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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

#351

Post by parsabg »

verditelabs wrote: post #319
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 tablet…

Great that this exists, and a shame that it'll probably never get a similar level of attention from funders, participants, or the press.

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

#352

Post by serf »

zzyzxd wrote: post #236
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…

They already learned to use light and fire to transfer data over long distance. How much difference is there between beacon fire and fiber optic cable? But I think they would be more surprised by how we managed to invent things like social media and AI, which destroy our brain. Ancient societies valued wisdom much more than us and were much more careful when introducing new technologies. It was fascinating for me to…

> Ancient societies ... were much more careful when introducing new technologies

I do not believe this for a minute.

> But I think they would be more surprised by how we managed to invent things ... which destroy our brain.

what kind of destroy are you talking about?

modern living changes brain development, it doesn't destroy things -- the brain is an ever-molding plastic object for that very reason, situations change and require different access to different things; unless by destroy you want to talk only of neuron number ; jury's out on that.

'Ancient societies' , let's talk Greek since you brought up Plato, ate and drank lead -- both accidentally and on purpose. destroyed their teeth on rock grit from stone mills and had zero ability to deal with the resulting abscesses aside from brutal surgeries without anesthetic, sterilization or antibiotics , inhaled burning wood smoke indoors just about everywhere, believed that the majority of natural happenings were omens , believed the womb caused women to 'wander', requiring infantilization and control of anyone with one, trained their militarizes through starvation and beating and rape/pederasty relationships were common place and even legally bound.

so, actually I think that ancient societies would be more surprised by the fact that nearly every one of their ritualistic ways of dealing with the problems that arose in their life was either 1) ineffective, 2) harmful, 3) deadly.

but first you'll have to convince them of what their brain even does ..

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

#353

Post by tialaramex »

benj111 wrote: post #304
tialaramex wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do we have better imaginations? Maybe, humans aren't very different, so it depends whether imagination is informed which seems plausible, or whether it is somehow fixed - modern humans don't have different eyesight than in that period, but almost all of them can read whereas back then almost nobody would have been reading these scrolls. > Can our sci-fi writers come up with something equivalent that is as dizzyingl…

Sci fi tends to be about extrapolation and or cool things/things that improve the story. I don't think humans have changed, I don't think a human could begin to image a world so far away from their own. Humans tend to image faster horses. A few might imagine a steam engine. But then you have the social reality of everyone having a car. Of the environmental downsides. I don't think you can extrapolate all that. So yes…

> Humans tend to image faster horses.

Well that's why most people aren't science fiction authors.

Back in 1953 Isaac Asimov wrote, "It is easy to predict an automobile in 1880; it is very hard to predict a traffic problem". There are subsequent riffs on this idea, but in 1966 Heinlein observes that actually the surprise wasn't the traffic jam (Indeed Asimov is wrong, people complained about traffic jams before cars were widespread, in a large city it was already a problem at peak times) but fucking. Turns out you can have sex in a car, and people did. Importantly, since they might have access to a car but wouldn't own a house, teenagers were having sex in cars...

Don't look to Science Fiction to predict the future, and especially don't look to Science Fiction stories to define your future given that you presumably prefer to choose your own outcomes (at least tech bros only named things after Iain M Banks' spaceships, they invented whole product categories trying to reproduce ideas from Neal Stephenson's novels)

However if you are looking for visions of how different the future might be, Science Fiction excels.

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

#354

Post by benj111 »

ricardobayes wrote: post #326
benj111 wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Define "good from afar". We romanticise the notion of the wild west, while ignoring the poverty death and disease. Would you rather live in the wild west or today, where the issue is AI which at this point is more a #SVproblem than even a #firstworldproblem.

That's a very interesting point. I'd think the "happyness/contentness" levels are not necessarily tied to life expectancy or poverty. I would argue despite some global tendencies being way up (like people out of poverty) we are at a local minima right now for happiness for the middle class. It is entirely possible middle-class people had it better in the late 50s/60s despite multiple statistics being much better toda…

Tbf I think my view is it's about improvement over your own life. We expect our children will do better than us and that our lot will improve etc.

That sets expectations. We are at a high base, but things aren't getting better thus we can't look back at our own life and see that we have been successful.

I suppose the question is, where are we in the life cycle? In the industrial revolution life was pretty crumby for a lot of the working class. Do we have to wait for society and laws to catch up so we get to that 1950s/60s heyday of life for the working class. Or is this a plateau and the disruption will makes things worse before they get better? Or is the west going to stagnate while china or whoever takes over?

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

#355

Post by edzillion »

kstenerud wrote: post #263

> PHerc. 1667 is what survives of a larger roll: earlier attempts to open it by hand — in the nineteenth century, and again in 1969 and the 1980s — destroyed its outer layers and left only the compact inner core, about 8 cm of an original height of 19–24 cm. I can understand in the freewheeling days of the 19th century, but I'm rather surprised that they'd be so cavalier in the 70s and 80s...

Reminds me of the Sybilline books; Rome only ended up with one of the three but made great usage out of what they had!

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

#356

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#357

Post by jareklupinski »

ricardobayes wrote: post #279

Looks like it's some phylosophical rambling, I can imagine the dudes sitting in their mediterranean garden and theoretizing about life. It's practically the Reddit post of 200BC.

in a few thousand years someone will figure out how to undo all the reddit comment scrambling scripts people ran during the apipocalypse and have a similar renaissance

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

#359

Post by ricardobayes »

benj111 wrote: post #354
ricardobayes wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a very interesting point. I'd think the "happyness/contentness" levels are not necessarily tied to life expectancy or poverty. I would argue despite some global tendencies being way up (like people out of poverty) we are at a local minima right now for happiness for the middle class. It is entirely possible middle-class people had it better in the late 50s/60s despite multiple statistics being much better toda…

Tbf I think my view is it's about improvement over your own life. We expect our children will do better than us and that our lot will improve etc. That sets expectations. We are at a high base, but things aren't getting better thus we can't look back at our own life and see that we have been successful. I suppose the question is, where are we in the life cycle? In the industrial revolution life was pretty crumby for…

Yes, very true, and I can already thank you for the thought-provoking discussion. I think we are the first generation who don't necessarily expect that children will do better than us, in fact, in many ways we know that they won't: climate change etc.

The current gen alpha is also the first generation since measurements began, who are doing worse at school, measurably, than the previous generation. All research points to the inclusion of digital learning devices in school as the cause of that.

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

#360

Post by mmooss »

verditelabs wrote: post #256
_boffin_ wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am floored at these achievements. Such amazing work. If I may ask, when you started thinking about achieving this, what were the first attempts, ideas on how to go about it? What were some of the obstacles that had to be overcome to achieve this ?

The process of trying to read the scrolls has been going on for about 275 years or so, now. Doing it nondestructively via CT scanning and virtual unrolling and reading has been in the works for 25 years or so, so it's a lot of building on previous work. Virtual unrolling and reading are not terribly hard to do manually, they are just not feasable on a large scale. Like years and years of human time spent tediously cl…

> We xray on what is AFAIK literally the most powerful xray beamline in the world and we would still like for it to be more powerful and faster.

What makes power relevent here? Obviously medical applications aren't particulary powerful, are quick, and are very useful. Is it harder to penetrate the material than the human body? Is the increased power due to increased resolution - i.e., increased pixels/cm^2 rather than increased watts/pixel? The latter would seem to risk damaging the artifact?

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