Craig Berry

I hang out on a couple of mailing lists used by professionals in the fields of mesoamerican archaeology and linguistics.  It's wonderfully exciting to watch as field research combines with energetic discussion to yield new discoveries.  Every now and then I get the nerve to contribute an idea; so far I haven't been told to get lost. :)

Right now, on one of those lists, there is a vigorous debate under way about the nature of Maya counting, particularly with regard to calendrics.  Not surprisingly, this arose from yet another post regarding the upcoming completion of the current Maya calendar cycle in 2012.

One key point in this discussion concerns the nature of "zero" in the Maya counting system.  Famously, the concept of "zero" as a number emerged in mesoamerica much earlier than in eurasia.  But it turns out that the Maya concept of zero was a bit different from our culture's version.  To us, numbers form an infinite line, marked at regular intervals by the integers.  One can start at 1, move one position to the right, and find 2.  Start at 1 and move the same distance to the left, and you'll arrive at 0; one further to the left is -1, and so forth.

It's becoming increasingly clear that the Maya zero was never used in this kind of linear counting.  Positional notation was never used for any quantity other than time, and no  codices or monuments record a quantity of zero for anything.  The idea of zero only appears in dates, as part of the five-place positional notation that measures time as a series of cycles, building in groups of 13 and 20.

However, all of these counts, at all levels of the calendar system, are cyclic rather than linear.  So even though mathematically the "zero" glyph is clearly treated like our own zero, its meaning is also "fullness" or "completion" -- because the beginning of that zero point on a given cycle also marks the completion of the previous cycle.

Think about watching a digital clock count up toward midnight using 24-hour (military) time.  The sequence is 23:58, 23:59, 00:00.  That last value, midnight, is simultaneously the end of the previous day and the beginning of the new one.  In the former role, one can imagine calling it 24:00, which would be equivalent to 00:00 of the following day.

And that's where it gets interesting, because the Maya, on the two monuments we have that mention the beginning of the current baktun cycle, both call that starting date 13.0.0.0.0 rather than 0.0.0.0.0, as one might expect.  It seems as if they recorded some cycle closings as if they were one past the previous cycle (like 24:00 in my time example) rather than the beginning of a new cycle.

There's something elusive here, some very different way of conceptualizing time and counting, tantalizingly close to being revealed, but maddeningly hard to pin down.  But just seeing that there are different ways to think about such seemingly fundamental concepts is exhilirating.  This is why I love learning.

Salon is running a fascinating interview with James Carse, whose new book The Religious Case Against Belief raises all kinds of interesting questions about the nature of faith and religion.  I haven't read it yet, but based on this article the book has jumped to the top of my pending list.  He emphasizes the differences between religions, which I find somehow refreshing given the warm fuzzy "all religions are pretty much the same" vibe that permeates Los Angeles.  Eclecticism and ecumenical harmony are fine and welcome, but we shouldn't pretend that there are not real differences between (say) Judaism and Hinduism.

"All words are sacred and all prophets true," but each says true things in different ways, about different things, in different contexts.  I rather like a world with that kind of vibrant variety in it.  It would be even better if people would stop killing each other over such differences.

In entirely unrelated news, we finally let Wafer out to wander the neighborhood on his own yesterday; we figure he's had enough time to get used to the idea that family, safety, and (most importantly) food are located in the new apartment now.  He came in and out several times during the afternoon, clearly building up his nerve with ever-longer expeditions.

Then he disappeared for more than an hour just as twilight was deepening.  The last light was fading from the sky when we heard the unmistakable sounds of a feline territorial battle under way behind the neighboring condos.  We called his name now and then so he'd know where to run if he decided to retreat, but otherwise just kept our fingers crossed.

An hour or so later, Wafer scratched at my bedroom window, and I went to the front door to let him in.  He was covered with leaf-litter, but didn't have a scratch on him.  I guess we've introduced the new alpha cat to the block.  madelineusher imagined him saying to the other cats "I used to fight coyotes.  Stay out of my way."

When life gets too exasperating, sometimes the cure is as simple as a little perspective.  Be sure to watch the linked videos.

This seems like a good time to refer to Sagan's immortal, brilliant "Pale Blue Dot" meditation, as well.

