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Monumental Record: the lives of the workers building the Great Pyramid of Giza

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Re: Monumental Record: the lives of the workers building the Great Pyramid of Giza

#61

Post by xenadu02 »

irrational wrote: post #52
dr_dshiv wrote: post #24

The fact that documents from the building of the pyramids can still be dug out of the ground is MINDBLOWING. The vast, vast majority of ancient texts only survive because people copied them for thousands of years. It makes me think about how many texts might still remain but are lost when someone builds a road or apartment building. In India, for instance, where there are thousands of palm leaf manuscripts rotting in…

Egypt is special because of the incredibly dry desert conditions. How many other places are there like Egypt where a tremendous empire existed for thousands of years surrounded by an environment so dry that it could preserve papyrus for 4000+ years?

This also greatly contributed to the preservation of the Pyramids themselves.

The great North African deserts come and go in extremely long cycles however. At some point a wet period will return and much of the preserved artifacts will be severely degraded or erased.

Re: Monumental Record: the lives of the workers building the Great Pyramid of Giza

#62

Post by kragen »

jd115 wrote: post #10
kragen wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We use coinage and alphabets, transmute rocks into metal, have near-universal literacy, fly through the air like birds, bring the fire of the Sun to Earth to slay our enemies, walk on the Moon, transplant hearts and kidneys from one person to another, and bring forth plentiful harvests within glass temples in frozen wastelands. We craft elephants of iron that swallow us when we wish to travel from one city to another…

This is the single best comment I have ever read on HN. Of course you won't see it glorified by HN folk, cause they're entirely elsewhere vibrationally. Too busy complaining. "Well, someone has to complain! Someone has to keep others accountable!" they cry. May be true, maybe not, but when all we do is complain, nothing gets done. Not for lack of effort and busyness, but for lack of faith and goodwill.

Thank you! FWIW it has 50 upvotes, so I guess several people liked it. There's a lot of stuff somewhat like this in Dercuano, Derctuo, and Dernocua (http://canonical.org/~kragen/dernocua) and in particular the story of Lao Yuxi in Dernocua is especially similar to it in nature.

I have to say I usually regret commenting here on Character Assassination News, more or less for the reason you say. I think it's an unhealthy, self-destructive habit of mine.

Other recent comments of mine you might enjoy, though some of it is certainly "complaining":

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29327736 (calculating the energy cost of the lowest-tech-possible way to do atmospheric carbon capture, upvoted to 7)

2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29880287 (offering a particularly clean formulation of binary search, downvoted to -1)

3. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28926494 (trying and failing to estimate the relative externalized environmental costs of using a plastic bottle and washing a glass one, upvoted to 20)

4. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29505838 (on the historical development of the "willful infringement" doctrine in patent law, including citations to caselaw and law review articles, and in particular how reading patents can expose you or your employer to treble damages; upvoted to 2 points and flagged)

5. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29697411 (on why metallurgical research is still more or less driven by experiment rather than computation, upvoted to 74)

6. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28660097 (my dismaying epiphany, based on empirical data, that I'm only about three times as fast writing things in Python as I would be in C, despite extensive experience in Python, and that it's often probably not worth the drawbacks. Probably a modern C alternative like Rust would be better; upvoted to 3)

7. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29815027 (on beating SciPy mathematical optimization algorithms on a circuit design problem in under 250 milliseconds with just a list comprehension, unvoted at 1)

8. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29144119 (a list of the biggest unanswered questions in physics today, upvoted to 10)

Re: Monumental Record: the lives of the workers building the Great Pyramid of Giza

#63

Post by kragen »

kragen wrote: post #62
jd115 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the single best comment I have ever read on HN. Of course you won't see it glorified by HN folk, cause they're entirely elsewhere vibrationally. Too busy complaining. "Well, someone has to complain! Someone has to keep others accountable!" they cry. May be true, maybe not, but when all we do is complain, nothing gets done. Not for lack of effort and busyness, but for lack of faith and goodwill.

