Airborne laser scan reveals Arran's ancient sites • Hacker News Board

Re: Airborne laser scan reveals Arran's ancient sites

#21

Post by growlist » Mon, Oct 14, 2019, 3:38 PM UTC

degenerate wrote: post #12

joosters wrote: post #2

Some kind of scale on those scan images would be helpful...

Or how it works at all. Is it like a shallow ground-penetrating radar? If not, how does it find these sites? The article left more questions than it gave answers.

MSM - even the BBC that are supposedly a bastion of good journalism - are generally terrible at covering science. My theory is that journalism now pays so poorly for most in the profession that all the decent graduates seek work elsewhere.

Re: Airborne laser scan reveals Arran's ancient sites

#22

Post by growlist » Mon, Oct 14, 2019, 3:40 PM UTC

arethuza wrote: post #9

smcl wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And of course up in the north, the Moray Firth :-) I wonder if there's anything referred to as "Firth" in a non-Scotland place, perhaps up in Canada or in NZ? update: yes (in England, Germany, NZ and Antarctica)! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firth#English_firths

And a bit further north there is the Pentland Firth which, of course, is nowhere near the Pentlands!

And for the ladies, there's Colin Firth.

downvotes?! no sense of humour.

Re: Airborne laser scan reveals Arran's ancient sites

#23

Post by dooglius » Mon, Oct 14, 2019, 4:09 PM UTC

gabiruh wrote: post #19

dooglius wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can anyone explain...?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog-whistle_politics By saying that they can scan buried ancient sites it resonates to the "enemy" that they can see everything it is trying to hide. What, at a first glance, may sound like celebrating science is just warfare.

I know what the term "dog-whistle" means. The parent comment you responded to is "TIL there's a place called the Firth of Clyde", what is the dog whistle in that name?

Re: Airborne laser scan reveals Arran's ancient sites

#24

Post by catalogia » Mon, Oct 14, 2019, 4:39 PM UTC

walmandurebu wrote: post #5

Couldn't this "airborne laser scan" be used for spying?

Just about any sensor you can think of can be used for spying. Are the logistics of recovering camera film from spy satellites something you think about every time you use the digital camera in your smartphone though?

Re: Airborne laser scan reveals Arran's ancient sites

#25

Post by paganel » Mon, Oct 14, 2019, 5:24 PM UTC

debbiedowner wrote: post #16

What is really interesting is that the main innovation is never mentioned in the BBC article. The academic they quote, Dave Cowley, is an author on "Using deep neural networks on airborne laser scanning data: Results from a case study of semi‐automatic mapping of archaeological topography on Arran, Scotland" from 11/2018 [0]. The "new 3D technology" that is becoming more "widely available" and allows for "rapid disco…

Do you happen to know if anyone out there is using DL techniques for identifying and most importantly for categorizing ancient pottery? I’m asking because until now most of that identifying and categorization has been of course made only “manually”, by archeologists themselves, with, imho, different levels of “success”. On top of genuine human errors (i.e. no-one can visually remember and compare all the pottery from a certain geographical region) there is also the added geo-political factor that must be taken into consideration, i.e. an archeologist from a specific country won’t categorize that easily a certain piece of pottery as belonging to a neighboring country/culture and thus a potential “enemy”. I’m thinking that further automatizing this process will get rid of human error.

Re: Airborne laser scan reveals Arran's ancient sites

#26

Post by Darkphibre » Mon, Oct 14, 2019, 5:38 PM UTC

debbiedowner wrote: post #18

debbiedowner wrote: post #16

What is really interesting is that the main innovation is never mentioned in the BBC article. The academic they quote, Dave Cowley, is an author on "Using deep neural networks on airborne laser scanning data: Results from a case study of semi‐automatic mapping of archaeological topography on Arran, Scotland" from 11/2018 [0]. The "new 3D technology" that is becoming more "widely available" and allows for "rapid disco…

p.s. I think the LIDAR data is here: https://remotesensingdata.gov.scot/collections , not on Canmore. It seems to be about a gigabyte total.

Thank you for this!

Re: Airborne laser scan reveals Arran's ancient sites

#27

Post by smcl » Mon, Oct 14, 2019, 9:14 PM UTC

growlist wrote: post #22

arethuza wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And a bit further north there is the Pentland Firth which, of course, is nowhere near the Pentlands!

And for the ladies, there's Colin Firth. downvotes?! no sense of humour.

That's a totally legit Firth, IMO

Re: Airborne laser scan reveals Arran's ancient sites

#28

Post by philjohn » Mon, Oct 14, 2019, 10:01 PM UTC

joemaller1 wrote: post #3

TIL there's a place called the Firth of Clyde

Also Firth of Forth - home of the famous bridge that needs constant painting (or at least, did, until they developed a special paint).

Flying into Edinburgh on a clear day when circling over the Forth is spectacular.