Unconfirmed Reports

Wandering the shops of Melbourne has reaquainted me with the fantastic range of small-press books which seem to be flowering from the more fertile corners of this dusty land. I purchased Transparent Skin, one of the various books available by Anthony Ridelll [sic]. He has a very idiosyncratic style of flowing words together, constantly changing direction without following any path for long:

Plaster came and made persons feel disconsolate. Some (like Ribfield) came away distraught. Others (like Ribfield) stayed and endured much, Was everyone present…? Ribfield was not decisive, even when rapidity of decision meant the difference between being run over and not being run over. The expectations of failure seemed to hang over proceedings to such an extent that they influenced events. Comatose flies lay about.

I note, with some pride, that the author was raised in the very same Mount Lofty ranges where I was also raised, but which he chooses to subtitle ‘dickhead Arcadia’.

Another very small press book, which I have been loaned by Daniel Gloag, is The Selected Rants of Michael ‘predator’ Carlton. predator was a very active member of the Cave Clan (urban drain explorers), and something of a semi-crackpot scientific theorist. He died recently, at a horribly young age, of some hideous cancer. A book has been collated and published in his honour, gathering his ‘rants’ on subjects both drain-related and theory-related, as well as his journal in the last part of his life. He attempted to write an ambitious treatise on how humanity can be considered as an informational phenomenon, though unfortunately the latter parts of the treatise were only completed in very sparse note form (a particularly intriguing note for future elaboration reads: ‘Why I am upset by vegetables and their being kept alive, insofar as they do not even photosynthesise.’)

Another section, in which predator discussed the information encoded in our numerical representations, brought me to something like a realisation, or at least a theory. predator noted that when we write a number in our ‘base ten’ decimal system, say 277, the first digit to the left tells us how many hundreds there are, the second tells us how many tens there are, and the third tells us how many single units. If you write just one digit, say 6, this is taken to be a representation of how many single units there are. But if you only want to express a quantity of hundreds, say 600, you have to put two zeros after the six, to indicate that this six refers to hundreds. Now it struck me as rather peculiar that the symbol which must *always* be present - i.e. the symbol representing the quantity of single units - is placed at the end of the sequence (since we read left-to-right), rather than the beginning. The fact that the figure for single units must always be present in a numerical representation seems to me to give it a right to some sort of natural primacy. It almost seems as if we read our numbers right-to-left, in contrast to the way we read letters.

This thought then reminded me of my recent, tentative studies in Arabic. When dealing with Arabic writing, one of the most difficult factors is that the letters are read right-to-left. But I recall how, when I reached the section on Arabic numerals, I was relieved to find that these are also arranged right-to-left (ones, then tens, then hundreds, from right-to-left), just as our numerals are. For this section, I did not have to reconfigure my reading brain.

The punchline is, of course, that we derived our decimal system of numbers from the Arabic system - and the physical similarity between the figures can still be seen. My theory is, that when the Arabs developed this numeric system, they had it going right-to-left only because the rest of their writing went this way, and because it made more sense to start with the single units, than to start with the hundreds, thousands, or millions - whichever is the highest category used. So we borrowed the Arabic system of numerals, without taking the bother to turn it around, and write it left-to-write, as we write everything else, and as we naturally read. In a sense, we have got our decimal numerals the wrong way around, but have simply been taught to read them in this slightly unnatural manner.

If you have ever been taught about binary numerals (where 1=1, 2=10, 3=11, 4=100, 5=101… get it?), you may have noticed how it feels slightly strange that, as you count upwards, the new ‘levels’ of quantity (i.e. 4, 8, 16 etc in place of 10, 100, 1000 etc) are added to the front of the string, rather than the end of the string. It feels strange to me, anyway. Well this is because those who defined the conventions for binary numeric representation followed the right-to-left reading of the decimal system, perhaps not realising that this convention was something of a ‘mistake’ in our borrowings from Arabic.

If only more scientists and mathematicians would acquaint themselves with the humanities! This lament applies also to Michael “predator” Carlton, may he rest in peace, for his rants against religion seem to focus entirely on the ‘misinformational’ phenomenon of which major religions are surely guilty, without acknowledging the social and emotional functions, which seem to me to be at least as important.