Two Bar was a name they gave a certain view of the Paris Basin, from their side of the river looking north past the clumps of muck and stranded flood wrack which would later host St. Chappel, Notre Dame and, just upstream, the citydwellings of the anciently and permanently rich of present day Paris, but seeing then, instead, the place where by the wrestlings of chance and design it would become.
The controversial Barry Coat of Arms
raddle (–dl), n. [Anglo–Fr. reidele, cart, rail; M.H.G. reidel, reitel, a cudgel.] 1. A long stick used in making hedges; also, a hedge formed by interweaving such sticks. [Obs. or Dial.] 2. a wooden bar, with a row of upright pegs set in it, used by weavers to keep the warp of a proper width and to prevent it from becoming entangled when it is wound upon the beam of the loom [Obs.] raddle, vt.; raddled, pt., pp.; raddling, ppr. to interweave. Webster's New Universal Unabridged Dictionary Deluxe Second Edition Dorset & Baber 3000+ pp. gen. ed. Jean L. McKechnie ©1983 by Simon & Schuster, N.Y.; Maps ©1972 by Simon & Schuster, N.Y.
udging from the newly offered venue of the current year, the United States of America which surrounds us here at HCE made a great mess of things with its invasion of Iraq in the preceding year (named 2003 by common agreement), a mess symbolized for us with sad eloquence by war's visit to the National Museum in Baghdad early in the escapade.
This is not to say that Iraq, metaphorically a museum being visited by the US, represented even metaphorically an equal to its own national museum in its attention to the full artful display of the retained gestures of the past, but rather represented alternately the full shabbiness of civility's continuing behaviors over time, the retained gestures of the great six-thousand year mass of civilization in those parts leading to their consequential Saddam Hussein.
But even the celebrated discovery of that befouled leader of the foe in his hiding place has not much mitigated our concerns in this respect, direful always when the houses of the holdings of the written record of the past (in this case quite original examples of the stuff of the past, laundry lists and sheep counts scuffed on clay and left until the visit this past year of the US there), suffer ending in war, and, heedful always of the yet-unsettled shock we first felt learning, quite late, of the destruction of the Library of Alexandria, we judged immediately and firmly that a similarly sad event had just occurred.
Four, say, thousand years of meaning as marked in gathered artifact, some object spanning the entirety of history, if history's meaningfully owned markings are its measure. Ended as an object, returned to its dusts, no longer. The museum was destroyed this past year, to our unrelievable regret, its best evidence of the fruits of civilization, housed in its collection of old examples from the very first of cities, borne away by the obliterating effects of the invasive visit of the US.
That civilization, gathered there in its own Downtown Historical District, given six thousand years and home field advantage, would as soon produce Saddam Hussein or the fellow just like him to be the leader of the thing, is a long established tendency.
The Barry Family has made its views on this tendency known: Beowulf would be better, for a leader, in the older ways of organizing the daily drift of folk followed by the Barry Family.
For civilization's purposes, though, either kind will do, Saddam or Beowulf in charge. It is civilization's long and storied indifference in this respect that has drawn the unbent scorn of Barry Family pronouncements over time, summarized in the reflexive slogan, Ah, go with the good fellow! so often employed when conversation edges this way.
Here at HCE we see the crisp utility of the tabulated thing: the calendar of the famous Roman calendrics as example, where in rows and columns the clever arguments of its precedent astronomies are given as answered, in the blended intersection of the namable and the countable days of it there.
It is not necessary that we carry with us all the Roman baggage implicit in the naming of the firstmonth of our calendar, January. It answers our main need well enough without all the detailed talk of looking back and looking forward both at once suggested in the threshold word made out of the famous given gateway god Janus.
It is not necessary that we carry with us, either, given the good answers of the calendar, all the complex mathematical astonishments of astonomy implicity borne out by its inscription. It's there, that argument, meant to be guessable, or, should it come to that, learnable, but carried to conclusion elsewhere.
Admittedly the calendar is the useful thing however little we apprehend of what went in to making it.
It is no accident, but represents rather the adaptive application of Chaldean methodologies, that the smallest parts of a day, itself the smallest unit shown on a calendar, are treated sexigessimally. By that theory of reciprocals known to Chaldeans each smaller subsidiary unit may be parted into sixtieths, and that part parted sixty times as well, as often as needs be.
The smallness of the small quantities evokable in this manner is beyond reproach.
It was the commonly understood problem of the Mediterranean astronomies that the motions of the skyparts did not resolve themselves by those matured methods into neat integral solutions.
The Moon does not take 28 days to cycle through its luminosities, but something more instead; each quarter of its motion is thus ill measured by the seven named days of its weeks, should such a system be proposed.
The day itself, useful if somewhat loosely defineable unit it is otherwise, does not measure the sixtieth of a sixtieth of a year, quite.
There is observably in each case some fractional something left over, a remainder or residue or incremental extra to be resolved, to be subtly entertained in what we at HCE have come to think of as the older sciences of before by the known successful methodologies of the Chaldeans.
Even Ptolmey, whose Almagest famously formulated by means of the great Greek geometrical mathematics an entirely plausible scheme of the skyparts, gave the Chaldean results their due, incorporating them directly and in good order into his own surpassing statement of astronomy.
All those many years on, the adept uses of the Chaldean treatment of fractional parts remained a feature of the sure knowledges of Copernicus on astronomy, to which he took such notable exeption in other particulars. Even then he remained the fluent one, suave sayer of the sexigessimals, Copernicus.
The numbered parts of the Roman calendrics are thus supported by the unseen sexigessimal cunning of the Chaldeans in handling such remainders as must always be allowed for there.
Not that this commonly occurs to us here at HCE at all.
We are minded of this but occasionally, when some new trove of tablets of the Chaldean clay by chance becomes unearthed again, bringing the vivid relation once more to light, or, when, as happened only this past year, that clay, Chaldean by virtue of the wondrously imaginable mathematics of its markings, carried down the ages as first formed, is cruelly crushed back again into the simple self-report of dirt and nothing more by the willful engines of human destruction.
All Chaldeans had the sexigessimal system of notation, as do the hours and minutes here at HCE in a continuation of the Chaldean in us.
The Chaldeans, in harmony with table after table after table of good results, of finely observed and annotated answers found in the clay left them by the oldest Babylonians, had that same practically civil proclivity for starting from the answer, and working back from whatever made it such, if necessary, but in any event, and importantly, going on from there to the other good result obtainable once what's on clay becomes the settled thing.
From the time of the oldest Babylonians and before the well-recorded count had offered up its lists: sheep counts and laundry lists pragmatically given as the settled thing by their inscribers.
To turn a list toward the uses of a table, it is necessary to perform some guessable operation on the list. The result, the good answer, is the table itself; the operation, what turned it from a list to table, some guessable or learnable thing, is only ever implicitly present.
In a table, something has happened. That something is the unshown but implicitly necessary complement of the table's good answers.
A clever way to fill a table up, obviating the need for understanding what may be an excruciatingly cunning turn in the mathematics of it going on implicitly beside the table's answers, is to straightforwardly, mimicking the brusk usages of buisiness practices everywhere since earliest times, count the given listed elements of the thing itself, and simply enter those nicely noted values there.
Even in the millennium prior to the Chaldeans, in the otherwise unnotable astronomies of that long interregnum in that region recommended to us here at HCE without irony as the center of civilization, the listed tracking of the skyparts continued.
Say the Chaldeans teased again into life the mathematics implicitly there in the remnant tabulations passed on to them, nurturing to fullest maturity the methodologies used to mark the passages of the skyparts in all that time since the oldest Babylonians and before.
The Chaldeans had at astronomy with the aid of the arithmetics of the oldest Babylonians, who'd helpfully inscribed on some readily available clay the tabulated results of their investigations into the subject quite some time before.
