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First word discovered in unopened Herculaneum scroll by CS student

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Re: First word discovered in unopened Herculaneum scroll by CS student

#171

Post by xamuel »

dr_dshiv wrote: post #144

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…

I wouldn't recommend the Parmenides as one's first step into Plato, it's one of his hardest dialogues. I'd suggest the Alcibiades as the best Plato intro. It's lighthearted to the point of pleasure reading, yet at the same time deep and profound. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1676

Re: First word discovered in unopened Herculaneum scroll by CS student

#172

Post by quakeguy »

germanier wrote: post #162
jansan wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can someone tell me if there is a German version of Life of Pythagoras available? I cannot find anything for some reason (only one bok on amazon that has only one review claiming it is an automated translation).

A commented translation is available under the title Pythagoras. Legende - Lehre - Lebensgestaltung as a book and as open access here: https://rep.adw-goe.de/handle/11858/00-001S-0000-002D-B3AD-5...

Thank you!

Re: First word discovered in unopened Herculaneum scroll by CS student

#173

Post by codeulike »

nataliste wrote: post #42

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…

Sophists have an unfairly bad reputation, if you'd just take the time to listen to them uncritically then I think you'll find much of what they have to say very convincing.

Re: First word discovered in unopened Herculaneum scroll by CS student

#174

Post by pmayrgundter »

nataliste wrote: post #42

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…

A note on the type and number of the texts, from the site:

"Early attempts to open the scrolls unfortunately destroy many of them. A few are painstakingly unrolled by an Italian monk over several decades, and they are found to contain philosophical texts written in Greek. More than six hundred remain unopened and unreadable.

What's more, excavations were never completed, and many historians believe that thousands more scrolls remain underground.

Imagine the secrets of Roman and Greek philosophy, science, literature, mathematics, poetry, and politics, which are locked away in these lumps of ash, waiting to be read!"

Re: First word discovered in unopened Herculaneum scroll by CS student

#175

Post by dr_dshiv »

xamuel wrote: post #171
dr_dshiv wrote: post #144

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…

I wouldn't recommend the Parmenides as one's first step into Plato, it's one of his hardest dialogues. I'd suggest the Alcibiades as the best Plato intro. It's lighthearted to the point of pleasure reading, yet at the same time deep and profound. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1676

Thank you for sharing an easier start to Plato. And yes, Parmenides is typically treated as one of the hardest dialogues. Nevertheless, the core of the dialogue is quite simple, where Parmenides discusses the relationship between the One and the Many. It’s really quite simple, yet it is fascinating and a great example of Platonic dialectic — it ends in mystery, but along the way makes you think really deeply.

Here’s a short segment from the dialogue:

“Then the one cannot have parts, and cannot be a whole?

Why not?

Because every part is part of a whole; is it not?

Yes.

And what is a whole? would not that of which no part is wanting be a whole?

Certainly.

Then, in either case, the one would be made up of parts; both as being a whole, and also as having parts?

To be sure.

And in either case, the one would be many, and not one?

True.

But, surely, it ought to be one and not many?

It ought.

Then, if the one is to remain one, it will not be a whole, and will not have parts?

No.

But if it has no parts, it will have neither beginning, middle, nor end; for these would of course be parts of it…”

http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/parmenides.html

Re: First word discovered in unopened Herculaneum scroll by CS student

#176

Post by dr_dshiv »

atomicnature wrote: post #149
dr_dshiv wrote: post #144

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…

Life of Pythagoras was super influential to my life. I was very inspired by the way Pythagoras lived his life - a 100% commitment to finding out what is true, travelling all over the world amassing knowledge/practices/skills through humility, trying so many things out and finally spending so much of his life teaching. Pythagoras was probably the greatest philosopher ever. I also recommend reading about Archytas, one…

Archytas is famous for having designed a steam powered glider. And for having freed Plato from his brief slavery. But he also appears to have written the first treatise on mechanical engineering:

https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1...

Re: First word discovered in unopened Herculaneum scroll by CS student

#177

Post by versteegen »

tysam_and wrote: post #119
versteegen wrote: post #17

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…

Other things like hlb-gpt? :)

I'd studied the problem to work on it, but didn't get as far as you. I agree that intuitively (not backed up by experiment) I expect that preprocessing to further flatten the segments and other hand-crafted features based on desired invariances should work well. It seems that a lot of people really have just used 2D convolutions, applied to just one or a few surface layers and then combined. So I'd also be interested in your code.

> 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.

I'm afraid I can't follow this.

Re: First word discovered in unopened Herculaneum scroll by CS student

#178

Post by albrewer »

xamuel wrote: post #171
dr_dshiv wrote: post #144

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…

I wouldn't recommend the Parmenides as one's first step into Plato, it's one of his hardest dialogues. I'd suggest the Alcibiades as the best Plato intro. It's lighthearted to the point of pleasure reading, yet at the same time deep and profound. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1676

I read those names correctly and wondered why, when I realized I'd listened the memory of them was from listening to the first episodes of The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps[0] over a decade ago.

[0]: https://www.historyofphilosophy.net/

Re: First word discovered in unopened Herculaneum scroll by CS student

#179

Post by versteegen »

radarsat1 wrote: post #160
terhechte wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is one of more than 600 scrolls that could be read afterwards if the method becomes scalable. What's more: "excavations were never completed, and many historians believe that thousands more scrolls remain underground." [0] [0]: https://scrollprize.org

> if the method becomes scalable the machine learning stuff is cool, but it's important not to discount the apparently pretty manual labour still involved in the virtual unwrapping: > Early in the summer, a small team of annotators (the “segmentation team”) joined our effort. They began mapping the 3D structure of the scroll using tools initially built by EduceLab and improved by our community. By July we had segment…

Actually it's much worse than that. Only a very small fraction of the first of the two scanned scrolls has been segmented/unwrapped after 5 months, and it's the easiest parts that are done -- about 1000cm^2 across something like 100 layers of papyrus 10cm wide. Only 50cm^2 of scroll 2 is done. Where the sheets are right against each other is much harder.

Re: First word discovered in unopened Herculaneum scroll by CS student

#180

Post by michtzik »

mholt wrote: post #137
lazide wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have any counter cites? Because it seems pretty close! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_plates

Primary sources. The only references to Egypt are in relation to the language, not actual Egyptians: https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/search?query=egyptians&typ... i.e. the plates were written in a language reformed from original Egyptian -- which makes sense, as ancient Hebrews would sometimes write in Egyptian characters when enscribing was difficult (metal plates!) because the Egyptian script was more concise. It…

> Then as for scam artist -- I suppose that is a matter of personal judgment, since no fair trial ever occurred or made a guilty verdict before he was murdered.

It's mildly impressive that in the same sentence where you mention there was no guilty verdict "for scam artist", you say Joseph Smith was "murdered", a thing for which there was also no guilty verdict: the five men indicted for the killings were acquitted.

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