6 ms·
A pretty embarrassing oversight! If the picture in this article is the mace, it's clear from the cuneiform that the 'object' would be upside down if it were in
by Libbum 8y ago
A pretty embarrassing oversight!
If the picture in this article is the mace, it's clear from the cuneiform that the 'object' would be upside down if it were in a vase orientation. Rarely ever do you start an impression from the left and trail off to the right.
- gerdesj 8y ago“we realised how daft we’d been”, says Irving Finkel, a co-curator of the show.
- toufiqbarhamov 8y agoIrvin Finkel is a truly entertaining and intelligent speaker. He has a bunch of videos and lectures on a range of subjects on YouTube through the British Museum Channel. I highly recommend not only his work, but the whole channel.
- starshadowx2 8y agoHis video with Tom Scott playing "The Royal Game of Ur" is super fun. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WZskjLq040I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WZskjLq040I
- toufiqbarhamov 8y agoI hadn’t seen that one, and it was a blast, thanks.
- failrate 8y agoI was so inspired by that video when I first saw it that I built my own Ur board. I prefer the 4 2-sided dice approach to the single 4-sided die, because the normal distribution of values allows for slightly more strategy. We also house ruled that rolling a 0 gave you a reroll token. Oh, and it is a genuinely fun game.
- benj111 8y ago> 2-sided dice I wasn't sure if this was an allusion to a coin flip. Turns out there are actual 2 sided die though. https://boingboing.net/2015/10/01/how-do-you-design-2-sided-dice.html https://boingboing.net/2015/10/01/how-do-you-design-2-sided-...
- logfromblammo 8y agoYou can make most oddly-sided dice as barrel forms (a.k.a. "long dice"). Take a cylinder of uniform density, and grind the ends down to cones, at an angle such that they cannot be a stable result. Now plane off the required number of stable surfaces at equal intervals around the barrel, and scribe its value on the opposite side. (Or for even-numbered sides, you can also construct it as an antiprism, capped by pyramids.) If one cone has finger-grips added, the die can also be spun like a top. These are teetotums. A dreidel is essentially a teetotum d4. For a d2, you add two parallel planes to represent the two stable results, and unstable-angled planes on the sides so that the die will always roll from them onto one of the stable planes on any flat, level surface. Or you can just curve the two sides, such that they meet at a point. You can even make a (nontrivial) fair d1 with a clever arrangement of planes on the barrel. When rolled, the fair d1 will always come to rest on the same face, without being unbalanced, because all other planar faces are angled to roll the die to an adjacent face. I can't recall if dice of this type are dependent on being rolled in Earth gravity or not, but it seemed like they were dependent on angle of repose in some way.
- benj111 8y agoThankyou. I'm not sure I've come across so many new words outside of a science paper that I didn't understand :S . What would be the use case for a d1 ?
- logfromblammo 8y agoMath/physics curiosity and absurdism, mainly. It's a die that always comes up 1, without cheating. How is that not art?
- minikites 8y agoThere are a lot of wild writing styles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boustrophedon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boustrophedon
- JumpCrisscross 8y agoOut of curiosity, why is single-directional reading more efficient (is it?) the Boutstrophedon? The latter would seem, at first glance, more efficient by minimizing eye "seek" time.
- thechao 8y agoSkimming requires tracking line parity. Remember that spaces are a relatively modern concept—lines of text just sort of break in the middle of words & all sort of nonsense.
- Figs 8y agoJapanese is still like that. No spaces, and lines can just break in the middle of words -- though there are certain cases where word wrap algorithms are not allowed to split lines (and standardized rules for these cases). See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_breaking_rules_in_East_Asian_languages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_breaking_rules_in_East_As... if you're curious.
- Tor3 8y agoTrue, but fortunately the particles come to the rescue. Generally a word is "tagged" with a particle indicating its grammatical significance, e.g. that it's the object of the sentence. And all the particles are Hiragana, so they stick out nicely. Helps with reading.
- titanix2 8y agoNo, there are not. Top-down right-left, right-left top-down, left-right top-down, boustrophedon, "filling the available space (hieroglyph)" and that's it. I never heard of a writing system going bottom to top.