Hello there! This is my blog/journal, so there is a mixture of personal rants, weird science, and random posts about ancient writing systems. To see all posts related to ancient scripts, click on this link.

If you came here via AncientScripts, please feel free to leave me a comment. However, please do not leave your email address, as you might be spammed. Email me at http://www.ancientscripts.com/email.html instead.

If you are on LJ and wish to friend me, please feel free to do so. However, if you want me to friend you back, please leave a comment.

Holy Crap! Black Clouds and Silver Linings debut at #6 on the Billboard chart!

http://www.roadrunnerrecords.com/news/DREAM-THEATER-DEBUTS--6-HIGHEST-CHART-EVER-20355.aspx

It's not too shabby in the rest of the world either.

Finland - 1
Germany - 3
The Netherlands - 3
US - 6
Norway - 7
Switzerland - 9
Italy - 10
Spain - 13
Australia - 16
UK - 23

Alex woke up at 4am last night. Again. He did the same on Saturday morning too. At least this time he went back to sleep, unless Saturday. Still, I'm pretty tired, because I sang and told The Big Red Barn god-knows-how-many-times. None of it worked, until I started talking about the parodies of 300 that I've seen on YouTube with a half-asleep wife. That put Alex back to sleep. I can't tell if he just likes our voices, or he actually likes geeky stuff. Well, who knows?

So it was overall a pretty good weekend. Friday my wife and I went to the French Laundry, arguably the best restaurant in the United States, the only one with three Michelin stars in the California. I wrote up a review of it at here. We had a good time driving through Napa Valley and walking around Yountville aka foodie central. Saw some celebrity chefs too (Michael Chiarello and St Thomas Keller himself).

Alex didn't take so well to the whole proceeding though. He was weepy and whiney and morose while we were away for a whole six hours. But we gotta try, not just for us, but it's good for him to have to deal with his anxiety issues. The thing is that today summer starts for him and while whiney he actually got into the car and went without much protestation. Who knows? Maybe he's getting better.

The weekend was ridiculously hot, so we hid out in the AC until late afternoon and then pop up for frozen yogurt. It's gonna be hot for a few days. I guess it's supposed to be summer but I'm just not that big fan of the 90-plus weather. I'd be content with the 70's forever.

Time to grab lunch. From downstairs. Ugh.

It's my wife's birthday today, so...

Happy Birthday naiad8 my wonderful goddess of the sea!

So for her birthday she asked to go to a little town called Yountville in the Napa Valley and go to a little restaurant called the French Laundry. I very heartily agree on this plan of action.

Anyway, right now we're lazily hanging around Christine's old bedroom in her parents' house in Danville. We'll be heading out in a couple of hours. Hopefully Alex won't have a full meltdown!

Whew...it's finally Friday.

Yesterday was kind of a crazy day. I took my mom to the DMV to get her licensed renewed. Because she's 71, she needed to take the written test again. She already failed a few weeks ago, and so she has two more tries. I dropped her off at the DMV, and went to work. She called me an hour later saying she's waiting for the test to be graded. I got there to find out she failed again. So she took it again, and I drove back to work again. Another hour passed and she called again, this time finally passing. Whew! So I drove back to the DMV to pick her up to head back home. It turned out that when she gave the test to be graded to the clerk, he took a look and put the test away and handed her a new one. My mom asked WTF (politely) and the idiot said that a corner of the paper was torn off (there's nothing on it) so she has to take it again! So my mom blew up at him. The corner was already ripped when the last clerk handed to her. After much ranting the idiot gave up and gave her a passing grade.

I guess people who work in DMV have ego problems and want power trips over little old ladies until they are firmly put in their place.

Also yesterday Christine, her parents, and Alex went to the Monterey Bay Aquarium. As usual Alex was a complete wreck. I didn't get to see how bad but Christine was depressed and morose all night long. I know that it's a phase he's growing through. Whenever he shows improvement in one area (he's been talking very well lately and starts to spell lots of words), another area suffers. I think it has to do with the theory that autistics do a lot of thought processing in perceptive areas in the brain (visual and auditory centers) (see this article) so these areas get overstimulated when Alex is learning and his coping mechanism is to avoid as much change (aka stimuli) as possible. We need to be patient as he needs time to assimilate all the new stuff he's learning, but sometimes it's very difficult to watch him in public compared against so-called "normal" kids.

