>My favorite was a visiting professor from MGU (Moscow State University) teaching 5th graders how to translate Babylonian Cuneiform, including how to infer meaning of writing that no spoken reference exists for. Not really useful right now, but is the very definition of cool when you are a kid!

Not just when you're a kid. I'm 34 and that sounds awesome.

As an adult, I find it cool too, but I can't think of a single kid I know that would be remotely interested in it. Half of them would probably be rolling their eyes before the second word.

That's the talent of true educators, present things kids would normally ignore in a fascinating way.

This effect is hopelessly swamped by what kids are interested in. It exists, but it's just not strong enough to be helpful at any kind of scale.

You don't necessarily have to compete with what they are interested in. You have to compete with the boredom of sitting still at their desk for hours on end while doing trivial homework/reading assignments. _Everything_ is exciting at that point and may foster a lifelong addiction... hobby.

> My favorite was a visiting professor from MGU (Moscow State University) teaching 5th graders how to translate Babylonian Cuneiform, including how to infer meaning of writing that no spoken reference exists for. Not really useful right now, but is the very definition of cool when you are a kid!

I've seen programming situations where something close to that would be useful (maintenance of very old code).

I don't remember the methodology all that well, but I think it's applicable to basic cryptology and NLP-type problems as well.

For a 5th-grader though it was a great into to science.

I am sure there is a ton of interesting stories like this about self organisation when the state collapses, created by the end of the Soviet Union. I wonder if anyone has ever bothered to capture and document this type of emergent behaviour, and whether it most mostly cooperative and peaceful, or whether it tended to violence and confrontational. These types of widespread government changes are not that common, and I'm sure there are a lot of lessons to be gained.

http://cluborlov.blogspot.com is run by one Dmitri Orlov, an ex-Soviet collapsarian similar to James Howard Kunstler. He basically did what you're asking for.

That blog is probably as far away from positive experiences as one can be! Just wasted 10 minutes reading about the impending collapse of US...

I'm pretty sure the original comment was meant to gather experiences of positive self-organization results and not doom'n'gloom rhetoric.

Yes. One does not have to venture far to find a 'we're all ruined' article. I was more interested in finding small scale examples of how communities react when a central government essentially ceases to function. Not a preppers screed (i haven't looked at the link)

http://cluborlov.blogspot.com/2015/04/communities-that-abide... is a positive post (as is its prequel presumably)

Looks interesting. Thanks for sharing.

> My favorite was a visiting professor from MGU (Moscow State University) teaching 5th graders how to translate Babylonian Cuneiform, including how to infer meaning of writing that no spoken reference exists for

I'm curious about that second point. Do you mean the same kind of vocabulary acquisition that people do in their own language all the time? (For example, a kid reading a book might learn some previously-unknown words that way, and everyone picks up spoken vocabulary by hearing it in use -- granted, picking up spoken vocabulary definitely doesn't meet the standard of "no spoken reference exists", but learning a word by its use in writing does meet that standard and is the same linguistic phenomenon.)

Do you mean translating a document in a foreign language without any idea how that writing system was pronounced? I'm not aware of any writings for which the following are both true:

1. We can understand the writing.

2. We don't have any reference for what the pronunciation would have been.

Cuneiform was used to write several different languages, most prominently Akkadian, which is a Semitic language closely related to Arabic and Hebrew. That helped in translating it. I don't know the language-family status of Sumerian, but it's written the same way, which is obviously helpful in pronouncing it. There are some rarer languages also written in cuneiform; for them we have decent information on their pronunciation, but we still don't really understand documents in those languages.

Old Chinese was written in a script carrying no phonetic information, and its original pronunciation is a major problem today. But it left us rime tables, and there are lots of spoken references in its many modern descendants. So for example, we're pretty confident that 京, the second syllable of beijing/peking, originates as a velar ("k") sound, and the palatal ("j") sound of modern mandarin is an innovation.

Ancient Egyptian held off translators for a long time, until someone realized it could be translated by reference to Coptic, for which phonetic information was preserved. Our phonetic understanding of Egyptian hieorglyphs is good enough that we've translated the names of foreign countries as written down in ancient inscriptions.

Anyway, if that professor was talking about something in this second category, I'd love to hear more about it.