Several of you have asked when and how my book, Numerical Notation: A Comparative History, will be available for purchase. I've been told that the official date of January 31, 2010 is more or less accurate, but it could be as late as February/early March, depending on how the final stages of production proceed. Sorry to those of you who were hoping to get it as a Christmas present. The list price has changed several times - I've seen it listed for pre-order at $111.95 but also as low as $76 (at Barnesandnoble.com right now). I consider $76 to be a very reasonable price for a 500-page hardcover academic volume. The irony is that while sales only really take off once a (much cheaper) paperback edition comes out, the press will only put out a paperback edition if sales of the hardcover are good. I do have some hopes though - stay tuned! I realize that even $75-100 is a lot to pay for a specialized volume.

Tags: my book

Well, Arthur may hate French, but he sure does love Japanese. Of course, our little Japanophile doesn't know any Japanese except for Totoro and Pitagora Suichi, so he's taken to inventing his own Japanese words. The first and more important of these is badicklebop, which means 'backpack', or so I'v been told. I can see it becoming a regular part of the lexicon ... but maybe we should try to find him some lessons locally before he invents Japanese from scratch.

Tags: arthur, language

When I was a kid, one of my friends had a father who had fought in World War II (a second-family situation) ... in the German army. This was quite a shock to my nine-year-old self, who had even by that young age absorbed the idea that we remember our own soldiers and vilify the bad guys. The idea that my friend's dad was a Nazi (which of course he wasn't, but I was in no position to make that distinction) was aberrant. It couldn't be right. My friend was quick to note (as I'm sure he'd been taught from a very young age), that his dad had fought the Soviets on the Eastern Front, which I suppose made it better somehow, because obviously the Soviets were bad guys too. So as we bow our heads today to rightly remember those Canadian soldiers who served and continue to serve in wartime and peacetime, I will take a moment also to remember the soldiers of 'the enemy' (whatever that means), past, present and future. Lest we forget.

My computer had serious virus fail yesterday (Security Tool malware) and now won't boot at all, not in regular mode, not in safe mode, nothing. It starts to load, then I get the BSOD and error messages, then it's hung up. Julia has a file on there that she needs urgently (like, today, ASAP). She doesn't need to fix the underlying problem, just get the one file onto a flash drive so she can work with it on another computer. I don't know anything about boot disks or any of this, really, except that it should be possible to find a way to make this work. Please comment on this post with any suggestions, or if you have Julia on Facebook or have her email, please contact her directly. Thanks.

ETA: Julia has managed to retrieve the file from an Ubuntu live CD (which I am also going to use to retrieve data onto an external HD tonight). Julia scanned the file she needed on her computer and it appears to be clean. Thanks so much to all for the advice!

Tags: geekery

So far today we have had to:

a) Deal with a boy at 5:30am who is just sick enough to be unable to get back to sleep, but just healthy enough to not want to get back to sleep.
b) Deal with a really serious (as in, now my computer won't successfully boot even in safe mode, needs to go to the shop kind of serious) malware infection on my laptop that occupied much of my day.
c) Spend an hour or so combing the house for curtana's misplaced passport, so she could go to class.
d) Pick Arthur up from daycare to find him asleep, and with his cold worse than it had been in the morning, with all the attendant guilt (he has absolutely no fever though - it's just a cold, folks).

I'm all out of cope, seriously. It was supposed to be a relaxing research/work day. Don't the fates know I have deadlines coming up this week? Fortunately Monday nights are our nights to sit and stare at the TV from 10pm to midnight, so I've got 11 minutes to kill.

Tags: growlery

In McDonald's playland today, Arthur was playing with two kids whose first language is Cantonese and who didn't really speak any English. After they didn't respond to his friendly overtures, he gave them the codenames 'Agent Red' and 'Agent Black' (Agent Red somehow later became Agent Mustard - yes, my child is odd, thanks). He then announced that, "He sprechens English. I think you sprechen English." I have no idea where he heard that. Then again, this is the kid who has developed his own science of 'optimedical physics', whose nature remains elusive to me.

Tags: arthur, language

Okay, here's the deal. My office chair, which came to me free from the Wayne State Department of Abandoned Furnishings and Other Crap, has given out after about a year of mediocre service. Its adjustable height now always readjusts itself to the lowest possible setting, once any weight whatsoever is put upon it. It was always pretty pathetic (after all, someone else had discarded it) and I'm not sad to see it go. But that leads to an important question: What new chair should I get? I'm certainly not going back to the DAFOC. I have some money in my startup account to cover the expense, as long as it will be worth it. Ideally I'd like a chair with a nice wide seat, arms, and that sits high (my desk is fairly high). I'd also like something that will last me ten years or more, so probably nothing utterly cheapt. It should be available for purchase online, to be delivered to my Detroit office. Suggestions? (Links to online purchase sites would be particularly welcome).

Just figured out that Wayne State's spring break is the same as the spring break at Arthur's school this year. Now we just have to figure out where we're going to travel!

One of the little-known joys of writing a book is that there are so many milestones that can be celebrated with liquor: manuscript sent to publisher, manuscript accepted, revisions sent, etc., etc. Yesterday I finished my proofs and indexing (well, ok, my research assistant had a *little* bit to do with that) and sent them off to my copyeditor, so that the next time I see my book (probably February) it will actually be ... a book! Alas for a morning meeting tomorrow, or I could really celebrate in style.

Tags: my book, numerals

For those of you who may not have been reading long, let me briefly and hopefully painlessly draw your attention to my blog, Glossographia, where I write about anthropology, linguistics, archaeology, and writing systems, as well as general issues in academia and scholarship.

Recent posts:
A typology of quotation marks
What we do
Ysteriousmay esselvay
No science like Snow's science
Levantine hieroglyphs in the early Bronze Age

Tags: language