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Vesuvius Challenge 2023 Grand Prize awarded: we can read the first scroll

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Re: Vesuvius Challenge 2023 Grand Prize awarded: we can read the first scroll

#51

I was recently reading the Greek Myths series by Stephen Fry and he makes a point of how there are so many stories we know of but have been lost from ancient texts. Stories and authors that were famous enough to be mentioned by multiple other authors but which themselves have been lost. This collection of scrolls could contain some of those lost stories and the possibility of that is terribly exciting.

Not just works of fiction or mythology but also histories, and works of science and philosophy.

Re: Vesuvius Challenge 2023 Grand Prize awarded: we can read the first scroll

#53
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That recovery is much easier though, it is using the device as intended. And of course, rm just unlinks, doesn’t actually delete, so even going a step further and recovering deleted content is hardly magic. This is more like if, sometime in the future, they somehow successfully reconstructed a snapshot of our computers’ volatile memory by examining the power supply, or something ridiculous like that.

Big if. We’ll lose a lot of digital data simply because we won’t have the means to read it. CD-readers aren’t manufactured anymore in volume. It’s easy to imagine society in 40 years not having any CD readers handy but having a bunch of CDs they want to read. Now multiply that by all the funny storage formats we’ve created over the years.

No need for a CD reader if you have a CT scanner and software that converts those ridges into bits. The bigger question is how well preserved those CDs will be.

Re: Vesuvius Challenge 2023 Grand Prize awarded: we can read the first scroll

#54
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That recovery is much easier though, it is using the device as intended. And of course, rm just unlinks, doesn’t actually delete, so even going a step further and recovering deleted content is hardly magic. This is more like if, sometime in the future, they somehow successfully reconstructed a snapshot of our computers’ volatile memory by examining the power supply, or something ridiculous like that.

Big if. We’ll lose a lot of digital data simply because we won’t have the means to read it. CD-readers aren’t manufactured anymore in volume. It’s easy to imagine society in 40 years not having any CD readers handy but having a bunch of CDs they want to read. Now multiply that by all the funny storage formats we’ve created over the years.

I’m almost certain it is impossible to actually do what I said. But then again, I bet anybody 2000 years ago would say the same of reading scrolls that have been consumed by a volcano!

Re: Vesuvius Challenge 2023 Grand Prize awarded: we can read the first scroll

#55

I was recently reading the Greek Myths series by Stephen Fry and he makes a point of how there are so many stories we know of but have been lost from ancient texts. Stories and authors that were famous enough to be mentioned by multiple other authors but which themselves have been lost. This collection of scrolls could contain some of those lost stories and the possibility of that is terribly exciting.

Not just works of fiction or mythology but also histories, and works of science and philosophy.

I want Aristotle's treatise on Comedy, and if I'm allowed to be terribly greedy, just one more play by Aeschylus.

This is the most exciting thing in the world to me right now, these scrolls, along with the thought that there might be literally thousands more still in the ground.

Re: Vesuvius Challenge 2023 Grand Prize awarded: we can read the first scroll

#56
post #50
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where can I read more about this? Frankly I'm a bit surprised that I've never heard about this considering how shocking it sounds.

Wild, isn't it? Hands down my favorite historical fact learned in 2023. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mummy_brown

Wild? Wait until you read about people actually eating mummies and corpses

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/mummy-eat...

Re: Vesuvius Challenge 2023 Grand Prize awarded: we can read the first scroll

#57

Over 2000 years ago a chap called Philodemus sits in the library of a luxurious villa owned by a rich guy who likes collecting art and writing. He writes his thoughts on pleasure, and the relationship between the quantity of something and the pleasure that might derive from it. The scroll goes on the shelves with the others. He writes lots. At some point later the villa is covered by lava from mt vesuvius. 2000 years…

... and what would he think of us, 2000 years later thought has led us to amazing advances in technology that would be inconceivable to him. But the sort of things the people of his day thought about, virtue, happiness, how to live the right way, not a lot of progress has been made. He might be surprised by that. In his time at the dawn of written thought-for-thoughts sake, they might have reasonably expected that soon people might think their way to a golden age of happiness and contentment. But 2000 years later we have learnt that you dont seem to be able to think your way to happiness.

Re: Vesuvius Challenge 2023 Grand Prize awarded: we can read the first scroll

#58
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Rather than pushing forward and destroying everything In the early days they wouldn't have accomplished anything by pushing forward, so it doesn't take all that much restraint. I'm more impressed by people in, say, the 1990s or early 2000s. They might've had a shot but there was still too much risk, so they restrained themselves until it was a safer bet.

On the other hand, we ground up mummies for paint to the point that we ran out and used fresher corpses to meet demand. It is a bit of miracle that they were preserved, and not just discarded.

Worse than that, lots were ground up (and consumed) for medicines.

Re: Vesuvius Challenge 2023 Grand Prize awarded: we can read the first scroll

#59
post #23

Apparntly the bad news is that the remaining scrolls most likely contain yet more Epicurean philosophy, maybe largely from not-top-rated guys like Philodemus. (Apparently it's possible that the library actually is, or incorporates, Philodemus' personal library.) https://twitter.com/DrFrancisYoung/status/175453630645602754...

That's not necessarily bad news.

Everyone interested in this story should read Stephen Greenblatt's The Swerve (https://www.pulitzer.org/winners/stephen-greenblatt).

It traces the story of a Renaissance humanist who tracked down and translated the Epicurean philosopher/poet Lucretius' De Rerem Natura, which Greenblatt describes as portraying a strikingly modern way of seeing the world.

In particular Lucretius and the Epicureans denied the existence of supernatural causes, were opposed to religious fear, and posited the ideas of atomism and biological evolution. Of course they're better known for their approach to living life, which Greenblatt shows is more sophisticated than sometimes caricatured, and which he portrays as a breath of fresh air compared to the oppressive moralism and hypocrisy of the Church at the time. (Jefferson and many of the American Founders described themselves as Epicureans.)

He goes on to imply that Epicureanism was influential and widespread in the ancient world but suppressed by the early Church, so that we now know little of it.

Anyone, one of the tantalizing parts of the book is where he describes the carbonized and unreadable Herculaneum scrolls, since they were the private library of a wealthy patron of the Epicureans. I think he thinks being able to read the scrolls will really change our understanding of the ancient world.

And remember: if they hadn't been carbonized, they would have crumbled to dust. That's why we only have the texts that managed to get copied. (Anthony Doerr's Cloud Cuckoo Land is a novel about the survival and 21st century rediscovery of an imaginary Greek play, and ... I'll let you read it yourself - https://www.anthonydoerr.com/books/cloud-cuckoo-land)

(Apologies for any errors above, as basically all I know about this subject is what I read in the book!)

Re: Vesuvius Challenge 2023 Grand Prize awarded: we can read the first scroll

#60
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wild, isn't it? Hands down my favorite historical fact learned in 2023. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mummy_brown

Wild? Wait until you read about people actually eating mummies and corpses https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/mummy-eat...

Wow. I like aged cheese but that is a bridge too far.
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