But no ones or twos.

Or, like this post, half an appreciation of nifty stuff and half a peeve.

The nifty stuff, first:

Medieval Dice with No 1 or 2 Found on Street in Norway.  Dice are really old tech, as it were, and crooked dice of one sort or another are almost equally old.  When Og and Ugh were casting knucklebones to pass the time in their Paleolithic cave, it probably wasn’t long before Og figured out that if he shaved down one side of his favorite knucklebone just so, he could up his chances of winning by enough to end up the possessor of Ugh’s best flint hand-axe before Ugh caught on.

Now, the peeve:

The article isn’t actually about finding dice.  It’s about finding a die, singular.  That’s how it goes:  One die, two (or more) dice.

It’s a common error, but one expects better of a science blog. I blame LiveScience.com for the error, because when I followed their link to the source article at  Norsk institutt for kulturminneforskning, and clicked on their link to get the text in Norsk bokmål, I saw that the  caption for the picture of the crooked die used the singular terning, as would be proper, rather than the plural terningen.  (The article itself speaks of dice, plural  and die, singular, depending upon context.)