Anyway, onto nicer things. Tomorrow a bunch of high school friends are coming over for lunch. Too bad more can't make it, but at least Alex won't be as frantic. As usual we're probably making way too much food. The menu thus far is strawberry gazpacho, baby green salad with goat cheese, some kind of hand-made pizza, grilled skirt or flank steak, and Brittany rum cake. Sounds ambitious but actually most of the stuff will be made ahead or at least prepared. But mostly it'll be nice to have adult conversation. We cut ourselves off too much from friends because of Alex, even other friends with kids of the same age because Alex just can't handle them.

OK, I'm getting morose again. Time to get back to work.

So I'm starting working out again. First, a big fail, because I couldn't connect the stationary bike to a suitable three-pronged outlet. So I switched to the Wii. Turns out there are quite a few games that are going to make my legs hurt tomorrow. Unfortunately, I still need some kind of upper body workout. Maybe I'll break down and go to the gym. (Yeah, fat chance)

naiad8 is working out again and she's doing dancing along to ethnic dance exercise videos. Not only do they burn up calories, they're also great entertainment for me! ;)

Now I should go take a shower and see if I can sleep before 1am!

SE-GWO-YA Was Here: Possibly the earliest Cherokee (or Tsalagi) syllabary and a date of either 1808 or 1818 were found inscribed in a sacred cave that was the burial site of Red Bird, an important Cherokee chief. The inscriptions don't spell any words, and could possibly be somebody practicing the signs. If indeed the date is 1808, this could be a snapshot of Sequoyah himself creating the syllabary, as the full script was completed in 1819. Of interest is also a number of abstract ancient symbols representing natural entities in the cave itself, which might've been adapted by Sequoyah into the script.

Did you know that California drivers are ranked 4th worst in the USA?

I, for one, am an excellent driver. However, there are a lot of idiots out there. Just this morning driving to work, I saw a lady right in front of duck her head repeatedly down into the passenger seat, while swerving madly. On subsequent observations I concluded there was no (lucky) passenger, but apparently she was trying to retrieve something from her purse. Sorry to be stereotypical, but based on previous observations (it's very scientific, I tell ya) it's probably a phone she's going to text, or lipsticks she's going to apply.

And then when I finally got off the freeway and try to merge onto a two-lane road, a pick up truck driver decided that she didn't like to be following a car going 35mph on the left lane so she merged onto the right lane, exactly the same lane I'm merging onto at the same time! I guess she didn't see a good-size metallic gray 2002 Mercury Cougar to her right, eh? Or should I commend her on keeping her eyes directly in front of her car, and completely immune to all distractions including other cars in her vicinity?

I won't even start on my commute home last night.

Now that I survived my commute to work, perhaps I should actually work.

I actually got out the door this morning a bit earlier, but lo-and-behold I ran into traffic all the way to work. No accident, just rubberneckers looking at construction. Murphy strikes again!

I had a good Memorial Day meal yesterday with both sides of the family. What's better than a grilling bunch of meat and veggies and consuming them under a warm California sun?

I'm starting on Ancient Scripts again. Let's see how long before this impetus fizzles out, shall we? My problem is I have too many goals but nothing immediate so I kind of give up because I have nothing to show. Blah!

My wife has been watching Legend of the Seeker on Hulu this whole weekend. I kept catching bits of it, and while it's kind of interesting, it just strikes me as a bit derivative. It seems to me that science fiction on TV and film has graduated from cheese fests and pedestrian story telling into true literary forms, but fantasy is still kind of in the sword-and-sorcery (or sword-and-sandal) comic book land. I think we need more complex characterization and more interesting philosophy than the run-of-the-mill good vs evil.

Or at least, can somebody smear some dirt on the lead female character's pristine white dress? Realism would be good too.

I think I'm getting old. I had a cup of Barry's Irish Breakfast tea last night around 10pm and I couldn't sleep until like 2:30am! And this morning I got a headache. I guess the caffeine content must be close to that of coffee, 'coz I've had other teas at that time at night and I still can fall asleep by midnight.

