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An entire Herculaneum scroll has been read for the first time

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Re: An entire Herculaneum scroll has been read for the first time

#311

Post by shmeeed »

vitally3643 wrote: post #86
inglor_cz wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The stones were cut with enormous precision, at least relative to what we know about the available cutting tools. You cannot still stick a knife between a lot of these stones. Maybe we will learn more about that.

I'm pretty sure we've conclusively answered these questions. Hand tools, skill, and absolutely unreasonable amounts of time and patience. Any master stoneworker from any era should be able to carve stone to that level of precision given enough time and reason. The problem, as always, is that there is usually very little reason to put in that amount of time and effort when you can get 90% as good for 50% the effort.

There's a lot of incentive to put in the effort when your customer is also your God King.

I only recently learned that there are the equivalent of graffiti tags left by different work crews within usually inaccessible chambers that boast the respective team's pride. The discovery did away with the earlier assumption that it was all slaves.

Re: An entire Herculaneum scroll has been read for the first time

#312

Post by ben_w »

codeulike wrote: post #173

Lets reflect on Aristocreon, in about 200 BC, putting their thoughts down on a scroll. They would be aware that the scroll might be kept in a library for some time. Maybe they could have imagined it surviving for 300 years. But they never would have imagined that in 300 years a volcano might destroy the scroll, but in some way preserve it. And then that nearly two thousand years later future humans with machines made…

> Can our sci-fi writers come up with something equivalent that is as dizzyingly far from what we know now, as now is from what Aristocreon knew?

Sure they can, but as one of them once opined: any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

What we cannot do, is guess which things so different from our world are, and are not, magic. Are the probabilities in quantum mechanics themselves quantised?

Is there an island of stability for fundamental particles, as distantly related to the gap between the electron and tau as silicon wafers are to the gap between titanium dioxide sand and silicon dioxide sand, such that we could use them to create conducting plates fine enough, that they could be placed close enough together, that by the Casimir effect we could construct a macroscopic object with overall negative mass?

Will we ever have a engineering-quality definition of consciousness, or be limited to the kind of pre-paradigmatic thinking that had Diogenes presenting a plucked chicken in response to Plato defining man as a "featherless biped"?

Will we destroy the earth in a way that preserves all the information, and find our minds resurrected a million years hence by strange alien beings?

Re: An entire Herculaneum scroll has been read for the first time

#313

Post by solumunus »

ricardobayes wrote: post #281
nbardy wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first bit was interesting and then you flipped right to generic cynicism. They would be impressed with our technology even if it has downsides. Wisdom is knowing humans and technology and imperfect tools.

What good is something that only looks good from afar? Most new tech is exactly that, for posturing to gain shareholder value - very few innovation in actually useful things that make peoples lives better. It's all self-serving, to consume more and get people hooked on digital experiences.

I’m not arguing that social media is a net benefit to society, but you’re acting like it’s all downsides. It’s been an extreme economic enabler for a lot of people. There are many people earning money independently who would have really struggled to put themselves in a position to do that 20 years ago. For independent businesses or artists it’s an invaluable promotional platform.

Re: An entire Herculaneum scroll has been read for the first time

#314

Post by balex »

codeulike wrote: post #173

Lets reflect on Aristocreon, in about 200 BC, putting their thoughts down on a scroll. They would be aware that the scroll might be kept in a library for some time. Maybe they could have imagined it surviving for 300 years. But they never would have imagined that in 300 years a volcano might destroy the scroll, but in some way preserve it. And then that nearly two thousand years later future humans with machines made…

> Do we have better imaginations?

Pantheon.

Re: An entire Herculaneum scroll has been read for the first time

#315

Post by taneq »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #285
snickerbockers wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Im sure that recovering fragments of text from 2000 year old charred embers would be absolutely incredible to them, but in general the ability to preserve books for thousands of years would not. Before the Gutenberg press, scribes were surprisingly efficient at copying manuscripts by hand. For many of the most significant works of the ancient world the oldest surviving manuscript was written hundreds or even thousand…

That's true, but then it's also a lot like comparing sex to cryonics. The scribes were actively copying the books, this is a continuous preservation process that's familiar to everyone, it's the same thing that talking about the bees and the birds covers. It requires expending continuous effort (and funding), and planning ahead. It's toil. And, as you noted in your last sentence, it not only allows for errors, it aff…

I think it’s interesting that usually we think of reproduction as being about increasing population, and senescence as being an unfortunate limitation of biology, what you could view both as aspects of the same error correction mechanism.

Re: An entire Herculaneum scroll has been read for the first time

#316

Post by parsabg »

I'm a big fan of the Vesuvius challenge (and Graeco-Roman history/philosophy) but I'm not convinced if the effort justifies the reward here, relative to other pockets of ancient writings we can use technology for reading and archiving.

We have large volumes of clay tablets from Mesopotamia that pre-date these papyri and are considerably easier to read that get nowhere near the attention. E.g. the library of Ashurbanipal.

Several reasons are at play I suppose - the excitement and the drama are much higher with this. But I think the West's obsession with the Graeco-Roman world is also a major factor.

Re: An entire Herculaneum scroll has been read for the first time

#317

Post by Obscurity4340 »

ceroxylon wrote: post #219
codeulike wrote: post #173

Lets reflect on Aristocreon, in about 200 BC, putting their thoughts down on a scroll. They would be aware that the scroll might be kept in a library for some time. Maybe they could have imagined it surviving for 300 years. But they never would have imagined that in 300 years a volcano might destroy the scroll, but in some way preserve it. And then that nearly two thousand years later future humans with machines made…

My first thought was the people capturing encrypted data in the hopes that quantum computing can crack it in the foreseeable future.

Wouldnt quantum be more like cracking twice as fast? Like if a password would take 50 million years to crack, it would be like 25 million years?

Re: An entire Herculaneum scroll has been read for the first time

#318

Post by giancarlostoro »

tayo42 wrote: post #113
giancarlostoro wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isnt the only incredible thing though, AI is being used to make discoveries in the medial field, and even to prevent sepsis related deaths, cutting down on them by detecting sepsis sooner. There was another that discovered the gene for Alzheimers is what activates it not just a sign of it.

Where are these jobs for non specialist swes?

That's an interesting question, I had not thought about this, but I'm sure they exist. I imagine you'd have to already be a researcher in those fields and have received funding to use AI in your research probably? In some cases they're using things as simple as GPT, but I'm thinking specifically of mathematical breakthroughs of not sure about medical.

Re: An entire Herculaneum scroll has been read for the first time

#319

Post by verditelabs »

parsabg wrote: post #316

I'm a big fan of the Vesuvius challenge (and Graeco-Roman history/philosophy) but I'm not convinced if the effort justifies the reward here, relative to other pockets of ancient writings we can use technology for reading and archiving. We have large volumes of clay tablets from Mesopotamia that pre-date these papyri and are considerably easier to read that get nowhere near the attention. E.g. the library of Ashurbani…

You'd probably like the Deep Past Challenge then: https://www.deeppast.org/

We are not associated with them, but they're a team of scholars that hosted an open challenge to do automated translation of Akkadian texts. Their first competition ended a few months ago but I believe they plan on hosting another at some point focused on doing image recognition to help speed up the transcription and translation of the tablets that you mentioned.

Re: An entire Herculaneum scroll has been read for the first time

#320

Post by gadders »

verditelabs wrote: post #2

I am on the vesuvius challenge team that did the segmentation, unwrapping, and ink detection, so feel free to ask any questions.

The science to get the text is cool, but where is the best place to read discussion of the text in the scroll, it's context, meaning etc?
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