Thank you! FWIW it has 50 upvotes, so I guess several people liked it. There's a lot of stuff somewhat like this in Dercuano, Derctuo, and Dernocua ( http://canonical.org/~kragen/dernocua ) and in particular the story of Lao Yuxi in Dernocua is especially similar to it in nature. I have to say I usually regret commenting here on Character Assassination News, more or less for the reason you say. I think it's an unheal…

Other recent comments of mine that I thought were good but didn't make it into the top 8:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29750891 (just quoting the Tipitaka on the list of games the Buddha would not play, upvoted to 25)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29704120 (on ways to generate the Sierpinski triangle, to which I would add http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dev3/skitch#!@12rr[t[m@.5t]f...])

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29842158 (on the energy balance of industrial agriculture, current phosphate reserves, and the degree of sustainability of current nitrogen fixation and phosphate extraction practices)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28678098 (on how to use coverage reports to improve software quality, upvoted to 21)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28592961 (a set of shitty shell scripts that constitutes a superior substitute for the YouTube Web UI, although right now youtube-dl and ytdlp seem to be getting throttled)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28333404 (complaining about line-extension fraud: "Pyrex" that isn't borosilicate, Saran Wrap containing no Saran, Sudafed without pseudoephedrine, and Western Digital's shingled disk drives, upvoted to 12)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28185545 (on how it's a problem that 90% of startup founders' jobs are storytelling, upvoted to 14)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29844706 (explaining why electrolytic hydrogen production with renewable energy is a viable option, though see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29857648 for some process efficiency issues)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28401159 (on why web hosting providers should not censor terrorists, upvoted to 28; see also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28401109 on the history of liberalism, upvoted to 9 but with a followup downvoted to -1 and another upvoted to 8)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28611769 (on the problem of nonlinearity in hedonic utilitarianism, illustrated with the Cheesecake Factory and Michelin stars, though someone mistook it for an attempt at a Grand Unified Theory of Restaurant Hedonics; upvoted to 18)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29834530 (on when rationality is or is not valuable, in particular on the importance of honoring Galileos rather than Maos)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28635172 (a perspective on electronic payment in Argentina and the tradeoffs of living there)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28721065 (on the history of refrigeration and the ice trade, upvoted to 10)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28509068 (on why reasoning from fictional evidence is unreliable and has historically led to bad conclusions, also coincidentally mentioning heart and kidney transplants, upvoted to 8)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29833195 (why it is impossible for China to be exporting its coal in the form of Bitcoin: it imports coal and doesn't export Bitcoin, and the whole Bitcoin network uses only 0.3% of China's energy consumption)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28441895 (on whether it is possible for the humans to learn algebra, upvoted to 8)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28613812 (on common misconceptions about Bayesian statistics)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28362300 (on the relative path losses of active and passive sonar and what that implies for submarine warfare, upvoted to 9)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28440912 (on what sorts of extraterrestrial life could potentially evolve to be intelligent)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29774257 (on the economic structure of why Google Search is no good any more)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28591650 (on including generalized lattice operators in programming languages, and the cognitive HCI aspects of programming language grammar design, upvoted to 8)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29735228 (on how Winnie-The-Pooh still is not in the public domain in many countries, apparently against the wishes of the Milne family)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28466492 (on some simple DSP for mouse wiggle detection to increase mouse pointer size in 12–18 instructions, upvoted to 2)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29712106 (on companies fraudulently claiming to use two-factor authentication)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28467260 (on the history of tracked vehicles in polar exploration)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29671402 (on user interface design for algebraic-notation calculator programs)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29558779 (on using pencil and paper as a user interface for computer programs by way of a camera)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29557929 (on FTDI's unprosecuted criminal vandalism of their customers' customers' customers' hardware)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29557730 (on the problems of archival and preservation of computerized documents such as HyperCard stacks)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29504940 (on murder in Oakland)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29477589 (a very short retrospective on the EPIC 2014 video and modern journalism)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29476060 (on why we should eliminate copyright; more detail in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29559952)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29332777 (on the mineral resources used in modern electronics)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29321232 (on why you should still pay attention to P/E ratios of stocks)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29286058 (on why the University of California's decision to drop standardized test scores as an admission criterion is unpopular with the ethnic minorities they have benefited)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29171793 (on whether Perl was born at JPL or at Unisys)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29158664 (trying to figure out how much nuclear power PRC is actually building)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29152453 (complaining about people commemorating my dead friend's birthday by speculating that if he were alive he would support their political viewpoint, one which he steadfastly opposed his entire life)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29144483 (on how the time gap from scientific discoveries to their technological deployment has or hasn't changed over the last century)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29143312 (on what would enable unfunded physics experimenters to make significant discoveries, getting into the nature of the historical interplay between theoretical and experimental physics)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29136343 (on social mobility and social justice in the Roman Empire)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29072399 (on why nuclear reactor development, and some other aspects of progress, stagnated after 01960)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28937181 (on the non-glorification of violence in US popular culture by contrast with the Iliad)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28885057 (an overview of data structures used for efficient implementations of text editors)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28878848 (comparing the relative costs of tracing GC, reference counting, and manual memory management; see also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28878635)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28853236 (on Jacque Fresco's utopian Venus Project and the resulting Zeitgeist Movement)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28733282 (on why it is bad for journalists to use "hacking" to mean "computer crime", which propagates confusion and fear of us)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28731861 (on the benefits of notation as a tool of thought)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28679454 (what an urgent new feature with a short deadline on a software project might consist of)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28679139 (on which software project process practices are really valuable in my experience)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28678845 (on why frequent releases in particular are very valuable)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28588402 (a totally wrong comment about oxalic acid for rust removal that prompted an excellent reply)