I've been contemplating the Platonic solids recently.  I've also been moving, working, fighting off the flu, having dinner with various people, preparing an LVX class for tonight, and about a thousand other things.  But in between, I've been contemplating the five Platonic solids, the only regular polyhedra possible in 3-space -- the tetrahedron, cube, octohedron, dodecahedron, and icosahedron, shapes familiar to every role-playing gamer as 4, 6, 8, 12, and 20 sided dice.

One interesting thing about these solids is that they occur in three families.  Take a regular polyhedron, draw a point in the center of each face, and construct a new polyhedron by connecting those dots; you'll get a new regular polyhedron.  Do the same to the new polyhdron and you'll get a smaller version of the the first shape again.  The solids can be grouped by these "complementary" relationships, naming each by its number of sides:

4 - 4
6 - 8
12 - 20

Notice that the tetraderon is complementary to itself, which is interesting.

Next comes the part that has me pondering.  Construct a tetrahedron out of inflexible sticks (I have a cool magnetic rods-and-balls kit for this) and you'll find it's rigid -- you can't push on it anywhere and make it "squish" and become irregular.  But build a cube, and it's immediately clear that you're holding a "squishy" solid; it can easily be bent and twisted into irregular shapes.  It turns out that both the 6-8 complementary pair and the 12-20 pair have one squishy and one rigid member; in both cases the figure with more sides is the rigid one.

It's also the case that all three of the solids with triangular faces are rigid, and both of the solids with nontriangular faces -- the cube, with square sides, and the dodecahedron, with pentagonal sides -- are squishy.

It's at this point that I wish I had more of an aptitude for serious hard-core math and geometry.  There's some beautiful truth about the nature of a three-dimensional world hiding behind the rigid-versus-squishy observation, but I have no idea how to find it, and probably wouldn't understand it if I did.  Still, it's fun to play with -- mentally, and physically.

The cable installation went smoothly on Saturday.  We're now getting all data services -- TV, phone, and internet -- through one pipe.  The net bandwidth is 10Mbps down, 1 up.  That, my friends, is what we professionals refer to as "screamingly fast".  My spine tingles every time I watch the progress bar on a download.  Yes, I'm a geek, I know -- but I'm a very happy geek.

The first modem I ever used on a home system carried 1200bps (on a good day, with a tailwind, downhill).  It's rather awe-inspiring to realize that home connection speeds have increased by a factor of roughly 10,000 -- four orders of magnitude -- over the past 25 years.

We're gradually getting settled in at the new apartment.  I love the place, especially its roominess; 10 years crammed into our previous home has made me really appreciate room to swing my arms without knocking over a lamp.

I haven't had net access at home since we moved.  Nor have we had TV.  The all-in-one cable installation is due to happen on Saturday; meanwhile, we're living like our primitive ancestors, doing this odd thing called "talking with each other" to pass the time.  Well, actually madelineusher has found an open wifi link to leech, but I haven't stooped that low.  Yet.

This morning, I decided to try for speed on my trip to work, just to see what might be possible.  Door to door time was 45 minutes, and that was with an unusually long wait for the bus.  I'll never get my antique Masonic tomes read on a commute as short as that. :)

Speaking of which, I'm nearly done with Robert Brown's Stellar Theology and Masonic Astronomy.  It's a very typical "lone visionary" book -- he has one very good idea, and proceeds to apply it where it is appropriate, and then where it is not appropriate, exhaustively, stretching his argument well past the breaking point.  I also tend to distrust an author's views on sacred geometry when he can write "The radius of any circle is one sixth of its circumference" with a straight face.  Still, his core ideas are excellent, and the book has shed some intriguing and productive light on several symbols of special interest to me.  I recommend the book if you already know Masonry and astronomy reasonably well, and can thus spot when he's gone off the rails.

We're moved.

Well, mostly moved; we still have a few things to pick up from the old place, and we need to clean there as well.  But all the major furniture and nearly all of our stuff is in the new place, and we slept there for the first time last night.

And it rocks.  There's a lot more room than we had before, and far more efficiently arranged.  The paint and decor accents are perfect.  Being on the first floor is about a thousand times more conenenient than our former position at the top of several flights of narrow, steep stairs.  (I sometimes thought of the first landing above the street as "base camp".)

There are a few problems -- for example, the hot water is misbehaving, sometimes there, sometimes not.  But they're working on other parts of the building, which probably explains that situation.  The property manager says he'll get it worked out quickly.