So the long weekend is coming, and people are taking off from work in droves. I might make a hasty retreat once more management have taken off to their golf trips or whatever. I don't really have many plans for the weekend, other than the usual family gatherings on my side and my wife's side. We might take Alex to a park or something but we'll play it by ear I suppose. At least it's not going to be hot like last week. It's going to be sunny and mild and dry, the perfect weather to be outdoors.

I'm seriously considering buying a tablet (just the input device, not an entire laptop) with a stylus so that I can draw illustrations and art on the computer. Doing it on the trackpad is seriously hurting my wrist. I might even try it on Alex. He doesn't really like writing with a pen on paper, but if it's a computer he might be more interested.

And random meme that's been sitting around forever.

The Rules:
1. Reply to this post and I'll assign you a letter.
2. List (and upload) 5 songs that begin with that letter.
3. Post them to your journal with these instructions.

I got L from naiad8. It turned out to be one of rarest letters in the first letter of song names (as I'm not into pop where every 1/3 songs start with "love").

Connie Dover - Last Night by the River
Tool - Lateralus
Angra - Lullaby for Lucifer
Dream Theater - Learning to Live
Jim Matheos - Laurel Dawn

Hebrew Text Discovered On 3,000-Year-Old Jar Handle

Archaeologists excavating on Jerusalem's Mount of Olives discovered an ancient jar handle bearing the inscribed name Menachem written in Old Hebrew. The style of the letters suggests the pottery fragment dates from 900 BCE.

After two days of eating crappy food downstairs naiad8 took pity on me and came to have lunch with me at a yummy Thai restaurant. It sort of reminds me of the our favorite Thai place in Berkeley which unfortunately is no longer around.

I've had two migraines in the past week. It's so weird because I haven't had any in a long time. Yesterday's was triggered almost like a seizure. I was looking at the computer screen, scrolling through tens of thousand of lines of gibberish when my brain just got really...numb? Then the light came and the intense pressure on the temples. I still have a "ghost" of the headache today. I really hate migraines.

We're planning on going to Santa Fe around Christmas, but because we'll be using my inlaw's time share points, my wife asked them if they want to come along. Now it's become a kind of an ordeal because my MIL doesn't really want to go but she doesn't want to disappoint my FIL who's more into planning for travel than the traveling itself so it's sort of this neverending yes/no/maybe/perhaps/we'll-talk-about-it-later/I-don't-want-to-leave-the-dogs kind of non-action. Whatever. I love NM so I'll be happy to go whenever, however, anyway.

Did anybody hear that the Four Corners marker is actually wrongly placed? It's like 10 miles off mark? That means that I have actually not stand on four states at the same time. Darn! Although the Navajo fry bread (see my icon) was awfully tasty.

This week feels really long for some reason. First the sink got backed up. I disassembled it twice and ran the snake through it to no avail. I think there's a clog way down the pipes. We're getting professional help coming out tomorrow to hopeful unclog it.

Alex's dental nightmares continue. Looks like his remaining front tooth is also damaged. It's turning brown. We're trying to get him an appointment with the dentist. That should be so much fun. In the meantime this is really affecting him. He's not paying as good attention at school, and he goes into random fits at home. This just sucks.

It's going to be in the 90's this weekend. The plumber is coming tomorrow afternoon so we're stuck at home on Saturday. We were thinking of going up to San Francisco on Sunday but then I remembered it's Bay To Breakers, so probably not the best day to be in the City. The Coast will be coolest but just about everybody will go there. So where oh where can we escape the heat?

To have some glimmer of hope I'm thinking of skipping work and going to see Star Trek again next week. And get more maracons from the nice bakery in downtown Redwood City.

Well, back to the doldrums it is.

It seems that work on Friday always sucks. I always have to deal with emergencies or stupid requests. Today I have to slog through a lot of numbers and dollars. It's not my job I tell ya. I do programming. I don't do accounting. I deal with symbols, not numbers. Numbers make my eyes cross. And on top of that, my wrists and arms are hurting. I don't have carpal tunnel because I try to be in good form but when I'm in a bad mood it's hard to keep a good posture. This, in turn, makes me even more cranky.

