If you had bought this picture for $2 later to find out it's worth $5,000,000, would you feel an obligation to share some of the proceeds with the shop from which it was purchased?
A $2 photo from a California junk shop is the ‘holy grail of Western Americana’
61–70 of 116 posts
Re: A $2 photo from a California junk shop is the ‘holy grail of Western Americana’
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
Assuming there will be a technological civilization in 137 years, I give it more than 50% that archive.org will be present in some form directly descendent from the archive.org of today.
Why 50%?
Re: A $2 photo from a California junk shop is the ‘holy grail of Western Americana’
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, this. I don't see how they could possibly verify that this is actually an image of BtK when the face is so obscured and the provenance of the image so uncertain. Kagin's is being very cagey about it too: "Any qualified individual wishing to review the authentication dossier and discuss the potential acquisition of the Billy the Kid Croquet Match Tintype are welcome to contact..."
Yeah, it may only be "verified": http://www.truewestmagazine.com/billy-the-kid-experts-weigh-...
Re: A $2 photo from a California junk shop is the ‘holy grail of Western Americana’
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just make sure that while you're mucking with the DNA that you build in a display mechanism. Future races will get curious as to why trees display pictures on their trunks.
Already happened. Consider peafowls as an extreme examples, but there are many other animals displaying so elaborate patterns that the most reasonable explanation seems to be that someone in the past long gone was playing around with embedding vector displays in DNA.
I think you're confusing reason with Star Trek. Elaborate, repeating patterns can emerge from any number of random or chaotic processes, that doesn't mean an intelligence tried to encode something in it.
And even if it were plausible, given the amount of DNA we've studied by now, the lack of any obvious discoveries of messages from aliens or our ancient ancestors would suggest that it's not that effective as a storage medium for arbitrary messages.
Re: A $2 photo from a California junk shop is the ‘holy grail of Western Americana’
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
Now imagine, sometime, somewhere, someone got a written manuscript from Plato, or the Buddha, or another figure and just used it to make fire.
That might be unfortunate, but we've set fire to priceless manuscripts intentionally far more often. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Destruction_of_the_Library_of_...
Re: A $2 photo from a California junk shop is the ‘holy grail of Western Americana’
#66It's consistently amazing how incredibly specialized our modern economy is.
Re: A $2 photo from a California junk shop is the ‘holy grail of Western Americana’
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
Now imagine, sometime, somewhere, someone got a written manuscript from Plato, or the Buddha, or another figure and just used it to make fire.
That might be unfortunate, but we've set fire to priceless manuscripts intentionally far more often. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Destruction_of_the_Library_of_...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxila [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nalanda#Decline_and_end
The other, brighter side of this coin is the many remarkable rediscovery stories, like that of the Archimedes palimpsest [3] in the 1990s and Indian statesman Chanakya's 3rd century BCE manuscript 'Arthashastra' [4] in the 1900s.
[3] http://www.archimedespalimpsest.org/ [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthashastra
Re: A $2 photo from a California junk shop is the ‘holy grail of Western Americana’
#68[Off Topic] I can't help but think this will help me win the internet. Here is a photograph of Billy the Kid playing croquet. Therefore my argument is valid.
Is reddit starting to migrate to HN or something? I've been seeing a lot of these types of comments recently.
Re: A $2 photo from a California junk shop is the ‘holy grail of Western Americana’
#69Re: A $2 photo from a California junk shop is the ‘holy grail of Western Americana’
#70You must have pretty specialised knowledge to look at that photo in the junk shop and say to yourself, "You know, that might be Billy the Kid. I should get this appraised."
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c2/Billy_th...
I'm not anything like an expert, but looking at the enlarged portion, he was the one who came to mind.