This morning, I got to try out my new commute for the first time.  I left the house at 7:35.  The walk into Westwood Village took 20 minutes and was very pleasant, over a gentle hill along well-tended sidewalks.  I stopped for a relaxed breakfast at Noah's, then walked around the corner to catch my bus just as the 920 pulled up.

The 920 is a "rapid express" (or some redundancy like that) which only makes a few stops as it travels from downtown to Santa Monica along Wilshire.  In fact, it makes no stops at all between Westwood and Santa Monica, where my office is.  This means I travel those four miles as fast as a car would, or perhaps even a little faster as the rapid buses have traffic light influencing systems that hold green lights for them if they're nearing an intersection.

I walked in my office door at 8:40, which means that with a leisurely stop for breakfast my door-to-door commute time was an hour.  I think I'm going to like this.  A lot.

I'm in the process of setting up utilities for our new place.  I got a bundled package of cable, phone, and net from Time Warner Cable.  For a little extra, I'm going to have 10 Mbps downstream service, and 1 Mbps up.  That's about ten times faster than my present service.

Now the tricky part...some people swear by TWC, some loathe it, and there seems to be little pattern to the difference.  I gather it's a luck of the draw situation.  So I'm really hoping we're on a good block, and installed on a good day.

This interesting article discusses new research results which pinpoint the date of Odysseus's return to Ithaca based on astronomical clues in the Odyssey.  But the article has a glaring, obvious, silly astronomical mistake in it.  I'm sure it's the journalist's fault, not the researchers'.

Five bonus points to the first person who replies to this post identifying the error.  I'll be very disappointed if the winner isn't an alumnus of one of my Astronomology classes.

First, happy Bloomsday to all!  May you find your Penelope with a minimum amount of hassle from angry giants and petulant gods along the way.

Meanwhile, big news in my household -- we're moving in two weeks.  We decided to get serious about looking for a new place, and found our dream home the first day.  It's a garden apartment in Westwood, 15 minutes' walk from the Transit Hub of the Gods (two rapid lines, one hyper-rapid, and more local buses than I can count).  This will cut my commute from 90 to around 35 minutes.  And the apartment itself is beautiful, with hardwood floors and nice paint in shades other than Depressing Apartment Off-White.

Stay tuned; we'll have a housewarming party as soon as we get settled in.  Because unlike our current home, which has a living room roughly the size of a Mercury capsule, the new place has room to party.  Woo hoo!

Every now and then human behavior so astonishes me that I find myself entering a mental state I call "the anthropologist from Mars", a phrase I borrowed from Oliver Sacks.  This happened most recently as I listened to an earnest debate on NPR about the effect of Obama's race on likely voting patterns in the November election.  And suddenly I found myself thinking, with a bemused fascination, "Do you really mean to tell me that the choice of who gets hired to run the United States may hinge on relative melanin production levels?"

What a weird, wonderful, tragic, exasperating, scary, exciting planet this is.

I got word through the YesWorld mailing list this afternoon that the Yes 40th anniversary tour has been canceled due to Jon's poor health.  Guess I can stop fretting about how much the tickets would cost.

Ambrosia's coming to town in late July, but that doesn't really make up for losing a Yes show.  Bah.

Well, not quite the oldest in the world -- I know people who have email addresses that date back to around 1983 -- but at 16 years, "cberry@cine.net" is pretty darned old.  Thus it is with a certain regret that I announce the impending retirement of that address (and the equivalent "cberry@cinenet.net").  This won't happen tomorrow, or maybe even this year, but the end is coming.  I've changed my outbound email to default to my new preferred address, "cdberry@gmail.com"; please change any address book entries, links, and so forth to use that.  Please note that it starts with "cd"; "cberry" is an entirely different GMail user, who will be very confused if he or she starts getting deluged with requests for information about OTO web issues and EGC policies.

Meanwhile, those of a particular geeky sort will be as delighted as I was by The S stands for Simple, a withering and funny critique of SOAP technology in dialog form.  Having banged my head against SOAP several times over the years, most recently just a month ago, this really hit home.  Enjoy.

Over the weekend at Kaaba in Philadelphia, we developed an idea for the first Kaaba-inspired lolcat image.  Thanks to my lovely and talented daughter madelineusher, it now actually exists.  It's rather large, so I'm putting it behind a cut tag.  slq, feel free to steal this for your presentation.  And if you don't get this, don't worry about it; it would take too long to explain.