There's scant evidence of what went through a mathematicians' mind in the intervening 1300 years: there's the florescence of a quite tidy sexigessimal system of arithmetic using place value notation and the ready stylus to mark up the results of the range of their many discoveries there among the oldest Babylonians, as preserved so purposely in clay, interrupted about 1650 B.C.E. by the rude intrusions of the Hittites. And then following that more than a millenium of the meagrest record of the practices of that arithmetic, so that the mechanism of its transmission down the ages is yet to be precisely understood. The Baylonian mathematics, a subtly extended arithmetic based on the number 60, came to be gloriously weilded by those well-known as Chaldeans in their highly evocative rendition of the skyparts.
The other demotic uses of mathematics down the ages in that region, from oldest Babylonian and before, declined to adhere to the standard of sexigessimality so strictly observed by the Chaldeans. They had their own decimal way of counting other things than skyparts all that time, and counts by twenty-four and twelve and two, as well. Often enough they casually combined in their regular daily use the signs for a sexigessimal part and a decimal part, making a mixed thing of it, comprehensible in context, but far from the savored standard of Chaldeans.
The oldest Babylonians left table after table of results. It's clear that in their pedagogy they approached the question of arithmetic from the direction of the good answer it could be said to give, leaving to the efforts of the understanding student the path back to the method used to get there, should that be the student's inclination. Preponderantly what's passed down to our own age in the acheived permanencies of their clay is the perpetuation by inscription over and over again by their student scholar copyists, of the set tabulated answers to the investigated range of arithemtic commonly considered by their kind.
Clearly the oldest Babylonians had the quadratic equation in mind when they listed the tabulated results of the good answers one would hope to find in any coherent exploration of the bothersome but useful topic. That they knew the theory of reciprocals to a scintilla can be made out easily enough in table after table, redundant witness to the good answer present in their repetitious copying. And, of course, it cannot be said that they ignored the relation known so well to us as the Pythagorean Theorem, but rather, by their tables clearly indicate generous time and attention spent in its examination.
By the well spent words of O. Neugebauer in his concise study, The Exact Sciences in Antiquity, the Chaldaean methodologies of what he insists on calling the Babylonian mathematics are readily made known to the looker.
O. Neugebauer puts it breifly, and can be thanked at least for that. Little we had ever hoped here at HCE to aquire any further knowledge on the subject of the calendrics at all beside that so conclusively presented to our earliest attentions by the nuns, expanding sufficiently as they did, the nuns, by their command of both subject and object of such study, our natural baseline interest in the matter at the time. We had not hoped here at HCE to ever expand on that core of hard-fought knowledge, suitable as it was, in the main, to the demands of all but the most arcane of daily uses.
O. Neugebauer, mercifully, does not require the looker to learn the cuneiformic characters of the Chaldeans in order to follow along in their mathematics.
Instead, he makes a nice translation of it into the solid, sure, comprehesible notation of the new sciences, so that the first ten terms of the Chaldaean count, for example, stabbed in clay some time ago, become in The Exact Sciences in Antiquity the more familiar one's, two's, and three's of what we have come to consider here at HCE, unexeptionally in this age, the standard given mathematics of it: the familiar 1, 2, 3, … etc., is what O. Neugebauer presents, instead.
We must consider Chaldaean that brilliantly conceived sexigessimal system of notation which underwrote all the best of the calendrics O. Neugebauer calls Babylonian in The Exact Sciences in Antiquity. To be "Chaldaean" to a Greek or Roman was not only to have at hand the sophisticated grasp of that famous way of counting, but also carried by its concise branding all the implied insult such terminology could bear down the millennia with regard to the motive of its users.
Just as the term "Bohemian" eventually came loose from its ethnogeographic sense to helpfully describe and hopefully malign the suspected meaning of a particular pack of folk in a later age, Chaldaean came loose itself.
What's Chaldaean continues in our quotidian consideration of the clock here at HCE, exposed to its fundamental sexigessimality by the nuns as we were made to be, the nuns who did not fail to fill us with its felicity, either, that counting by sixties, when it came to marking out the precincts of the purely mathematical circle itself.
O. Neugebaur makes do with the notation of the familiar mathematics of the new sciences to make a neat consistent intermediate equivalent of the Chaldean marking.
For example when he writes 1 1,10 1,20, he is actually indicating what would have been seen by the Chaldeans as the cuneiformed count to the left in the illustration just above taken from his book The Exact Sciences in Antiquity. Famliarly decimized, these are the numbers 1, 70, and 80, for the values one, seventy and eighty which all three notations propose to represent.
The past, as adopted, in the Barry Family boglore, is the negotiated thing.
Admittedly the Barry Family Standards weigh firmly on what's gone before, as is their purpose. The boglore cannot be mentioned, the past remains undredgeable, without them.
The Barry Family Standards (as agreed), derive directly from the unordered trove of bogknowledges and stratagems made known to the the Barry Family during all those many millennia in the Paris Basin.
The Barry Family Standards work their seive of judgements on any model of the past, trying to deliver up the boglore, just as they lend their seive of judgements to any considerable model, past, current, or proposed, with their disinterested offering of the settled thing to measure that model against.
That is what they are for, and naturally that is what they forever do, the Barry Family Standards, when mention of the past is made, interposed as they are between the past as laid out and the past as capable of being taken up for review, given the crude but serviceable tools they represent.
In the eversettling environs of the bog, that slumped and soggy space down to which all the rest comes eventually for mixing there, in the Barry Family view, the settled thing is the marvel to behold. That there could be in spite of known bogspecific tendencies otherwise, trending as such tendencies do downward for the most part, though with a little curling eastward as well, that there could be the settled thing in any sense, is a charming useful marvel of the world, from this perspective.
The spare cache of settled things collected there in the Barry Family Standards was long likened by its members to the raddle of stiff sticks offering outline to the suggestion of some weedy raft, the raft being the inevitable accoutrement of such travel as any of them were capable of accomplishing in that time without sinking completely out of view. Though not in and of itself the settled thing, the raft by its raddle made for the nice intermediary step between the Barry Family hoof and the all-assuming requirements of the bog.
No wonder then the Barry Family has held so dearly to its Standards, at least in principle, down the ages.
All during that much-derided stay in the Paris Basin, all during that long seemingly sedentary time there under the constant downpour of disdaining and perhaps not quite unjustified commentary of neighbors regarding the close, the quite close, the overtly evident and objectionably intimate relationship so bluntly insinuated by their remarks on the given Barry and the ever-associated swine, the Barry Family had at least the settled thing of their unordered list of Standards for support.
From out of elsewhere to the bog and to the Barry Family there, from the as-yet-to-be-considered past of the Chaldeans, came word eventually to the Barry Family of that pack of people and their practices, particularly with respect to the millenium of methodically recorded views made, famously, by Chaldeans on the matter of astronomy.
For all the reasons given by Chaldeans, it can not only be seen (proferred persistenly as it is to the perspective of perceptive humans), but also very cleverly memorialized (as it is in the useful permanencies of the well-known markings of the readily available clay of the Chaldean surround), that the skyparts have their motions.
The clay itself, fundamentally poor dirt in the Barry Family view, became Chaldean also by their Chaldean use of it.
Of course to be a clay unspent by the Chaldeans is the commoner charactersitic of all clay, the usual condition of it even among the most of it to be found as undergirt to their own home ground.
But in their time, recognizing the utility of its permanencies, the Chaldeans made Chaldean use of some of it, that clay, making it Chaldean clay.
To this day there is that clay that is Chaldean clay, left lumped for the most part undisturbed in great dry midden mounds called tells on the sands and scant soils of the famous home range of the Chaldeans, memorializing the marked interests of the Chaldeans in astronomy.
