Alice Kober: Unsung heroine who helped decode Linear B | Hacker News Reader

Alice Kober: Unsung heroine who helped decode Linear B

bbc.co.uk

61 pointssheri9 comments

If I were to walk down the street in downtown Washington, DC, stop persons I took to be college-educated professionals, and ask them to identify Michael Ventris or to identify Linear B, I don't think I'd get above 5% on Ventris or 10% on Linear B, and both are generous estimates. With Fox's book that will change briefly, but not for long. With numbers like that, does it make sense to describe Kober as unsung? More unsung perhaps.

"Ventris was the very model of a solitary, tortured genius - so much so that the deciphering of Linear B has often been portrayed as his accomplishment alone."

I happen to have here a copy of The Decipherment of Linear B by John Chadwick (Cambridge University Press, 1958). Chadwick certainly portrays Ventris as brilliant, but says

"His brilliance is witnessed by his achievement; but I cannot do justice to his personal charm, his gaiety, and his modesty."

That doesn't sound particularly tortured or solitary. Chadwick does mention Kober, by the way. Page 35 is largely allotted to her work, which section ends

"I do not think that there can be any doubt that Miss Kober would have taken a leading part in events of later years, had she been spared; she alone of the early investigators was pursuing the track which led Ventris ultimately to the solution of the problem."

I agree completely. The thing that struck me about Ventris was how much effort he put in disseminating every bit of information that surfaced to his fellow scholars. Reading about the decipherment, one cannot help but realize how much effort these people put into maintaining what we would do with a simple mailing list or a Usenet newsgroup.

For those who think Linear B irrelevant to Hacker News except as trivia, as a non-technical person at a software company, I was casually consulted by a member of the W3C CSS3 group on arcane writing systems. One of the questions was "Do Aegean numerals and Linear B symbols need to rotate?" My response was "I'm uncertain off hand, but let me check my linear B book at home." Never thought I'd say something like that at a SW company. In any event, I did check my books, and neither Aegean numerals nor the somewhat related Linear B needed to rotate.

Oh, and if you are frustrated by the fact that you can't rotate cuneiform in CSS3, that's my fault.

God, when I was scanning HN's front-page, for a moment saw this as "Using heroine helped decode Linear B"!

Which brings to mind two things:

* Many people have used "mind-expanding" drugs to create new art, literature, etc. but I wonder if there has been any cases where they helped with a scientific discovery, e.g. similar to the classic example of Kekule seeing a snake biting his tail while day-dreaming and realized that this was the structure of the benzene molecule. On a different note: can you code while you're high (caffeine doesn't count!)?

* The other thought was gaining intuition on how the brain decodes writing, there seems to be a probabilistic aspect to it, where word meanings have probabilities assigned to them, much like a spelling checker: http://norvig.com/spell-correct.html

> I wonder if there has been any cases where they helped with a scientific discovery

Paul Erdos was a prolific mathematician who was notorious for using speed to keep going on a problem. He briefly quit for his health but quickly decided it made him too unproductive.

Some form of "hard" stimulant use (i.e., not just caffiene) is widespread in the circles of academia I frequent.

I've heard that Ritalin (ab)use is widespread in academia.

Well, as I have read, Erdos didn't "use speed" the way one might think most people use speed. He took the same small dose -- 5mg, IIRC -- every morning. He quit to prove to a colleague that he could quit, but once that was established, as you say, he went back to his previous practice.

The point is, if everyone who used psychoactive drugs did so as responsibly as Paul Erdos, there would be little reason to make them illegal.

If they make a movie about her, Elisabeth Moss (aka Peggy on Mad Men) would be quite the match look wise.

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