I spent the Memorial Day weekend in Philadelphia helping to run Kaaba Colloquium, an OTO leadership training seminar.  We were jointly hosted by Thelesis and Tahuti Lodges; my thanks to everyone who worked so hard and so successfully to make us welcome.  My only regret is that I had so little time to explore Philadelphia; I ate at a couple of great old restaurants, and gawked out the car window at Liberty Hall twice, but mostly had to concentrate on business.  From what I saw, it's a lovely city, and I want to go back some time and really see the place.

We were staying in the central city area, where the street grid was laid out far before the age of the automobile.  As a result, most of the so-called "streets" looked to my West Coast eyes like narrow alleys; nearly all of them are single one-way lanes, often with parking on just one side, or neither side.  Over and over, we'd make a turn into what I took for a driveway, only to tool along for blocks on what turned out to be what the locals consider an actual street.  And of course the impression of crowding is very much enhanced by the towering office buildings looming on all sides, which are also unusual to my LA-accustomed eyes; we keep our skyscrapers in one tiny area downtown, where nobody ever goes. :)

This especially struck me when I got back to LA last night.  As my taxi headed up La Cienega, I was very aware of how wide it was, how low the buildings on either side were, the broad sweep of the sky above, the Hollywood Hills ranged across the horizon ahead of me.  It felt open, expansive.  And then I remembered returning from a previous Kaaba in Tucson, a city of enormously broad boulevards and low, isolated buildings set in sprawling lots.  Coming home from that trip, on that same stretch of La Cienega, I was impressed by how close together the buildings were, how they crowded the street, many with two or three floors, all nestled tightly around the narrow, traffic-thick lanes of the road.

Amazing how little of the unusual it takes to make the ordinary seem new again.

On Saturday evening at LVX Lodge, one era ended and another began.  After more than five years of exemplary service, magdalena_lvx stepped down as Lodge Master, with scorpio111 taking her place.  The transition ceremony was quite moving...there were few dry eyes in the house, and I had trouble getting some of my lines out around the lump in my throat.

Congratulations to the Past and Present Masters!

Day 3 of training is done.

Remember the climactic scene in The Wizard of Oz, when Toto pulls the curtain back and you see that the Wizard isn't the huge, terrifying, steam-spouting marvel everyone thought he was?  Well, imagine an alternate version, where the curtain is pulled back, and the Wizard turns out to be even bigger, scarier, and more marvelous than anyone dreamed.

That's how I feel right now.

This is so fricking cool!

Today is my last day at my current employer; on Monday I report for indoctrination at my new one.

I never know how to deal with the ends of things.  Part of my wants to dwell on the last-ness of every little event -- "This is the last time I'll ride Culver City Line 1 to work!  This is my last dev-team meeting!  This is the last cup of coffee I'll drink at this desk!"  Another part pushes that even further, realizing that some time earlier this week was the last ordinary time for all those things, and that the actual last versions are so distorted from the norm that they don't count.  But then when was my last ordinary cup of coffee here?  If today's was so unusual, then yesterday's was the last ordinary one...but that makes that one unusual, too.  This reasoning can be extended backward in time as far as you care to go.  It's a variant on the unexpected hanging paradox.

Musing on this today (on the Culver City Line 1 bus), it struck me that the only reasonable conclusion is that every day is in fact special.  This can be seen as a circuitous route to the "Best Day EVAR" theorem developed by noted philosophers belladonna93, maeghanne, and lady_saffir.  In its highest sense, it's a call to stay awake, in the "Wake World" sense of that term -- fully participating in and appreciating each moment, never falling into the robotic coma of rote behavior.  Alas, in its more prosaic reading, it sounds like Rod McKuen.

I suppose that's why we have the word "ineffable".  When you say these things directly, they end up looking silly, tautological, or both.  You have to feel them, and then you're left with a feeling you can't express, which is frustrating.

But enough philosophy for now.  I have documentation to complete.

"Free Tibet" flags made in China.

I had never heard of the philosopher Ken Wilber before reading this Salon article, but now I'm convinced I need to read his books.  His "integral philosophy" appears to be a modern take on what Crowley called "scientific illuminism".  Are any of you familiar with his works?  I'd be interested in commentary, if so.