Deposited as well in the fine collections of universities and museum in their home range and throughout the wider world by those who have thought to champion its permanence, as well as in the unspoken collections of certain indivuals who for obvious reasons would not care to be named, the Chaldean clay remains the well-regarded thing indeed.
The Sun rolls, and the Moon rolls. They both roll round.
By its own elliptic orbit the Sun makes its way round the distantly described focus of its travels, some unimaginably long far away which takes, as near as matters, 26,000 years to circumscribe, even at the rate travelled by our own energetic Sun.
The Moon rolls much more immediately around the Earth, the brief period of its orbit admittedly accentuated by the varying illumination provided it by the for all intents and purposes otherwise engaged Sun.
Our own Earth rolls, too. It has its way around the sun on a yearly basis.
The Sun rolls, and the Moon rolls, and the Earth rolls, too.
Of the three, only Earth twirls.
Sure, there's some wobble to the Moon as it makes its way around the Earth, but it is not twirling fast enough for the other side of itself ever to come around to the front where it can be seen fairly by humans. The one very familiar side of it only is everpresently available for view from earth for lack of twirl.
And the Sun, pondrous thing really, does revolve in a way similar to the true twirl of Earth, but with not nearly the alacrity around its axis needed to be described sensibly a twirl.
Earth goes round the Sun twirling as it goes, unlike the motion of the Moon or the Sun's nearer neighbor Mercury for that matter, which untwirlingly sets one molten face toward the Sun and one frozen face away, even as it persues its quick cycle around the big hot thing.
The Babylonians, or, as we here at HCE choose to refer to them when the subject is the sciences, the Chaldeans, marked down their many observations of the motions of the skyparts.
A fluke of meteorology left their land with little rain, the Chaldean sky in consequence not nearly the simile for cloud it was just then in the more northerly disposed reaches of the Barry Family range, and therefore much more suited to the continuous and, please circumstance, unbroken practice of permanently recording such observations as they might be allowed to make, unquestionably spurred by the justly famed endemically urbane inclination of cities to enourage the clumping of like types as together as necessary for them to get at each other easily.
The Chaldeans, as we say of the group, tracked and tabulated the redundant motions of the skyparts. They used the useful clay of their land to mark it up, making what in many instances proved to be a permanent record lasting to this very day, which is of course the proper drift of any permanent thing.
Ever-exposed to the ongoing, consequential, unmediated experience of the effectual elements of post-Ice Age meteorology in Northern Europe since well before the time of the actual Discovery of the Barry Family itself, the Barry Family has been quite naturally disposed throughout all the coursings of its own interminable conversation to aspire to a degree of fluency modelled quite intentionally after the the fluidities of its surround, and as well to speak with a length, a volume and a constancy equalling the interminable intercessions of that same climate.
With best usage, the period of the sentence sought to equal thus the period of the given rain, in the Barry Family view.
Little good it did from that perspective to try to look farther up than that circumstantial cloud, so very coterminous it was in both Barry Family language and experience with what was meant by sky.
Word came eventually to the bog, as all things do in time, of the more inclusive catalog of skyparts made clearly sensible to the wide-ranged notice of other humans.
Certainly the Sun and Moon, however ill-met by the available intelligences of the Barry Family, were not unknown. Through half-lit hints and suppositions based on them, vague and generalized though they were, the Barry Family had its own working knowledges of those two considerable things.
And yet it cannot be denied that the introduced astronomies of the other humans with their highly descriptive measure of an inclusive and overarching setting above and beyond the disturbed meteorologies of the home range of the Barry Family profoundly affected the Barry Family view not only of meteorology itself, now seen as surely subsidiary to the encompassing schemes of astronomy, but also belied the very adequacy of their own honed style of conversation, comprehensively aligned as it had become through long ages of use to the now-deprecated rangings of mere climate.
It is the unredacted inference of the boglore that everything is everything.
It is said that in earlier ages the inference was more easily acheived: Wordsworth gathered it up quite nicely on a country walk with his sister Dorothy, and bothered to write it down in the talented rephrasings of his well-known words.
It is said that in the ageless past the rudest resident of the bog accepted this inference all too readily, this "everything is everything."
The "country walk" being in fact the only jaunt available to any of the boglot of them wherever they stepped in those past times, it is easily seen that the inference would be daily only a few steps distant, on average, from any of them, considering the everassociating words of Wordsworth on the subject, so nicely and naturally conjoining the two, the country walk and the inclusive identity of the readily reached inference that everything is everything. They could hardly step away from the idea, the boglot of them, even among what we take to be the Barry Family itself during its many millenia in the Paris Basin, a group commonly differentiated by its contrary inclinations in almost every other usage.
And this without regard to quite similar deductions drawn down from the ageless lore and leavings of meteorology to which the conversation of the bogresident must reflexively return, even among the Barry Family as so disposed.
Well–reminded by the everpresent evidences of full rain or merely moistening mist or the gloom assisting the arrival of some new measure of it, that its to say, swayed by the deductive introduction of its descendant offerings, the bogtrotter, even a Barry, so inclined to be contrary in every other usage, admitted without comment that everything is everything indeed.
There was the oddity of a quirk of their philology, even before the Discovery of the Barry Family itself, a quirk shared by all those many similarly subjected to the incessancies of the influential drizzle which described the common lot of them in those northern lands retiring from an Ice Age where they lived: the word for "cloud" and the word for "sky " were the same. "Sky" subsumed "cloud" in this telling, just as "cloud" expressed "sky."
From this it was hard not to say, "The sky is falling soft tonight," as example, when the urge arose, as it must, to make reflexive mention of the endemically experienced and for the most part quite sufficiently understood condition of raininess which fell to those who bothered to listen to such talk at all.
That sky itself should exhaust its place and meaning as a skypart, and by such decline commingle with the crowd of Barrys all below, was evidenced constantly by conditions, and not infrequently by the admittedly redundant yet assuredly unavoidable mention of it using the one word for it at their disposal.
Thinking it was February 22, 2004 instead, looking with the easy presumtions of the counting of the Roman calendrics one full month ahead in its scheming.
Given the ill-fit elements of its descriptions, as roundly remarked just now below in the Bogblog, we find it difficult here at HCE to decide (despite the explicit instruction of the nuns in this regard as a part of our earliest tutelage on the subject) whether February 22, celebrated birthdate of the famous George Washington, happened when he emerged to fall on that same day of the week as February 22, 2004, a Sunday for all we know, will do.
The older scheme of counting of before, in use when George Washington was born, became supplanted among his kind during the ongoing course of his own well-regarded existence by the revised and now standard measure of the Roman calendrics familiar to us here at HCE.
In 1752 September had but 19 days, the date Tuesday, September 2 being followed immediately by Wednsday September 14 in that year. Note that the weekdays rolled on undisturbed by this reduction. Nevertheless it made for a great scandal, the changeover, with packs of people at the time pouring through the streets demanding back their eleven day, as might be expected.
From what we gather here at HCE George Washington was thus constrained to move the annual celebration of his own date of birth to another date entirely, odd uneasy task for anyone we suspect, from the eleventh day of February in the old way of naming to the twenty-second day of February in the new, in order to give the proper interval of a year between festivities.
But again, and importantly, did the fellow on his original day in this world then enter on the same Sunday of the week as that required of the February 22, 2004 to be so soon celebrated? That day will be a Sunday, we surmise, February 22, 2004.
The Barry Family standard is strict in this regard. The day must have its four elements, the two named elements followed by the two numbered, so that of today (returning from our previously projected February) it must be announced, first the names "Thursday, January" and then following that the numbers "22, 2004," in every proper phrasing of the date.
"Thursday January 22, 2004," it is. Any other formulation is mere nickname by comparison. And, "Sunday, February 22, 2004," it is as well, with respect to our earlier projection.
