141–150 of 218 posts
I wrote this for a different community (filled with semiliterate sophists), but this is absolutely huge and could upend huge swathes of understanding about the last two thousand years. You can avoid the longform essay below if you want. The short of it is there are several potentially common works possibly in the library that could directly prove or disprove what is found in the New Testament and the predicates of Ra…
This might count as one of the most extreme stories of data recovery I've seen. I wonder if in another 2000 years we'll have a "first file discovered on discarded hard drive platter".
"Spot robot dumpster dives in landfill and finds 100,000 bitcoins in discarded hard drive"
See also Nat’s twitter announcement: https://twitter.com/natfriedman/status/1712470683207532906 $700k is a life changing amount of money. I admit, it’s tempting to drop everything and go devote myself like a monk to the pursuit of ancient enlightenment via modern ML. I wonder where we’d start… It’s also funny that the scroll might just be a laundry list.
It's likely somehow a reference to the Emperor. Purple cloth was extremely rare and expensive, and it was the colour worn by the Emperors. Indeed, it eventually became a capital crime for people outside the Emperor's family to wear it. I don't know if that was yet true at the time of Vesuvius, although Wikipedia claims Caligula may have had someone killed for wearing purple.
Still interesting that they found that word. As far as I know the sea snail it comes from didn't inhabit the waters off Herculaneum.
Suggested Reading for beginners:
* Life of Pythagoras, by Iamblichus
* The Golden Ass, by Apuleius of Numenia (specifically, translation by Robert Graves)
* Life of Alexander by Plutarch
* Education of Cyrus by Xenophon
* Parmenides by Plato
Also, I have found SHWEP.net to be invaluable for a gentle yet rigorous guide through many classics, though it takes an esoteric bent (which I love)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Indeed, it eventually became a capital crime for people outside the Emperor's family to wear it. Similarly, various Emperors far away in China had a similar enforced color-monopoly, except it was on yellow. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_in_Chinese_culture#Yello...
Interesting. Does that mean the Yellow Turbans choose Yellow to demonstrate a lack of legitimacy for the Eastern Han emperor?
See also Nat’s twitter announcement: https://twitter.com/natfriedman/status/1712470683207532906 $700k is a life changing amount of money. I admit, it’s tempting to drop everything and go devote myself like a monk to the pursuit of ancient enlightenment via modern ML. I wonder where we’d start… It’s also funny that the scroll might just be a laundry list.
I don’t think people in those days wrote bullshit. You had to know how to write, and if you did, no one was entreating you to write grocery lists.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not sure why this is downvoted. Yes, in California half will go to taxes and the rest is enough for a downpayment on a shack. Hardly life changing.
Must be nice to be a billionaire. I'm a fairly well paid engineer and I would certainly consider a $700k gift to be life-changing.
So it's more of a (skillful) gambling prize than a gift.
I highly recommend getting into classical literature. It is incredible and beyond conception — I had a light scattering in my education, but only later and recently have I discovered how incredible it can be. Suggested Reading for beginners: * Life of Pythagoras, by Iamblichus * The Golden Ass, by Apuleius of Numenia (specifically, translation by Robert Graves) * Life of Alexander by Plutarch * Education of Cyrus by…
> If these words are indeed what we think they are, this papyrus scroll likely contains an entirely new text, unseen by the modern world.
I highly recommend getting into classical literature. It is incredible and beyond conception — I had a light scattering in my education, but only later and recently have I discovered how incredible it can be. Suggested Reading for beginners: * Life of Pythagoras, by Iamblichus * The Golden Ass, by Apuleius of Numenia (specifically, translation by Robert Graves) * Life of Alexander by Plutarch * Education of Cyrus by…
The lettering was found by looking for 'crackle' texture on papyrus segments from the CT scans which obviously were in the shape of Greek letters, and annotating those as training data. Unfortunately such crackle texture isn't visible, at least by eye, on most of the papyrus. Probably it's only that visible where the ink was very thick. You can easily see the difference in texture in this electron microscope image [1…
I actually participated in the challenge for a little while and this was the approach I took before I dropped out to do a few other things. However, what I did was a bit different -- instead of looking for a crackle, I surmised that that 'crackling' effect actually is just of course slices of the data over different rifts in the parchment, and that the data of the ink lay on the manifold of that crackling and bending…