Whirlwinds, Africa's Embodied Number Systems, and Things Children Need To Know

Greetings everyone. It’s been a while since I’ve been in touch and for that I apologise. I find that life as a husband and parent goes in cycles. There are those nice “set and forget” periods where everything just runs smoothly and I have loads of time to do stuff. Then there are those other whirlwind times where every day seems to finish just after it started, passing by in a flash. The thing is, most of the time it’s whirlwind time, and I’m tired!! But enough of my whining - let me tell you about some bits I’ve been up to online recently.

We Are Reading is Back!

After a couple of years away, the #WeAreReading live stream series has returned. The book we’re currently reading is Africa Counts: Number and Pattern in African Cultures by Claudia Zaslavsky. So far, it’s been an insightful dive into the various ways in which number (and by extension, mathematics in general) has been expressed in African cultures across the continent. For example, we’ve learned how in many African number systems are vigesimal - based on 20 rather than 10. We learned that this is patterned the humans have ten fingers and ten toes. Similarly, we’ve also read about the myriad forms of gesture counting in Africa, where specific hand gestures carry very specific numerical connotations. And we’ve seen loads of cases where words for numbers in African languages are actually words for body states. What we’re finding is that number in the African world is not abstract and ethereal. Rather, number and thus mathematics , is embodied, rooted and grounded in the physical experience in the universe as cosmic beings interconnected with the universe.

If you haven’t already, check out the playlist and listen while you work, chill, run errands, etc. We’ve done four deep dives so far and I’ll try and pin down a predictable schedule and let you know when you can join us live. I do miss those long deep discussions we used to have back in the day!

Things Children Need To Know

I’ve also started a new series of short form videos called Things Children Need To Know. My hope with these videos is to help parents and caregivers to understand and explain important ideas and facts to children. I don’t know about you, but there are so many basic things in life that I struggle to explain simply, which means I don’t full understand myself! For example, I sat down to record a video called What is the Internet and got bogged down in ridiculous analogies and meandering explanations (I’ll have to come back to that one). If all goes to plan, this playlist will grow into a very large compendium of useful short-form content. The first one debuted today and is called What are Large Language Models? Make sure you’re subscribed to my YouTube channel so you get notified whenever I post new ones.

I’ve got a couple of regular videos in the pipeline too, and I’ll upload them for paid Substackers here first, before uploading to YouTube at a later time. So stay tuned for that.

Otherwise, I very much hope you are in good health and that life is treating you well.

Take for now and see you next time. Now back to the whirlwind!