Perhaps George Washington was born on a Sunday in a year now past. By light of the Roman calendrics as presently construed here at HCE, with our generous credence to the significance of the day of the week, were this true, was he born thus, then the coming date Sunday, February 22, 2004, would be the nice full significant anniversary of the thing indeed, even with the elements "February 22" and "George Washington's birthday," so contentiousy aligned across that span of years. Otherwise the celebrated date is just a nice near-miss, by the Barry Family estimate.
This day just following a New Moon is the first day of the new year in the Chinese count.
It cannot escape our attention here at HCE that the famous lunar calendar of the influential Chinese astronomy has a burden of residuals and remainers of its own chosen methodologies to account for, just as the Roman calendar, under the watchful stewardship of those favoring its continuance, must constantly account for the ill-matched yet at last useful elements by which it constructs its own measure of a year.
The Moon's range reaches that skypart shadowed by the intervening Earth from the direct tangibilities of the widely influential Sun.
It is redundantly a visitor there, to that unlit space, the Moon.
This period of lapsed reflection on its part is called no moon at all by some, though in the Bary Family view, this is much like calling a sleeping bear no bear at all, judging its existence solely by its current unferocity.
Nevertheless the cry of, "Hey look, there's no moon!" will be heard in all the languages of humanity on this day, is our guess here at HCE, who for our part have always found this a forgivable solecism, on par with saying the sun went down or just came up, for example.
It may be helpful, it is certainly our adopted practice here at HCE, to think of the cycle of the moon's recurrent luminosities as beginning with no luminosity at all, the unlit instance of it of today the starting place for its regular round of brilliancies, which increase from none to the most that it can ever have and then dim back again to none again in somewhat more than twenty-nine days all told.
In all the surviving annals of the older sciences of before, when writing turned to astronomy, it offered up its own known and specific signs for the skyparts it attended to.
The sun, whose famously unfathomable focus falls unfailingly on humans, was given by those practiced in that hand as a circle with a dot just there at its own center in the proper way of writing out the astronomy of the older sciences of before. With that one sign the sun was said, by that singular glyph it was readily known. For all we know here at HCE the practice of that briskly made reference may still linger in the usages of astronomy's current practitioners.
Though the Sun needs but one sign in astronomy, the Moon bears four, exalting by these glyphs the ongoing human interest in the perceptible light sent moonward by the Sun, the very amount and tendency of the stuff being explicitly indicated by each of the four of them.
The Moon when New, when hardly a moon to speak of in the least because unlit, has for its sign a blackened circle, and when Full, a circle like the sun's, though left undotted. The Quarter Moons, the First of them, which follows the New, and the Last of them, which follows the Full, are also represented each by their own sign, given as a sort of fattened C for the Last of them, and given as its reversed crescent, equally fattened, for the First.
It would be difficult to talk merely of the Moon with this notation, since any one of the four signs drags with it a connotated quantity of illumination.
Presumably the astronomers of the older sciences of before rejected the idea of introducing yet a fifth sign meaning just the moon and nothing else into their notation, and often found themselves deploying the word for the thing itself instead of the indicated sign when it became necessary to indulge in such generalities.
We see here in the list of astronomical signs found in our standard source for such matters (the Deluxe Second Edition so commonly referred to here at HCE) that the Quarter Moon, either one really, is given as the proper sign for the thing, however much more light than strictly speaking necessary is entailed by such usages.
Even from the vantage of the bog it's clear that Monday, January 21, 2004 will not occur.
It is a misnomer for a day in the Roman calendrics, Monday January 21, 2004.
Despite the weighty inclined leanings of the boglore on the matter, the Roman calendrics remains the Roman, catholically observed standard of calendrics here at HCE, in a manner quite continually consistent with our explicit instruction in the matter by nuns all those many years ago. We take as given its firstnamed month of January and the number of its year, the year baldly enumerated along the unequivocal path of integers in sequence from its start.
We roll the twelve-spoked wheel of its named elements, the months, along the more integrally evoked path of its annual enumeration. Every numbered year will have its January, its firstnamed month among its well known famous dozen of them, the twelve of which are unfailingly visited on each numbered year in given order.
January has its allotted count of days, as does each month, although only the most intricately argued abstrusities of the Roman calendrics support the practice of so disparately outfitting each month in this regard, some having thirty listed days, some featuring as many as thirty-one of the them (as does our current instant of January) and one, always the most succinctly expressed of months, notoriously foreshortened and changeable thing, having far fewer days to deliver than any of the rest.
From its earliest introduction to the Roman calendrics, the Barry Family has viewed suspiciously this characteristic variety of monthlengths, a suspicion naturally shared by those of us here at HCE, though our own guess rests on its accuracy by dint of the suasions of the nuns previously mentioned. Somewhere in the bothersome workings of the Romanized detail of its methodologies is the required disposition of the months to be so variously endowed with days, is our understanding here at HCE.
January has by this agreed dispensation thirty-one days on its list of numbered days.
January, like any month must have its minimum of four allotted Mondays, as is known. Some years, as has happened in the past, given the perplexed relation of name and number for any of its given days, January may have as many as five Mondays, although as time would have it, 2004 does not present this opportunity.
Neither does 2004 present the opportunity for Monday to name January 21, its firstmonth's fund of Mondays being otherwise exhausted, joined in the event to four uniquely other numbers among its necessary thirty-one of them instead.
Elsewhere among the numbered years Monday, January 21 does properly occur, but not here, not now.
Monday, January 21, 2004 is a misnomer, then.
It is not inconceivable, no: as attested by our constant mention of it here in the Bogblog it is not inconceivable at all.
It is, rather, unrealistic.
January is so elemental to the scheme of the Roman calendrics that January cannot be offered up handily for inspection without entailing almost all the rest of it, the whole creaky solcentric model with its inherent tension between the name for a given day and the number of it.
Still, we can say at the very least that the Romans had their way with words, known appropriators they never failed to be of all the sturdiest of signs and slogans of all the cultures being encompassed by the mighty brickworks of their own civilities. January is soundly given in the Roman naming.
A search of the near surround reveals in fewer than thirty seconds here at HCE the book Smith's Smaller Classical Dictionary (edited by E. H. Blakeney Everyman's Library No. 495, London, 1949). From it we elicit January's intended Roman sense, firstgiven name in the annual round of 12 named months by which the recurrent ranging of that most meaninful skypart, the famous Sun, is marked.
We here at HCE who look longingly at times in Smith's Smaller Classical Dictionary for solace, are often drawn to the Preface To New Edition of that admittedly smaller but to us ever–meaningful book.
Following the original preface of E. H. Blakeney dated August 1910, here given as Preface To First Edition, are the utterly resonant words of an editor known only by the initials J. C. T. which begin, "This edition is in main a revision of Mr. E. H. Blakeney's condensation of Dr. Smith's Classical Dictionary …"
It is a frought offering, the revision of a condensation, we have always thought here at HCE.
Immediately in the Preface To New Edition, J. C. T. has the phrase (surely by way of an indicator of that incorrigible propensity for ellision which any editor might name among the foremost talents of such craft) "in main" for what we here at HCE would construe, given our more spaciously appointed wordspace, as "in the main" instead. This is already a savings of thirty-three and one third per cent on the part of J.C.T., the use of the two words instead of the three, with little or no harm at all to the underlying meaning of the phrase. Although the rhythmic component, famously irreducible in any language, is blunted in our view by this truncation, such an early gesture of unfailing concision is well–met here, deploying as it does at once the prime and most obvious technique of the many effectual methods comprising best practices in this regard.
When sucessfully acheived, of course, a revision of a condensation is the most condign and pleasant thing, particularly when the source of its distilled residuum (in this instant the indicated Dr. Smith's Classical Dictionary) is the ever-referenced standard in its own right. It is our practice to consider Smith's Smaller Classical Dictionary just such an acheivement.