Good news is I'm going to see Star Trek tomorrow in IMAX. Oh yeah baby! I'm really looking forward to seeing it.

I'm also making pizza from scratch tomorrow for Mother's Day at my inlaws. Hopefully my wrists would've recovered by then. I'm going to make the dough first thing in the morning so it'll rise nicely. I'm totally hankering for a prosciutto, fig, and goat cheese pizza.

Well, gotta go back to number crunching.

Today we got articles about digital archives.

Iran's Ancient Story Preserved Digitally
http://www.newswise.com/articles/view/551742/

Tens of thousands of Aramaic and cuneiform tablets from the Achaemenid Persian Empire are being digitalized by the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago into an online database. The tablets date from a short time period in the reign of Darius I, and contain administrative records on every level of society. Many of the images are photographed in high resolution and polarized light, making faded inks more visible. Another set of tablets are scanned using the so-called Polynomial Texture Mapping apparatus, which takes multiple images under different lighting conditions and ultimately allows users to virtually change the angle of the light source falling on the tablets.

Annoyingly though, I tried to access the already digitalized content, but one site, the West Semitic Research Project, requires users to print out, fill out, and fax an application form to get a login. The other site, OCHRE, is not even up yet. So at the end of the day I couldn't really see anything. Oh well.

UNESCO's Digital Library Includes Fake Maya Manuscript
http://www.mesoweb.com/reports/fakeMayaMs.html

UNESCO's recent launched World Digital Library is a fantastic resource. I've been exploring quite a bit of it myself. Unfortunately, according to this recent Mesoweb report, the WDL includes a fake Maya manuscript belonging to the so-called Canek group of manuscripts that purported to date to 1548 but in reality was a forgery made in the 1950's or 1960's. The giveaway was that it was written on modern paper and contained a Spanish translation of Sylvanus Morley's 1947 book The Ancient Maya.

One would think that for such a project rigorous peer review by scholars in relevant fields unattached to the project would've been conducted in order to catch mistakes. It would appear that such review wasn't done, which throws into question the authenticity of the content on the WDL.

This is actually a very good, balanced article:

Indus Valley code is cracked - maybe
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/KD30Df01.html

It talks not just about the "discovery", but also the counter argument, as well as the political implications of whether there was or wasn't a writing system present in the Indus Valley civilization.

Couple of news articles in the past couple of days about ancient writing systems.

Photograph © www.metmuseum.org

Artificial Intelligence Cracks 4,000-Year-Old Mystery
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/04/indusscript

Mmm...not exactly. Whereas the title of this article boasts a tremendous breakthrough, in reality it is more like pointing in the right direction. The Indus script has long been an undeciphered enigma. However, recent controversial opinion by some linguists claim that it doesn't not actually represent a spoken language at all, but just a collection of symbols.

To throw a gauntlet into this controversy, University of Washington computer scientist Rajesh Rao compared the "conditional entropies" of various writing systems, non-linguistic symbol systems, DNA sequences, and computer programming languages. In a simple nutshell, conditional entropy measures how likely a symbol would occur after a preceding symbol. All human writing systems have medium conditional entropy (languages have rules and vocabularies but lots of flexibility to mix and match), whereas non-linguistics systems have either very low entropy (very rigid) or very high (very flexible).

The conditional of the Indus script falls within the range of human writing systems and very different from symbol systems, pointing to an actual language behind the Indus script. Moreover, Indus script's conditional entropy most resembles those of Sumerian and Old Tamil. The researchers explain this might be an indication that the Indus script is a logophonetic system writing a Dravidian language, which is actually the prevalent theory of the Indus script, so this study points in the right direction, but doesn't really "cracks" anything earth-shattering.

The actual Science article can be found here: Entropic Evidence for Linguistic Structure in the Indus Script

Fragment Of Hebrew Inscription From Period Of Kings Of Judah Found
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/04/090425203201.htm

An inscription was discovered during an excavation in the Walls Around Jerusalem National Park. The inscription dates to the 8th century BCE, based on both pottery sherds discovered near the inscription as well as the style of the Old Hebrew letters.

