201–210 of 246 posts
Amazing this stuff still yields secrets after thousands of years. Meanwhile the 3.5" floppy disks in my parents attic on which I've kept all my teenage Turbo Pascal source code have long lost all their data.
This is something I think about a lot. How do we build a "data pyramid" that can be interpreted by future generations. I feel like much of our culture will be lost to bit rot.
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There are thousands of sumerian cuneiform tablets left to translate, if you're bored ;-) Many of these predate the pyramids by a thousand years or so. Most translated ones contain mundane enough stuff, so its likely that the rest are similar, but if you're looking for something ancient to discover something in, I can't think of a better place to look given their age and that they're already found (ie available to rea…
Suprised they're not largely machine readable given the geometric nature of cuneiform. You might have to aggressively guess some combinations as the components of hte symbols aren't always well separated but it seems easier than reading current alphabets/characters. I did get in to cuneiform at one point in the past but the dictionary to translate was, IIRC, over £1k. Any good links you can suggest for corpus of work…
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Is that part of the original sculpture? It looks like a modern pedestal constructed for it to me.
You are right, but that was just an example I found on the web. Here is another one: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/19/Sculptur... A few more: https://c1.staticflickr.com/3/2693/4094114491_b9ae422af4_b.j... https://c1.staticflickr.com/5/4293/35910672716_90f1f62105_k....
Forgive my ignorance, but couldn't this be explored with 20th-century technology like a very long drill bit and a fiber optic camera rig? Every article about this mentions sending up tiny flying robots for some reason.
It's the "very long drill bit" part that's problematic. They're trying to explore with minimal to no damage to the original structure.
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You are right, but that was just an example I found on the web. Here is another one: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/19/Sculptur... A few more: https://c1.staticflickr.com/3/2693/4094114491_b9ae422af4_b.j... https://c1.staticflickr.com/5/4293/35910672716_90f1f62105_k....
Art is restored all the time. The places these labels were put are not where the valuable details rest. I grew up around antique collectors all my life. You are overreacting.
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Me too. If this is a worry of yours, though, may I suggest, in no way rhetorically, going into the "not fucking it up" business? The pay is generally terrible, but nothing beats making your own hope.
I could really go for some hope and would very much like to do something of that nature, but it's hard to figure out where my skills are best allocated. As for the pay I am very difficult to motivate with money beyond what makes for housing and food security.
Better is the enemy of good enough -- just do something, and if that doesn't work, do something else.
There are so many issues facing the world: climate change, population growth (/collapse, depending on where you are), food security, energy security, biodiversity, civil society, socioeconomics in the face of automation, supervolcanos, etc. etc. etc.
There are diverse solutions to all these problems. If energy security is your thing, then everything from better residential insulation, to business process optimisation for solar panel installation, to R&D for fusion reactors is potentially part of the solution. Pick whichever one interests you the most. You don't need to be the Elon Musk of whatever it is that you've chosen: if someone else is already doing it, they'll need everything from web developers to janitors. Work for them, and you'll be part of the solution. And if in a few years you see something that'll make you even more hopeful, do that instead.
Personally, I chose "better urban design" as my personal route to saving the world. If we could make much better cities, this would seriously mitigate issues with energy consumption, climate change, land use, and civil society. But how best to do this?
First I tried being an architect. But the impact I could make was limited by the property developers I worked for, who were limited by the urban planners they worked around, who were limited by the urban infrastructure technologies they worked with. So I changed careers, taking aim at transport technology innovation. Went back to school, got an MBA, and joined a company developing a new class of transport technology (the Heathrow Pod, if you're curious). After a few years I realised that my influence was constrained by working for the technology vendor; I actually needed to work for governments instead. So I switched careers again and became a transport-planning consultant doing advisory work in 14 countries. After a few years I realised that my advisory services were producing cool feasibility studies but no actual results, because the actual implementations were too constrained by antiquated, innovation-inhibiting communications processes and planning/design tools. This was a software problem. So I switched careers again and started a company developing collaborative urban planning software (https://www.podaris.com), and now spend most of every week fighting with Javascript. This can be a tough slog, but it's Javascript that will hopefully change the way that cities are designed, thereby doing my bit to save the world. I feel good about it.
The above story isn't meant to be illustrative of what you or anyone else should do. WHAT you do will be different for everyone, and is very nearly irrelevant, provided you've put some thought into it. THAT you do is the important part -- and you are absolutely capable of doing it.
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Me too. If this is a worry of yours, though, may I suggest, in no way rhetorically, going into the "not fucking it up" business? The pay is generally terrible, but nothing beats making your own hope.
What does this business entail?
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If I remember my old books correctly, they were not slaves, they were peasants who were paying tax as labour instead of money or produce. Like conscription, but for civilian work. So there is still compulsion here, and the workers would often have had similar emotions and incentives as slaves. The fact that the workers had more freedom probably gave them more ability to act on that than if they had been proper slaves…
> they were peasants who were paying tax as labour When you put it like that, it sounds an awful lot like slavery.
does that disprove Jean-Pierre Houdin's beautiful theory, that there is an inner construction passage? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lasCXujNPfs&list=PLf_5zbxiQ4...
It looks like it disproves it. The theory speculates on the presence of peremiter ascending pathways behind the exterior walls - if they do exist I’m guessing they would have shown in the scans.
Interesting how the pyramids have been around for 4500 years and we still don't know all about their structure... Fun fact: there's a Neolithic site in Ireland, Newgrange, that's actually older than the pyramids. Fascinating and worth a visit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newgrange