Any ambiguity in the counting scheme of the Roman calendrics is brushed aside by its firmly adopted usages, especially as its current result is so regularly and unequivocally made known at the top of every journalled page, so that even under the strictures of the charmingly lapsed standards of the San Francisco Chronicle, as example, or even under the more stridently evinced standards of the famous New York Times at the other extreme of what we take for news here at HCE, there will reflexively occur the correctly noted mention of the thing up there.
"Monday, January 12, 2004" was so printed there on that given day we must assume, having perhaps read but barely noted it there as printed in the San Francisco Chronicle on that day, though on the other hand certainly not having read it at all in that day's New York Times but convinced, nonetheless, of its appearance there on general principles.
The ordering of elements of "Monday January 12, 2004" in those journals coincides precisely with the ordering of elements of the Barry Family Standard in all respects, with the named elements offered first, and next the numbered elements in their turn.
In the Barry Family formulation, January, wedged between Monday and 12 in that saying, seeks to mediate between and reconcile the disparately inclined tendencies of the word for the day, Monday, offering its serviceable, regular, but in the main innaccurate modelling of the lunar cycle, with the number (12 in this case) of that same day's position on the listed length of the given month.
The tension between the named and numbered is not easily reconciled. Offering up "12 Monday January 2004" would bring the contentious terms too close, as would "Monday 12 January 2004," for that matter.
Given the values of the Roman calendrics "January 12, 2004" is conceivable. Its naming is the quite necessary consequence of the clever counted sheme of cycles and series proposed by the adopted Roman thing, as is your other value "January 21, 2004," for that matter. There will always be a twelfth day or a twenty-first day of any month, and the year no matter how extended will always have its January. We can say with great obduracy that both January 12 and January 21 will occur, given merely the proposal of 2004.
January 12, 2004, has occured as was fortold by the methodologies of the counting scheme leading up to it and then printed as proof at the head of every page of every paper printed on that day, the previously mentioned San Francisco Chronicle or famous New York Times being examples of such practise, as surety of the arrived day January 12, 2004 is trumpeted in small but incontrovertable type, as it is on a daily basis, for the readiest of reference to the eye of the looker, at the top of every page.
Although for many years here at HCE we had quite enough of the New York Times (our given standard in a newspaper here at HCE) on a daily basis, we currently have no ready reference to its offerings in print. But, yet unseen, we trust that the New York Times on that day (assumed by all to be January 12, 2004) did accurately and unfailingly follow the commendable practices of that tradition. We should not expect to be at all suprised to see it there, leading each page, the properly expressed term "January 12, 2004," should we ever chance to encounter a printed copy of that edition.
It exaggerates to say the naming of the day of the week so-named Monday, monikered after the moon, as example, being the so-named one of the well-understood seven of the clearly envisioned days of the given weekly round, serves up much useful anything else about the place of the moon in the sky by being so named, on the other hand.
Monday makes the well known plea of the well-known week for its well-known relation to the moon by the simple expedient of appropriately identical naming. One of the elements of week is moon, so-named, by such blandishments.
The little cycle of the week watches out erratically for the moon; it reaches the irresolution of a remainder when measuring four of its own number out against the actual amount of time it takes for the noticeable lighting of the moon to cycle through the easily appreciable redundancies of its illuminations, from that most meager non-amount of light of it at all, full round to the conceivable most of it that it may ever bear, and back again, which takes, observably, recurrently, more nearly 29 days to re–commence than the 28 days allowed by the roll of four full weeks in the rough measure of it given by the Roman calendrics.
The numbers 28 and 29, being such near neighbors, as numbers, are prime to one another, and the resolution of any measurement depending on the eventual synchronzation of their disparate cycles is a troublesome bother indeed.
This is not to say the week does not have its adherents, ragged measure it may be. Though it leaves something here left over to be accounted for in the Roman calendrics, there are in fact the known developed techniques for managing this residuum, subject as it has been to the suasions of the subtlest of mathematics of those who have for so long sought its resolution.
If the moonlight from dim to bright and back did take 28 days, then the meaning of Monday would have some constancy. Its appearance would always nicely match one of four recurrent observable luminosities, product of the nice synchronous turning of the two entities, the one a sky part and the other a fairer copy of it than possible under the actually and thus unavoidably current condition, which makes quite plain that the sky part is so disposed, instead, to take much nearer twenty nine days to complete the indicated cycle, rather than the twenty-eight which that subjunctively described ideal proposes, and as a result gives Monday far many more than four possible brightnesses when its moon-given name is evoked to label by the Roman calendrics a given day in its time.
Monday is unmoored from consistent measure of the moonlight, however suggestive of the skypart its appelation.
It is easily understood that no matter what day of the week we use to begin our cylic week, by the time we reach the 28th day of our orderly sequence of namings, we will have encountered the need to name four of those days Monday. There will be four Mondays, even should we begin our roll of days with a Tuesday, and not reach the need in that first week to name the Monday of it until the seventh and very final day of it arrives. In that instance the required fourth Monday will be named on that twenty-eight and last day available for its appearance. Otherwise, begun on one of the other of the seven available days to start with, the fourth Monday will occur earlier in that span.
No more or less than four Mondays are required of the first 28 days, but of the first 29 days of our tallied weeks it must be allowed that, given the propitious headstart, it is possible to need the name of Monday five full times within that selected span of time, in order to name the first, eight, fifteenth, twenty-second, and twenty-ninth of days.
There is the slight hiccup of the incommensurable here, five being the never-allowed value for the number of Mondays contained in 28 days, but being on the other hand and with the addition of but one more day, the occasionally accessible value of a run of 29.
Karl Popper made his measure of a science this: that from it may be constructed unfailingly statements both properly constructed, using the given methodologies of the science, and noticeably false, untrue in a way easily known to all, even to the point of being explicable in time to listeners least willing to take up the necessary tools themselves, explicably false by measure of its own given standards, which can be learned, and understandably false to the wider and in the main less willingly learned human discourse.
This is not to say that among all the many number of statements made possible by the human propensity for forming statements in the first place, that there are not, by the limiting yet sharpened focus of the given scientific interest, sheaves upon sheaves of statements both notable and sufficient to their own wording which are by the acknowledge limitations which any sharpened focus must entail in any science, simply incommensurable. The incommensurable falls naturally away from Popper's point.
The false, unlike the incommensurable, has its measure in a science. It can be contained and made evident. What's false can be teased out: that is the promise Popper gives the sciences.
Popper points out that if a science is a science at all, it has at its disposal a well–estalished discourse derived from the methodologies at hand to dispose of all the readily falsifiable claims contained in a well-formed statement of the craft.
It is trivially easy to make a false statement in any conversation. Popper proposes that it is the glory of science, instantiator of its very claim to worth at all, that false statements of science can be so readily discerned, that the great and telling talent of science is for decisively, if at times laboriously, determining what's untrue.
Given the perspective of the wider human discourse, where such a facility is not universal, it cannot fail to be recognized that the proposed talent of Popper's science, falsifiability, with all its blunt and canny forbiddings, would aid in the disposition of any conversation, however inclined. But for all the reasons, falsifiability (clever constituent feature of a science that makes what's irrefragably false pronounceable), notwithstanding its utter utility in any context, remains to this day the ill-practised instrument outside the domain of the specialists of the sciences as so construed by Popper.
The truth in any science is a residuum, by this measure, a remainder forever resistant to the encompassing ability of the tools of such said science to make out what's untrue.
Thus, by the following indirection, a truth may be had by science: a well-formed contradiction of its truth may be proposed, and that contradictory proposal may, when examined sufficiently by the aforesaid cleverly arrayed ability of the science to make out what's untrue, reveal itself to be just that: untrue. Truth emerges in science as the contradiction of the contradictory thing thus diagnosed as being false.
