Category Archives: Classification

Classification

Numerical Separators

Posted on November 1, 2022 by Graham Shawcross

With a base 10 place value number system, Britain and America use the period as the radix symbol, to separate integers and decimals, and use a comma to separate groups of digits; for example, they would write 3,200,100.56 Other Europeans … Continue reading →

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Place Value

Posted on September 24, 2015 by Graham Shawcross

Laplace “The ingenious method of expressing every possible number using a set of ten symbols (each symbol having a place value and an absolute value) emerged in India. The idea seems so simple nowadays that its significance and profound importance … Continue reading →

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Seriation

Posted on January 31, 2015 by Graham Shawcross

This is Archie, our then 3 year old grandson, after spontaneously reassembling a sawn up branch and being asked to pose with it for his delighted grandfather. Seriation is defined as “the forming of an orderly sequence” and was apparently first used in this sense in the 1650s. … Continue reading →

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Number Names and Words

Posted on September 23, 2014 by Graham Shawcross

Number Names George Lakoff has pointed out that we do not normally distinguish numbers from what might be more properly be called number names. (Lakoff 1989)  The most common number naming systems adopt base-10 and use ten single-digit number names, … Continue reading →

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Embodied Materiality

Posted on December 6, 2013 by Graham Shawcross

This is another list, probably even a listicle, of objects with eccentric properties. In this case objects that are, or were originally, named for the materials they are made of. Richard Wentworth was the curator of the highly influencial 1999 … Continue reading →

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Archetypes and Visual Pangrams

Posted on June 28, 2013 by Graham Shawcross

This follows an earlier post on Visual Pangrams here Pangrams To recap, ordinary pangrams use every letter of the alphabet at least once to form a more or less meaningful sentence, for instance: – Jackdaws love my big sphinx of quartz … Continue reading →

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Woodland and Silver

Posted on April 3, 2013 by Graham Shawcross

The co-inventor of the bar code N. J0seph Woodland died recently; his other co-inventor, Bernard Silver, having already died in 1963 aged just 38. They had been inspired by Silver overhearing the president of a food chain pleading with one … Continue reading →

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A Continuous Semantic Space……

Posted on January 18, 2013 by Graham Shawcross

I came across a report of this recently in the New Scientist and thought it might be important as it seems to suggest that the brain locations of names of objects and actions have some commonality across the brains of … Continue reading →

Posted in Architecture, Brain Physiology, Classification | Tagged , | 1 Comment

Buffon’s American Degeneracy

Posted on January 20, 2012 by Graham Shawcross

Buffon’s American Degeneracy: George Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon (1707-1788) disliked what he thought was the arbitrary nature of Linnaean classification. Buffon thought the natural world ought to be understood in all its complexity and consequently produced his monumental (36 … Continue reading →

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