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Non-tech-related stories frequently make the front page here too. It just so happens that this site has a lot of coders because, err, it's literally Hacker News.
I found a seashell in the middle of the desert
81–90 of 127 posts
Re: I found a seashell in the middle of the desert
#82[deleted]
Re: I found a seashell in the middle of the desert
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
Was the land lower, the seas higher, or some combination, way back when?
I would wager that the land was lower than the sea back then.
Ha! Indeed.
If all the ice melted it would raise the oceans by something like 230 feet, so modern Vienna would still be above water at 495 – 1778 ft elevation.
Although some estimates suggest Earth loses 20 - 30 cubic kilometres of water to space annually. Plus whatever water is bound up in mineralisation annually.
450 million cubic kilometres of water lost over a 15 million year period would lower ocean by something like … a bit?
The total volume of water on Earth is presently estimated to be around the 1.386 billion cubic kilometre mark.
The volume of a sphere increases to the cube of its radius … carry the 1 … nup, that’s to hard for me.
Beach front property in Vienna, at a guess?
https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/how-would-sea-level-change-if-all-...
https://www.ewash.org/how-much-water-disappears-from-earth-e...
https://science.nasa.gov/earth/earth-observatory/the-water-c...
Re: I found a seashell in the middle of the desert
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
Who says the whole analysis isn’t AI inspired?
No one. I'm pointing out there are existing AI models that can do this that the author could have tried before investing all the work to build his own.
> investing all the work to build his own.
I don't think you understand why the author did this on a fundamental level. Sometimes it isn't explicitly about getting the outcome directly, it's about putting in the work to understand how you get there.
Re: I found a seashell in the middle of the desert
#85"If by some fiat I had to restrict all this writing to one sentence, this is the one I would choose: The summit of Mt. Everest is marine limestone." John McPhee from the wonderful Annals of the former world
I also recommend a quick search for "whale skeleton mountaintop". The mythology of dragons probably came from a find like that.
Re: I found a seashell in the middle of the desert
#86Herodotus did it first, and even speculated that that region must have been covered by water at some point.
Herodotus wouldn’t have written it quite the same — no Jupyter notebook for example,
Jupiter being a Roman term; the nearest equivalent for the Ancient Greeks was Zeus.
Re: I found a seashell in the middle of the desert
#87He is losing a lot of information in that normalization pipeline (whole shell reduced/feature engineered into nothing but an outline). A CNN or something similar would be better and he can maybe get a better depth map of the mouth shape.
Re: I found a seashell in the middle of the desert
#88Cool write up, a little weird that you were surprised to find it in the first place though.
yea, finding shells all over was one of those things I was taught in elementry school. We even had a field trip to some place to find them along with geography lessons on the various layers of the area
Re: I found a seashell in the middle of the desert
#89Herodotus did it first, and even speculated that that region must have been covered by water at some point.
Herodotus wouldn’t have written it quite the same — no Jupyter notebook for example, Jupiter being a Roman term; the nearest equivalent for the Ancient Greeks was Zeus.
Safe to assume Herodotus would have used a Zeus notebook.
Re: I found a seashell in the middle of the desert
#90St. Stephens cathedral in Vienna was built with sandstone that contains seashells. It's hundreds of kilometers away from the shore, but ~15 million years ago the area where it stands now was a seabed. The stones are not from the exact location where it was built, but from close by. The quarry where the stones came from hundreds of years ago is still active, and you can find tons of fossils there. It's practically imp…
Was the land lower, the seas higher, or some combination, way back when?
Land lower - Alps and Carpathians hadn't formed yet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paratethys and its predecessor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tethys_Ocean