Any pleasant truth thus established may be turned back again to the uses of falsifiability, undermining the advancement of statements, however well-wrought, which do not meet its previously examined requirements.
By either approach, untruth may be gainsaid by the formulations of falsifiability, fundament of science it is in the persuasive Popper's proposition.
In the Roman calendrics the weeks and months are named, the days and years numbered. In the English of it spoken by the Barry Family, the words are offered first, and then the numbers of it, taking full if somewhat unordered notice of the required cycles and series: thus, "Monday, January," the words of it first, then "21, 2004," it's numbers next, gives "Monday January 21, 2004" as example.
This example is easily falsifiable by the given sciences underpinning the famous Roman calendrics. The expression can be evaluated using settled operations of the Roman methods and discovered to be, in this instance, entirely a misnomer.
We leave as an exercise for the looker the confirmation of the conterfactuality of the term. We merely point to the healthful equivocality of its falsity.
Monday, day of the week given the name of the moon, is of course a valid name from the pallette of seven valid names for the days of a week recognized by the Roman calendrics. In the dubious dating "Monday, January 21, 2004," if Monday is true, then one of the other values must be false.
January must have its Mondays. The little seven–spoked wheel of days of the week will turn four fill times at least in firstmonth, evoking in proper order its minimum of Mondays. January must have its Mondays, and its first 21 days at least three, just as 2004 must have its January, in the Roman scheme.
By our calculation no harm comes in putting Monday and January together with 2004. It cannot be gainsaid that there will be many good examples of Monday in that month, given the indicated year.But likewise, 21 is a valid choice from the pallet of valid numbers available to any month, every month having its twenty-first day, however it may trail off in the event, in the Roman count. January is unexeptional in this regard.
And, since 2004 will have ineluctably its January, as previously mentioned, there is likewise nothing incompetent in our usages of the offered ennumerator 21, though then one of the other values of the troubled term must be false in turn.
We have then, in contrast to the inevitable Monday of January 2004, quite alternately January 21, 2004, an entirely sensible formulation in it own right.
Given January, 2004, if Monday is true, then 21 is false. But, alternately, if 21 is true then Monday is false. The term "Monday, January 21, 2004" is surely mistaken, but the nature of its mistake can never be resolved from within the calendrics, which can only equivocate when faced with such irreducibly contrasted falsifications.
Night may be nicely known with the applications of astronomy, fine elaborated collection of techniques for mentioning the sky it's proved to be over the ages for every culture that's bothered to look up, in the Barry Family estimate.
General knowledges of the sun and such are the universal lot of humankind in this view, with every human conversation constantly succeptible to the arbitrary interruptive introduction of surely reflexive observation on the matter of the sky and its parts. The fact that its is raining, e.g., long sensible to all, does not dismiss its reiterated mention, its constant zealous introduction into the otherwise directed current of human discourse.
The Barry Family view to which we find ourselves attached here at HCE derives from those many millennia under the occluding influences of the rains and mists and moists of that (for all intents) interminable cloud above (recognized as initiating agent of the morass made of the Barry Family stretch of Northern Europe — from whence "down," the known Barry Family standard in direction, so readily devolved —; the cloud which in the archaic usages of its members shared the same name as their word for "sky," it being readily enough apparent from context whether the lint gray or the less likely limpid blue of it was meant).
Under such conditions, far from optimal for astronomy, the Barry Family is not known for the slightest contribution whatsoever to that overarching science, even given the considerable age of the Barry Family and its inclination, shared with any group of people, to look up and over time add to its cursory bag of meagre knowledges some serviceable sense of the redundant regularities in the processes of the skyparts.
Knowledges on that subject, astronomy, subjected to the scanty observations of the Barry Family's clouded view, remained strictly speaking conjectural down to the present age, with little more of astronomy than the gist of the greater measurements of it as roughly drawn to the Barry Family from presumably accurate observations of others whose perspective was not congenitally reduced, as it was by the nature of the evidence descending toward the Barry Family, almost exlusively to the meaner measures of meteorology.
Undeniably, with the obsessive attentions made possible by the atomization of function of those so civilized as to attach to it the attention it requires and the concomitant urban clumping of peoples persuaded to its practice, the most acute renderings of astronomy flourish in every civilization as an incubator or less metaphorically a workshop for the production of the mechanisms of mathematics well-matched to the motions of the recurrent elements of the sky. Inherent in the variegated expressions of such advanced civilized astronomies is implicit knowledge of all the supple usages of the Pythagorean Theorem which, as previously demonstrated, all cultured mathematics share.
When talk turns as seems inevitable in human discourse to the density, direction, and velocity of the impending drop, the Barry Family, among the subtlest of discriminators in regards to rain and all its doings, is well–equipped by temerament and training to carry its end of the conversation. Still, it recognizes the superior surround of the astronomy of the situation, the ongoing determinate dependecy of the descendant climate on the noticeable workings of the skyparts, as presumably so well-annotated in the astronomies of others.
As a good calendar follows the measure of a good astronomy, and as the cthonic Barry Family had no good astronomy of its own for the reasons given, but attended almost exclusively instead to the admittedly less universal evidences of its meteorology, it follows that its earliest "calendar" was deficient, and that the eventual introduction of the Roman calendar, based as it is on ages of continuous sheparding of attentions to the matter by the great procession of participants in the astronomy of the older sciences of before (who from the prospect of their superior observations crafted a quite cunning representation of the recourse of the skyparts out of the constituent elements of their maturing mathematical methodologies), that this Roman calendar, or any other suitable substitute capable of abstracting in a like concise and telling manner the understandable information made available by all that effort, would attract the admiration and eventually be adopted in its essential features by the Barry Family with little more than the perfunctory cavil accompanying any discussable event, however agreeable.
Joseph, in his gently tendentious The Crest of the Peacock, alludes at some lenth to the admittedly superior calendar fashioned from the mesoamerican astronomy of the Maya.
We here at HCE who consistently defer to the Roman calendrics for purposes of discussion, acknowledge nonetheless the majesty of the crafted calendric of the Mayan methodology, however little care we have taken to master it.
That Monday so aptly named January 12, 2004 in the Roman calendrics (acknowledged standard of enumeration here at HCE, that which remains always by our constant attentions to the various conversion factors involved, to be synchronized with the proposed motions of our own personal calendric, but whose naming conventions have long since been bowed to by the Barry Family Standard), that given Monday with its succinct formulation in the comingled processes of naming and ennumerating, brief to the point of brave as a description of the event, in the cautious Barry Family view, that particular Monday which by the established anecdotal standard of the Barry Family would be best named by describing all its incidents in at least enough detail to quell divergent perspectives on the matter, that Monday would properly be said to be the second named element of a seven element cylce of days known as a week, a cycle of names so common to us that the knowledge is never likely to slip from our minds, not only with respect to the seven names themselves, which are ever accessible, but also with respect to the order in which they, so named, occur in the cyclic of the week, the regular round of which was inculcated into those of us here at HCE to the point of unfailing facility by the earliest tutelages of the nuns.
The inclination of each cultured mathematics is to express empirical evidence of a quite good understanding of the implications of what we here at HCE unfailingly have come to call the Pythagorean Theorem as a consequence of the early trained allowances of the nuns who schooled us in the term.
Such a book as The Crest of the Peacock Non-European Roots of Mathematics by George Gheverghese Joseph ( Penguin paper printed 1992, London, 371 pp.) gives ample evidence of the wide-ranged knowledges depending on that little nugget, measures extending in the preserved markings the Chinese knowledges of it or the mesoamerianisms of the Mayan mathematics of it, the well-known thing which we have come to agree is Pythagorean (even in the teeth of the dense disparaged arguments of the Uncle's Ratios and Sums against the term) which are absent in the more fiercly focused offerings of O. Neugebauer's The Exact Sciences in Antiquity.
