory palaces. Both techniques are powerful and broadly attested. Both are adaptable, able to accommodate whatever type of information one wants to remember. And both work by similar principles, pinning to-be-remembered items to familiar locations.
The two traditions do have important differences. Memory palaces exist solely in the imagination; hand mnemonics exist half in the mind and half in the flesh. Another difference lies in their intended use. Memory palaces are idiosyncratic in nature, tailored to the quirks of personal experience and association, and used for private purposes; they are very much the province of an individual. Hand mnemonics, by contrast, are the province of a community, a tool for collective understanding. They offer a way of fixing and transmitting a shared system of knowledge. They serve private purposes, certainly — such as contemplation, in the case of the Mogao mnemonic, or calculation, in the case of Bede’s computus. But they also have powerful social functions in teaching, ritual, and communication…
The five-fingered memory machine: “Handy Mnemonics,” from @kensycoop in @PublicDomainRev.
* Steven Wright
###
As we give it (to) the finger, we might recall an occasion for counting that required no fingers at all: on this date in 2015, a baseball game between Chicago White Sox and the Baltimore Orioles at Camden Yards set the all-time low attendance mark for Major League Baseball. Zero (0) fans were in attendance, because the stadium was closed to the public due to the 2015 Baltimore protests (over the death of Freddie Gray while in police custody).
“Hands have their own language”*…
Saint John the Baptist by Leonardo da Vinci
Most body parts come alone or in pairs. We have one nose, one tongue, and one navel. We sport two eyes, two knees, two feet, and so on. Fingers are a glaring exception—we’ve got a party of five on each side. This presents difficulties. When we want to single one out from the group—to specify which finger we slammed in the door, for instance—what do we do? We name them, naturally. But how?
This is a uniquely human problem. Pentadactyly—the condition of having five fingers—is pervasive in the biological world, but we are the only species that has the capacity (or occasion) to talk about those fingers. The problem is not just that we have five of them, but that they are so vexingly similar: they differ slightly in size and dexterity, but all have that pucker-knuckled, nail-capped look. How have people in different times and places solved this problem? How have they named the members of this confusable quintet? Answering this question offers a tour of the inventiveness of the human mind…
Our names for our fingers show a surprising depth of cultural variation—and similarity: “Where Do Finger Names Come From?”
###
As we dub our digits, we might send carefully-timed birthday greetings to a man with very accomplished fingers, Abraham-Louis Breguet; he was born on this date in 1747. The leading horologist of his day, he introduced a number of formative innovation into watch- and clock-making. He built the first gong spring (which decreased the size of repeater watches) and the first anti-shock device or “pare-chute” (which improved the reliability of his watches while making them less fragile). He sold the first modern carriage clock to Napoleon Bonaparte, and created the first “tact watch” by which time could be read by touch. And finally– and most impactfully– he built the first tourbillon (the self-winding mechanism that introduced the “perpétuelle” watch), which he patented in 1801.
You must be logged in to post a comment.