Episode 95: Reckonings, with Stephen Chrisomalis

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Episode 95: Reckonings, with Stephen Chrisomalis
Mark Sundaram & Aven McMaster

It’s time for a reckoning! Or, to be more accurate, a number of reckonings. We talk to Dr. Stephen Chrisomalis, a linguistic anthropologist who specializes in the anthropology of mathematics and the interaction of language, cognition, and culture, about his new book Reckonings. It’s a fascinating discussion of how we write and represent numbers, and how that’s changed over the years. Why don’t we use Roman numerals any more? It’s more complicated than you might think…

Announcement: Mark will be running another session of his Speakeasy seminar course, The Origins of English: Learning to Think Like an Etymologist, which is open to anyone who’s interested. Registration is now open at Speakeasy.com for the session running on Sunday afternoons (Eastern time) from September 12th October 3rd.

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Wayne State University faculty page

Reckonings webpage

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Episode 15: Stephen Le

Episode 015: Stephen Le
Mark Sundaram & Aven McMaster

We talk to Stephen Le about his book 100 Million Years of Food: What Our Ancestors Ate and Why It Matters Today, and his efforts to use an understanding of evolution to help us decide what to eat. We chat about what it means to "eat what your ancestors ate", the cultural history of food, and his wide-ranging travels in search of traditional foods to try--especially insects! 

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And thank you to our Patreon supporters: 

Carlos Solis
Valerie Polichar
Lukas Hägele
Evermore Anon
Ian & Susan McMaster
Chantal Sundaram
Sean Soderman

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