Tag Archives: Enumeration

Otto Koehler

Posted on June 23, 2015 by Graham Shawcross

Numerical Competence in Animals The German zoologist Otto Koehler (1889-1974) was the first scientist to convincingly demonstrate numerical competence in animals. The first part of this post is based upon a panel from Counting on neurons: the neurobiology of numerical competence” (Nieder … Continue reading →

Posted in Architecture, Brain Physiology, Design Methods, Enumeration, Logic | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

Primed Number Lines

Posted on April 28, 2015 by Graham Shawcross

As noted in the previous post, there is a right brain hemisphere dominance in attending to visuospatial and numerical information. (Rogers et al 2013) So when patients with a right parietal lesion and therefore a spatial deficit for left side stimuli, … Continue reading →

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Even 3-day-old Chicks Do It

Posted on February 9, 2015 by Graham Shawcross

An interesting series of experiments has recently been reported in Science.  (Regani et al 2015). These strongly support the idea that many animals and humans represent numbers by a mental number line where smaller values are located on the left … 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 →

Posted in Architecture, Classification, Enumeration, Logic | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

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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What Counts

Posted on September 23, 2014 by Graham Shawcross

Numerical Abilities As well as being able to roughly compare continuous quantities, humans and animals of various sorts share a method of recognising small numbers of objects or sequences of events that is independent of language.  See Subitising and  Counting Ants Both … Continue reading →

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Counting Ants

Posted on July 26, 2014 by Graham Shawcross

Counting Ants This is not about how to count ants but how ants count. The post follows research by Zhanna Reznikova and Boris Ryabko that investigates the numerical capacities of ants using ideas from Information Theory such as Shannon entropy and Kolmogorov complexity. … Continue reading →

Posted in Architecture, Enumeration, Randomness | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Missing Pullover Found

Posted on April 1, 2014 by Graham Shawcross

My long lost 1970s pullover, slip-over, or perhaps more properly 70s tank-top, has turned up at the back of a cupboard. Last year we had turned the house upside down looking for it. The design is apparently based on the colour … Continue reading →

Posted in Aesthetics, Architecture, Design, Enumeration, Knitting | Tagged , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Spatial Representation of Number

Posted on February 23, 2014 by Graham Shawcross

Francis Galton “…this peculiarity is found so far as my observations have extended, in about 1 out of every 30 adult males or 15 females. It consists in the sudden and automatic appearance of a vivid and invariable “Form” in … Continue reading →

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Five Finger Exercises

Posted on February 6, 2014 by Graham Shawcross

Written and spoken numbers are represented differently. In English numbers are usually written with Arabic numerals or as a transliteration of the spoken version, for example 342 or three hundred and forty two. Rod counting provides a written representation of … Continue reading →

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