Re: Monumental Record: the lives of the workers building the Great Pyramid of Giza

#64

Post by kragen »

6510 wrote: post #13
jd115 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the single best comment I have ever read on HN. Of course you won't see it glorified by HN folk, cause they're entirely elsewhere vibrationally. Too busy complaining. "Well, someone has to complain! Someone has to keep others accountable!" they cry. May be true, maybe not, but when all we do is complain, nothing gets done. Not for lack of effort and busyness, but for lack of faith and goodwill.

On the contrary, if no one complaints nothing will happen. Moaning always comes before invention. Its just not the moaners themselves who make anything happen but they are very much part of the delicate balance. You could invent something without moaners but no one would recognize it. Take this one for example: > bring the fire of the Sun to Earth to slay our enemies The amount of moaning we still have to do about th…

I suppose that in a sense any non-playful attempt to change the state of affairs, whether directed at technical progress or not, is rooted in a "complaint": you imagine a possible future and judge that the current state of affairs is worse by comparison.

And you cannot simply ignore the present when you do this. Any attempt to bring that future about necessarily begins by taking stock of the resources available in the present: if you try to hike to a mountain peak without taking your gaze from that peak, you will stumble and twist your ankle. But that is not a judgmental, condemnatory way of perceiving the present; it is a factual evaluation of the means available to you in the present, similar to the factual evaluation of the possibilities that exist in a possible future.

So I don't know that I agree with your thesis that progress is rooted in dissatisfaction, though many people do.

> The amount of moaning we still have to do about this? If we fail at that task, this fire stuff will be sure to be the end of us.

This comment suggests to me that you do not yet adequately appreciate the risks of pervasive surveillance and precision-guided munitions, by comparison with which the risks of thermonuclear warheads pale.

Re: Monumental Record: the lives of the workers building the Great Pyramid of Giza

#65

Post by kragen »

Der_Einzige wrote: post #45
kragen wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We use coinage and alphabets, transmute rocks into metal, have near-universal literacy, fly through the air like birds, bring the fire of the Sun to Earth to slay our enemies, walk on the Moon, transplant hearts and kidneys from one person to another, and bring forth plentiful harvests within glass temples in frozen wastelands. We craft elephants of iron that swallow us when we wish to travel from one city to another…

By writing in this style, you try to imagine what an ancient person who sees the world today would describe it as. I do not know exactly why, but this style of writing is profoundly alienating to me. I think it's because it sounds like it is before our "rational turn" during the enlightenment and renaissance. I don't mean this in a bad way, but I think your utilization of it is not compelling on its own for your poin…

I don't think it is bad that it is alienating to you, although I hope that didn't cause you to suffer. Conveying the alien nature of antiquity (and, by implication, of the future) was much of my purpose in thus employing ostranenie.

Re: Monumental Record: the lives of the workers building the Great Pyramid of Giza

#66

Post by kragen »

kragen wrote: post #59
guerrilla wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow this belongs in the comment museum, excellently written and insightful. It reminds me of the The Body Rituals of the Nacirema[1]. I wish more people wrote things like this, it gives a dash of objectivity to how things are. I agree with both you and GP though, in some ways things really haven't changed at all despite these technological changes. If you can't see the constancy too then I don't think you see the big…

I agree.

