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Gravitational wave researchers cast new light on Antikythera mechanism mystery

gla.ac.uk

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Re: Gravitational wave researchers cast new light on Antikythera mechanism mystery

#101

Post by anagramwho »

dekhn wrote: post #56
refulgentis wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Running through this in my head again and again, and editing 500 times along the way, apologies. I'm done now: You believe that it is narrowly true gravitational wave researchers did this, like a kid saying they "wrote their essay" in response to whether they "did [completed] their homework" I believe it is wholly true. I believe we agree on the narrow truth that they are gravitational wave researchers. I believe we…

The goal of the authors of the PR is to promote a narrative. In this case, the PR intends to increase funding for gravity wave research by imputing its utility in another field. From The ELements of Style, Strunk and White, omit needless words. Dropping "Gravitational waves" from the title conveys the same information. The Elements of Style, by Strunk and White: Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain…

The authors used the LIGO Scientific Collaboration's (open source) Bilby package to do the nested sampling analysis. So this was a drop-in use of this GW software to analyse the antikythera data. There is quite a close analogy between the 22-dimensional antikythera analysis, with its intrinsic and extrinsic parameters, and the ~15 dimensional spinning binary black hole analyses done in the GW world, again with intrinsic and extrinsic parameters. That's the GW connection, and it may not be so clear from the reports.

Re: Gravitational wave researchers cast new light on Antikythera mechanism mystery

#102

Post by dekhn »

anagramwho wrote: post #101
dekhn wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The goal of the authors of the PR is to promote a narrative. In this case, the PR intends to increase funding for gravity wave research by imputing its utility in another field. From The ELements of Style, Strunk and White, omit needless words. Dropping "Gravitational waves" from the title conveys the same information. The Elements of Style, by Strunk and White: Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain…

The authors used the LIGO Scientific Collaboration's (open source) Bilby package to do the nested sampling analysis. So this was a drop-in use of this GW software to analyse the antikythera data. There is quite a close analogy between the 22-dimensional antikythera analysis, with its intrinsic and extrinsic parameters, and the ~15 dimensional spinning binary black hole analyses done in the GW world, again with intrin…

Yeah, so after collecting enough opinions from enough people, I'm 100% confident saying there isn't truly anything specific to GW here. When I use the ROOT library from CERN to analyze my molecular dynamics data, I'm not doing particle physics, I'm using ROOT as a general purpose library.

It doesn't really matter. The work is not exceptional, it doesn't shed new light on anything, and really only got the coverage it did due to clever use of key words and hype by the press release authors. In other words, like 90% of popular science.

Re: Gravitational wave researchers cast new light on Antikythera mechanism mystery

#103

Post by refulgentis »

gumby wrote: post #47
refulgentis wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sorry if I'm coming off as combative, I'm legitimately, genuinely, confused: what part is clickbait? They are gravitational wave researchers. Poking around this: I have a test for myself before I rant about science journalism: "would it be confusing without the thing my rant is angry about?" Answer here is yes, I'm very familiar with this sort of thing from the astrophysics people in my physics department 18 year…

> what part is clickbait? They are gravitational wave researchers. They are physicists who are in practice data scientists. They are both male, presumably have experienced no amputations, and look like they were born in the 20th century. Their “day job” is in gravitation. They both likely speak English. The only part of which which has even the slightest bearing on their work is that they are of late de facto data sc…

This is a NPC reply. Yeah, in our profession, people using those tools have "data scientist" on the paycheck. Doesn't mean they wanna be called that or that their actual job is that.

Re: Gravitational wave researchers cast new light on Antikythera mechanism mystery

#104

Post by sigmoid10 »

dekhn wrote: post #72
sigmoid10 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Why build machines at great scale when there is so much almost free human labor? It's crazy that to some extent this is still true today. Automation could go a lot further with existing technologies and make many workers' lives easier or safer. But it is often cheaper to hire humans and burn through them instead of spending the money to implement new kinds of robotics. Especially when companies only think until the…

After many years of working on the the problem of biological automation, I came to conclude that it's really hard to beat an extremely skilled/smart lab tech for general purpose experiments. And my company thinks on the decade+ timescale.

True. But what percentage of the workforce is extremely skilled and smart lab techs? And who knows, if we automate mundane normal jobs, we might get more people who find the time to pursue such high level skills instead of being worried about paying for food.

Re: Gravitational wave researchers cast new light on Antikythera mechanism mystery

#105

Post by shiroiushi »

throwawayffffas wrote: post #88
orbital-decay wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I'm not sure if slaves were this expensive back in ancient Greek or Roman times, but I suspect it probably wasn't that different. The price fluctuated heavily. After a successful conquest slaves were way more affordable. Generally, a lot of people were able to afford slaves, so it was cheaper on average too. It was also place-dependent, compare for example Athens where roughly half of the population was free, and Sp…

Your point still stands, but as a note in Sparta slaves were state property, not individually owned.

If the slaves in Sparta far outnumbered the native population of Spartans, what exactly kept them from revolting and taking over? Was it just because the Spartans were all trained as warriors?
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