Neugebauer has great command of the materials of the Mediterranean motions of ancient mathematics, and from a purely precedential point of view, viewed as a necessary collection of settled evidences in an argument carried by the mathematics of the new sciences which has since the time of the famous Newton so successfully supplanted the preceding older mathematics of before, Neugebauer's contribution is essential.
The mathematics of the new sciences succeeded the mathematics of the older sciences of before and have in fact become in their way the unavoidable standard of conduct in that field. There is little the Barry Family or any like collection of contrarians can do to tip the settled point in this regard.
Neugebauer identifies "antiquity" precisely as that place from which sprung the commingled harvest of Greek, Babylonian Egyptian and Hindu methodologies which, at least from the implicit if admittedly uncatholic context of the mathematics of the new sciences, is a complete and accurate account of the locus of what "the older sciences of before" might sensibly mean from that ascendant perspective.
However much the vaunted Chinese or exquisitely accurate Mayan mathematics might evidence an equally or in cases surpassingly previous command of methodologies, for the purposes of the revelations of the new sciences, the successfully pressed argument carried by the new sciences was between it and those "older sciences of before" as sketched by Neugebauer, and not between it and "the older sciences of before" as encompassing all previous human efforts. The older sciences of before were specifically the ones the world of Islam had access to, preserved, synthesized, extended, and in time revealed to the skeptical view of the humanists of Europe, whose efforts by and by came to be so conclusively replaced.
Passed down among the fine Chinese for it or among the many Mayanisms left us on the matter (despite the multiple and utter depredations suffered on that given record over time) are many decent examples of the superiority of their own grown methodologies for managing their mathematical pusuits over those of the "older sciences of before" of Neugebauer's antiquity. The supplest geometer of the scholastics, the most humane of European humanists, heir to the crucial snythesis of Greek formal and earlier Mediterranean empirical mathematics, failed to formulate what was so readily learned in the Chinese, for example, or the Mayan mathematics, for that matter.
As example Horner's method is instructive. Introduced into the mathematics of the new sciences by the indicated Horner in 1804, the method named for him by the conventions of the new sciences refers to a technique employed for centuries by the Chinese to satisy their bothersome occasional need to solve equations of a power higher than that intelligible to geometry as then construed. The highly regarded European humanist, even by the supplest usages of the famous Elements of Euclid, could not get at good answers for such problems, which as a result remained bothersome throughout Europe until the happy hint of Horner, spoken with the accents of the new sciences, voiced a proper means for making them.
The Chinese who attended to it discovered nearly half a millennium beforehand what the new sciences name Pascal's Triangle (after the initiatory patterings of that pensive Parisiene about the figure in the famously European France of the 1600's), and following along after its suggestive inclinations, reached in time, those attendant Chinese did, the compact method commanding the name of Horner. Hundreds and hundreds of years before the titular fellow, of course. In terms of the previously referrenced argument between the new sciences and the previously indicated older sciences of before, this is by the way. The argument, epitomized by the appropriate apotheosises, was between that same-said supplest geometer of the European humanists of the mathematics of before on the one hand, and Horner's newmade way on the other. The geometer simply could not make his way to that method with his mathematic's tools, though mathematics has another way around, travelled by the Chinese and by Horner both.
To the Uncle, there was something to it, Euclid's Elements, something in it quite congenial to his own measure of the matter; something utterly satisfying in the given triangulating beginnings of it in the Book I of the Elements of Euclid, in the Uncle's estimation.
As O. Neugebauer demonstrates in his The Exact Sciences in Antiquity, the Babylonian and Egyptian mathematics of old emerged from the common practicalities of commerce and land use.
Focused on results, such a mathematics must revere to the point of preservation the properly inscribed results of its tabulated workings, and indeed we have in museums, in universities, and in the odd illicit cache of the collector, quite more information than we need to make this tendency out.
They scribed and saved, scribed and saved, those Babylonians and Egyptians, until there remained, now continuous in time, all the good and greatly useful piles of their mathematical results spilling out even now into our own day from the unlooked tells and tombs still sheltering them.
Their tables are conclusive, meeting the requirements of even the harshest present parsing of the modern methodologies of mathematics, making evident as they do in their resultant markings that the very Babylonians and Egyptians referenced by O. Neugebauer in his The Exact Sciences in Antiquity, well-knew, the lot of them, and took ever-cunning advantage of the implications of the famous Pythagorean theorem in their time, as is extensively noted in O. Neugebauer's celebrated review The Exact Sciences in Antiquity.
Though the Barry Family taste runs toward the loosely argued but more exacting replacement of the term "Chaldean" for "Babylonian" whenever the antique sciences of that region are under review, it is a smallish cavil to set against the magisterial command of materials in O. Neugebauer's otherwise well-chosen words on the subject. Not that this has kept the Barry Family from consistently announcing its preference for what may seem to others a minor detail of substitution whenever the conversation requires it of them. It is forever "Chaldeans," in the Barry Family view.
Wherein the tables exhibit implicitly an ancient facile manipulation of mathematical properties that can only be the result of a most cleverly conceived conception of that well-spring of relations we are obliged to refer to as the Pythagorean Theorem.
Undeniably the self-same fascinated attention to that fecund formulation is to be found rooted in the practices of every cultured mathematics of the past, even in those not explicitly visited by O. Neugebauer's examinations. Certainly in the far east of Asia and in the relatively even farther east of what we have by now come to consider the Americas, there is no question that the ancient practitioners of the locally derived schemes of mathematics had after the same relation we have come by habit to call Pythagorean, as is so readily apparent in their preserved marked usages of its implications.
To the Uncle, there might be something to it, civilization; he took its mathematics as an admirable indication of the lovely and to the boglore quite exotic knowledges to be had there.
Unhappily, by the tides of history, the Uncle was first introduced to the analytical mathematics that lay at the foundation of the new sciences, the analytical mathematics offered up in the names of Descartes, Leibnitz, and the disputant Englishman, Newton, rather than to the older synthetic mathematics which the analytical mathematics had so thouroughly superceded.
To the Uncle's eye analytical mathematics seemed a toolshed of marvelous machineries, and as it is in the archaic established Barry Family interest to look suspiciously on the motive of the pointer whenever the tool-related collection is being revealed — many a Barry has been saved of a chore by such suspicions over the ages — the Uncle's honest hope, product of both temperament and training, was that he would live a full life without much use of those machineries at all, that the pressing needs of the other things to do would keep him from whatever useful chores such machineries might make necessary. Inbuilt, his ability to do such mathematics was ably sheparded by his honed resistant talent for avoiding chores as a class. As a result the analytic mathematics made little headway with the Uncle.
The older mathematics of before, that nicely joined synthetic metaphor for a whole wide swath of stuff so concisely contained by the more encompassing later analytic mathematics of the new sciences, had its special charm for the Uncle. In the stuff of the older synthetic mathematics the Uncle sensed some curious element congenial to his own innate view on the subject, as if his own mathematics, primarily anecdotal in character, was well matched by the subtle storytelling going on e.g.in Book I of Euclid's well-known Elements, where the path to the proof of the famous Pythagorean Theorem is so lavishly laid out.
In the boglore the cardinal direction is down, down the given drift of all to earth. All, it is assumed, will soon enough reach the bog, the lore and leavings of all the human kind dripping by degree into its universally bogaggregating assumptions over time. This is the yet-uncontradicted thesis of the boglore, at any rate.
We here at HCE, followers of the Barry Family fashion in this regard, salute, for example, the arrival of the sciences, the varieties of which have come only recently to the attention of the Barry Family view, as these things are measured.