Well, except for the parts that were compliments to me, which I don't have enough objectivity to pass judgment on.

Re: Monumental Record: the lives of the workers building the Great Pyramid of Giza

#67

Post by kragen »

bambax wrote: post #15
kragen wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We use coinage and alphabets, transmute rocks into metal, have near-universal literacy, fly through the air like birds, bring the fire of the Sun to Earth to slay our enemies, walk on the Moon, transplant hearts and kidneys from one person to another, and bring forth plentiful harvests within glass temples in frozen wastelands. We craft elephants of iron that swallow us when we wish to travel from one city to another…

All of what you're describing happened after the Industrial Revolution, and most in the last 20 years. Yet the cutoff between Ancient Times and "our era" (?) happened 2000+ years ago, for some reason. Also, we don't fly "like birds". We are flown, crammed into metal tubes that are more similar to ancient galleries carved in mountains, mentioned in the OP, than to any bird. Edit: As a matter of fact I don't understand…

Even if your genes were the same, would you be the same person if you had grown up never seeing an alphabet, never driving a car, two of your siblings dying in childhood, and never hearing of a government (like most of the world in Merer's time) or at least of a democracy (like Merer's workers)?

Re: Monumental Record: the lives of the workers building the Great Pyramid of Giza

#68

Post by kragen »

Jeff_Brown wrote: post #39
bambax wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of what you're describing happened after the Industrial Revolution, and most in the last 20 years. Yet the cutoff between Ancient Times and "our era" (?) happened 2000+ years ago, for some reason. Also, we don't fly "like birds". We are flown, crammed into metal tubes that are more similar to ancient galleries carved in mountains, mentioned in the OP, than to any bird. Edit: As a matter of fact I don't understand…

I think you're both right. We live completely differently now, but it's not clear that our essence has greatly changed. In particular, that our values have changed is wonderful. But that's a cultural development. I'm convinced most of the people I've known would have shrugged at slavery like most Romans did, had they grown up with it. (Maybe they would have questioned it as children, but by adulthood they would have…

Undoubtedly Khufu's subjects would be aghast if you shrugged at damming the Nile; perhaps the Romans would be aghast if you shrugged at oral sex, conscientious objectors, and female bosses instructing male employees; Hindutva activists today are aghast if you shrug at eating hamburgers, to the point that they may lynch you if they catch you slaughtering a cow. Some of our moral values are of course the correct ones, slavery being actually objectively immoral unlike those other examples, but generally people only know their culture's value system, not the objectively correct one. And some of our moral values are definitely not the correct ones.

Re: Monumental Record: the lives of the workers building the Great Pyramid of Giza

#69

Post by kragen »

ajuc wrote: post #26
kragen wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We use coinage and alphabets, transmute rocks into metal, have near-universal literacy, fly through the air like birds, bring the fire of the Sun to Earth to slay our enemies, walk on the Moon, transplant hearts and kidneys from one person to another, and bring forth plentiful harvests within glass temples in frozen wastelands. We craft elephants of iron that swallow us when we wish to travel from one city to another…

> But many fewer people are born compared to our population (which is 250 times bigger than in Merer's time), because now people do not become pregnant unless they want to, usually. Ancient people had https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silphium_(antiquity) for the same purpose. They likely used it up to extinction.

Aye, and in the last century a huge fraction of the planet's biodiversity has been lost. But I don't think it's clear that silphium and similar herbal drugs constituted an oral contraceptive with effectiveness on par with the Pill.

Re: Monumental Record: the lives of the workers building the Great Pyramid of Giza

#70

Post by dr_dshiv »

irrational wrote: post #52
dr_dshiv wrote: post #24

The fact that documents from the building of the pyramids can still be dug out of the ground is MINDBLOWING. The vast, vast majority of ancient texts only survive because people copied them for thousands of years. It makes me think about how many texts might still remain but are lost when someone builds a road or apartment building. In India, for instance, where there are thousands of palm leaf manuscripts rotting in…

Egypt is special because of the incredibly dry desert conditions. How many other places are there like Egypt where a tremendous empire existed for thousands of years surrounded by an environment so dry that it could preserve papyrus for 4000+ years?

3 tremendous empires, depending how you count. Egypt, Greece, Rome...
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