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British Museum realises 'vase' is in fact an ancient mace-head upside down

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Re: British Museum realises 'vase' is in fact an ancient mace-head upside down

#91

Post by failrate »

logfromblammo wrote: post #86
benj111 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 2-sided dice I wasn't sure if this was an allusion to a coin flip. Turns out there are actual 2 sided die though. https://boingboing.net/2015/10/01/how-do-you-design-2-sided-...

You can make most oddly-sided dice as barrel forms (a.k.a. "long dice"). Take a cylinder of uniform density, and grind the ends down to cones, at an angle such that they cannot be a stable result. Now plane off the required number of stable surfaces at equal intervals around the barrel, and scribe its value on the opposite side. (Or for even-numbered sides, you can also construct it as an antiprism, capped by pyramid…

Teetotums are great. Games like TRGoU frequently use beans that have a spot on them. In my case, I painted the faces of wooden craft cubes black or white, 3 sides each.

Re: British Museum realises 'vase' is in fact an ancient mace-head upside down

#92

Post by Qwertystop »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #70
masklinn wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't think it's hard to understand, it's just the plague of consumerism IMO. It's not consumerism it's specialisation: with the advance of sedentarisation and techno-industrial might, we can afford to go beyond one tool doing a bit of everything not very well (e.g. shave and punch holes and cut food and …) and instead use plenty of tools which do one job very efficiently or conveniently.

It's not just specialization, often it's overspecialization , driven by commercial interests. Even though a generic tool G can do tasks A, B and C well, people are told to buy specialized tools for each of those tasks that are only marginally better at their specific tasks (sometimes, not even that) at the expense of being worse for the other tasks. Hell, sometimes it's the same tool, but with a specialized label and…

Shaving razors aren't just different in that - the angle of the blade relative to the handle is different, because it's more comfortable/easier to control for different regions of the body.

The price difference isn't particularly justified, but presumably "face razor" and "leg razor" doesn't sell as well.

Re: British Museum realises 'vase' is in fact an ancient mace-head upside down

#93

Post by PhasmaFelis »

wyattpeak wrote: post #45
PhasmaFelis wrote: post #33

What am I actually looking at here? I see a rough, pitted, badly damaged surface with smooth, white stuff showing where it's cracked away. Is the smooth inner layer part of the original, a solid object with a decorated exterior? Or is the inner part a modern reconstruction, and the outer all that remains of a hollow original?

The smooth surfaces are modern filler to make the object whole. The pitted and damaged surfaces are pieces of the original. It'll be hollow since they thought it was a vase. It's unlikely the filler is solid, these reconstructions are generally made as faithfully as possible to the original without too much synthesis. So it should be the same shape as the original is presumed to have, but no engravings or anything wh…

Thanks!

Re: British Museum realises 'vase' is in fact an ancient mace-head upside down

#94

Post by masklinn »

ryanmercer wrote: post #90
SmellyGeekBoy wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Strange that tech seems to be moving in the opposite direction, with single-purpose devices like MP3 players, GPS devices and cameras being consolidated into phones.

Personal electronics perhaps. I'd argue there are more specialty hand and power tools than ever before though.

That's probable, but at the same time e.g. woodworkers would tend to build their own tools on the fly to fit their specific or personal needs, these tools were not standardised or widely available but I'm guessing the average wood carver in the 15th or 16th century had dozens of very specialised tools, it would just be tools they made themselves or asked a friend to make for them rather than tools they bought from a big box store.

Re: British Museum realises 'vase' is in fact an ancient mace-head upside down

#95

Post by logfromblammo »

benj111 wrote: post #88
logfromblammo wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can make most oddly-sided dice as barrel forms (a.k.a. "long dice"). Take a cylinder of uniform density, and grind the ends down to cones, at an angle such that they cannot be a stable result. Now plane off the required number of stable surfaces at equal intervals around the barrel, and scribe its value on the opposite side. (Or for even-numbered sides, you can also construct it as an antiprism, capped by pyramid…

Thankyou. I'm not sure I've come across so many new words outside of a science paper that I didn't understand :S . What would be the use case for a d1 ?

Math/physics curiosity and absurdism, mainly.

It's a die that always comes up 1, without cheating. How is that not art?

Re: British Museum realises 'vase' is in fact an ancient mace-head upside down

#96

Post by JetSpiegel »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #60
2arrs2ells wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

David Macaulay's "Motel of the Mysteries" ( https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/108831.Motel_of_the_Myst... ) satirizes this bias, with archeologists from 4022 inspecting a modern day motel room and uncovering the "holy" toilet. It's a gem.

Thanks for that, I was just thinking about how people years from now would interpret stuff like our erm, sacred thrones used in the daily cleansing rituals.

Daily? More like every other day...
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