Surely the sciences had their long free run of the earth for all their millennia elsewhere, before their introduction to the bog became an issue; but they did come, the sciences, in time, confirming in this instant the minor lemma that in the event some things do come after all to the bog in time, lore and leavings marvelously preagregated by the actions of humans so distant that they have never even attempted to imagine the Barry Family themselves, the pure ignorant others in that respect, wonderfully freed up by that fertile patch of ignorance to grow their own sweet other thoughts instead, reaching their limit in the whole wide inconsiderate world of them with, happily enough, no occasion to consider the Barry Family at all, the great most of them going on about the satisfactions of their daily lives utterly without any thought to the Barrys in the least, quite to the benefit of all concerned.
It is an oddity of history that the new sciences, famously the successors of what until then had been the old plain sciences of before (famously evoked, e.g., by The Elements of Euclid), the new sciences which replaced the structured qualifications of the Aristotilian scheme of science with the cleverly disposed quantifications of the other, newer brand instead (as evoked, in turn, by the infamously enlightening words of Newton), should have reached the bog, when finally its lore and leavings did decisively reach the bog, at the same moment, if not in fact just prior to, the introduction of the older sciences there.
It is not possible, given the crude tools of the boglore, to predict with any certainty the order of accession of the elements of the bog. Things come in time to the unordering bog, is the assumption of the boglore, as proved true in the arrival of the sciences.
The known truths of the sciences remained long occluded to the Barry Family view, necessarily engaged as it was in its otherwise disposed considerations; quite long occluded indeed: the first the Barry Family had of it that made much sense of it at all came well after Newton himself had turned to dust, after the new sciences evoked by his name had succesfully established by their well-settled standards, preeminence over the supplanted scheme of the older sciences of before, which as chance would have it were themselves as yet to be introduced in any meaningful way to the bog and to the Barry Family.
Thus the usefully scientific, in this sense symbolized by the offered epiphanies of the very wise men indeed, Newton, as example, and Euclid, and also your other man if you must, came bogward backward from their origins, the intriguingly discarded offerings of the older sciences of before first arriving pre-renounced in the fresh all-clasping categories of the new sciences, so-called, from the Barry Family point of view.
It is not to be suspected that the discoverers, during the time of the Discovery of the Barry Family, regarding those neighboring them, those self-professed others who had long bothered to volunteer names for the Barry Family itself, those others so quick to slogan the group of them "pigpeople" with their too-casually judgemental sneer however well-matched by the returned sneer of the indicated group, that those readily-opined others were supposed by the discoverers during the time of the Discovery of the Barry Family to represent the universal sympathies of the widespread host of humanity spread out all along the indicated earth.
Not in the least. The discoverers recognized the self-professed others as co-nominators of the very definition they sought to grasp by their own discovery of it. It was in point of fact the hard truth of old lore that to place a Barry by a pig was to risk redundancy, and so in that sense the association, the merited central tenet suggested by the others however free, however easily pronounced or outlandishly evoked by their chosen speech, was hardly subject to dispute. But these were mere neighbors in the wider world of humans, in the discovered view of the Barry Family.
The discoverers during the time of the Discovery of the Barry Family knew neighbors as a thinnish rind between the proposably Barry and the truly outer other of all the populations of the people with all their great time on their hands who had no name for the Barrys at all, no opinion, no appreciable interest whatsoever, who in fascinating ways filled out their vast swath of days without taking the Barry Family into account in any way.
All the great lot of them and their lore and leavings, fascinating from the first to the Barry Family kind.
We here at HCE recognize the casual power of the standard dialectic (given Barry on the one hand, as proposed) to distinguish on inspection of that other necessary and contrapodial hand, the other. Often enough the focus of the fascinated attentions of the Barry Family rest on that distractingly other hand, housing the fascinating other as proposed.
Long they threaded through the gauzy frontier of other Barrys and near-Barrys in the congregated crowd of them at the time for some sign of the true shape of its border, proposed thing Barry meant to extend completely to the edge of other by their fresh measure. Certain they were, those discoverers in the time of the Discovery of the Barry Family, that it could in fact be adequately delineated, however evanescent a quality it might surround in the event.
Others always mentioned the pigs first. Oh, and of course there were early accounts of the glib disheveled unendable conversation that came to distinguish them as well. But mostly, it was the pigs of the people under review that set them so easily apart in the mind in the speech in the very nostrils of those who would so gladly register themselves as other under the circumstances. They, all the persuaded others gathered nearby enough to have an opinion on the matter at all, were universally persuaded that the one overriding consideration, the matter, the issue, as they would have it, of the pigpropinquity of such people, constituted in and of itself the fully adequate working definition.
The discoverers conceded the broadbrushed truth of the other's constant and on the whole ill-humored observations about the pigs in the main, but never counted this association to be diagnostic in and of itself. The discoverers viewed it rather in the manner of a preliminary stain, the earned thing admittedly applied to prepare the surface for the properly built picture of the Barry they proposed.
No move is to be imagined on the part of the Barry Family in this time of its discovery to name itself, no.
We must keep in mind that the Discovery of the Barry Family preceded by millennia the formal outbreak of the Naming, with all its attendant acrimonies. In the distinctly distant time of the Discovery of the Barry Family self-naming as a public gesture by prevailing standards still went uncountenanced, great gaucherie it was thought to be in their customary way with words, self-naming.
Self-naming was the privileged thing, the unspoken self-given reserved identifier which must never be easily pronounced among followers of that fashion.
No, consonant with contemporary mores, the discoverers instead took on themselves the sobriquets so freely fashioned for them by all the others. If the popular phrasings often turned on calling them Pigfondlers, then so it would be. It is of course only in retrospect, by the application of the rhetorical device of ampliatio, by which the earlier instant of the thing takes the name laterly given to what it becomes, that we may speak at all of a Barry Family at the time of its discovery. The discoverers themselves were innocent of this word.
The assembled affinities continue in the bogrelated view of the Barry Family. The new year, known by its curt Roman number, 2004, does not appreciably "begin again," in the bog, but rather rafts in on a recontinuance of relations thus established.
There is bog, of course, in the Barry Family view, but there is also necessarily all the other-than-a-bogs of the reported rest of the world so assembled out to the far reaches of the earth, word of which will filter, as most things do, to the bog in time.
There were the myriad minded evident ways of collecting together as humans, and the Barry Family during the period of its Discovery, just prior to its arrival in the Paris Basin, amidst the bold choices and rueful acknowledgements of its proposed identity, presumed (by an axiomatic extension of existence to the class of things not sharing the as-yet unspecified dinstinction being sought [even with the crude given tools of the time such seemingly indifferent lot of them as the Barry Family could be distinguished by its discoverers from the others, it was claimed], which is to say, in this instant, the class of non-Barry Family members with all their lack of whatever it was that the discoverers proposed to find so differently disposed among the Barrys at that time) that others had their willing ways of being human just as well.
For all that there were others and their clever other ways, and that the other's ways often enough were the accepted ways or in any event not much resisted ways of the Barry Family itself, still its discoverers insisted its identity was properly unique by quite other measures entirely, and went on with the exercise.
Other-than-a-bog beckons the Barry Family curiosity nonetheless.
It is a great wonder acknowledged by the whole of the Barry Family that it doesn't all slip into the reconstituting bog over time, consistent with what seems the quite normal bog directed course of things. That on earth there are e.g., in remnant instances the practices of the exact sciences in most ancient and distant lands delivered up to our own age by the presupposed permanencies of the symbolically scratched clays of the famous early civilization of the Middle East, that on earth there yet remain the hard true evident continuities of the storied artifacts of humankind resistant to the primary inclination of things to seek affinity in the bog, has long attracted the appreciative notice of the Barry Family.