Unfortunately part of the inscription is broken off, causing both lines to contain only fragmentary words. The first line appears to contain a name's last three letter (qoph, yod, and he) which would be a name ending in -kiah. The second line appears to contain two words, the first ending in kap and he, followed by a word starting with bet.

Church lot rock actually ancient runestone
http://www.upi.com/Top_News/2009/04/24/Church-lot-rock-actually-ancient-runestone/UPI-57371240599604/

Turns out that a rock marking a parking lot in a church in fact bears runic inscriptions dating to about 1,000 years ago.

The weekend went by pretty fast. Played a lot with Alex in the backyard, took some naps, and made some yummy dinners (Saturday was Swiss-themed, tonight was Spanish-centric). We also got tickets to Star Trek IMAX (geekgasm), and reservations to the French Laundry (foodie heaven) for naiad8's birthday! It's good to have things to look forward to.

I've also started working on a new page on quipu on Ancient Scripts. In my typical style, I can't just regurgitate information from books. I had to try it myself. In case you're not familiar with quipu (or khipu, which is technically the scientific, if unfamiliar, terminology), it is a numeric and accounting system used by the Incas and their predecessors in Peru and Ecuador for thousands of years to keep track of amount of goods and material. But instead of recording the numbers on paper or clay tablets, the ancient Andeans tied knots on rope to represent numbers. Three kinds of knots are used, which I've reproduced below:



( Preview of the quipu page )

So why is this relevant to Ancient Scripts if this is all numbers? Well, you'll have to wait for the actual page to reach Internethood.

It's blisteringly hot in the Bay Area. It's like 94° in Mountain View today. I've put in the AC tonight so we can get some sleep. I got an ancient house so the master bedroom is the only room with AC, so I might stay in here even after Alex has gone to sleep.

And then my laptop is having fits. The screen is dying. I have to balance it precariously so that it doesn't turn into a psychedelic rock light show like this. I talked to Dell support and they'll send somebody out to replace it. The field technician is supposed to give me a call. Hopefully they'll actually follow through.

Another thing that kind of sucks is the past week, which was supposed to be the "date" weekend in which Alex would sleep over at my inlaws. Didn't quite work that way, as they called at 9pm Saturday night. He was unhappy this time for whatever reason. So we drove over there (one hour one way), picked him up, and came home. That kind of screwed up the sleep schedule so he wouldn't go to sleep until midnight for the past two nights. I'm hoping that a school day would reset his clock.

At least one good thing is that we got to try two authentic Mexican restaurants that we've been wanting to. On Saturday night we went to Reposado which is more upscale with a ridiculously big shelf of tequila. Food was pretty good. I really liked their sopitos which is like corn-masa cakes with tasty fillings on top. And they make killer carnitas.

On Sunday we went to the farmer's market in California Avenue in Palo Alto, and while the number of vendors isn't as large as Mountain View's, they did have food vendors. One stall belongs to the Oaxacan Kitchen which is just one few blocks away. I got the molote which is corn masa wrapped around a chorizo-potato mixture, and naiad8 got the chicken tamal in mole negro. I think that's the best mole negro I've ever tasted. But the coolest thing of all was waiting in line, watching the cooks take a ball of corn masa, press them into tortillas, and throw them on the griddle. The smell of the corn masa really brought back memory of Costa Rica.

It's a sunny but incredibly windy day today. I think it's a 45mph wind. My car kept being pushed when I drove to work and also when I went to lunch. As my office complex is WAY out in the Bay the wind swirls around the buildings and funneled like in a wind tunnels. It's howling like I'm in a typhoon, except it's cold, not warm. Hopefully we won't get any power lines knocked down.

Work is going as slow as molasses. I can't get my head around some pretty convoluted code that's been passed from one person to another while nobody *really* understands it. Oh well. I'll just make it even more convoluted and pass it to the next person.

I've started working on Ancient Scripts again. I actually posted a poll on ancientamericas over the weekend soliciting the title of the page. So, in deference to the people's choice, I'm working on a page about Quipu and all the latest developments.