Earlier quoted context omitted.
[flagged]
5/7 trolling; not bad
You don't like what I have to say? Fine by me. Guess we'll see.
An entire Herculaneum scroll has been read for the first time
371–380 of 404 posts
Re: An entire Herculaneum scroll has been read for the first time
#372Where is the direct English translation? I don't care about anything else.
Re: An entire Herculaneum scroll has been read for the first time
#373A scroll has been read ... what does it say ?
Re: An entire Herculaneum scroll has been read for the first time
#374Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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.
That's my point. It's not about the technology itself, because that's never cut and dry. It's about having a process to evaluate and criticize a technology before fully embracing it. Socrates was in a position with loud voice. Critics of technology exist today too, but they aren't loud enough. Instead, there's a far stronger force coming from private companies and their investors to push whatever they want onto us.
But I want to admit that I was indeed shoehorning my rants about AI (not the technology itself, but how it is being adopted) into this topic. Let me stop steering the discussion further. I do think the fact that we could recover Herculaneum papyrus like this is amazing!
Re: An entire Herculaneum scroll has been read for the first time
#375Scrolls from Herculaneum have been read for a very long time. Not disputing the achievement of digitally unrolling one, but the scrolls from the library of have been studied since the 18th century.
I think it's a case of HN once again butchering the title. I submitted it as the exact title from our page on scrollprize.org, "An _Entire_ Herculaneum Scroll Has Been Read For The First Time", which is IIRC true.
From my cursory reading of the pre-print, it didn't seem like the entire scroll has been read? Or rather, you read everything that can be read, but part of the original have been lost? (Like columns 1-4).
VERY COOL WORK!
Re: An entire Herculaneum scroll has been read for the first time
#376Every time you feel depressed by the state of tech, and how so many intelligent people seem to work on forcing ever more ads down people's throats (a common trope around these parts), remember that projects like this do exist too! There are lots of very smart folks working on incredible things, they just aren't as loud.
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.
LLMs or the more general category of AI (machine learning)?
Re: An entire Herculaneum scroll has been read for the first time
#377Earlier quoted context omitted.
That varies greatly on the state of preservation of the scroll. For some of the scrolls we can recover entire columns of text. But this is a best case. Plenty of scrolls, or portions of scrolls, are extremely damaged and warped to where our current methods cannot unroll them through any combination of automated and human driven unrolling. Both of these still have massive headroom for improvement, but achieving that h…
I'm curious prior to this has there been any research/attempts at chemical methods to strengthen the structure and allow it to be unrolled?
Various physical methods of unrolling, including the use of chemicals, have been attempted over the past 275 years, but none have proven to not destroy the scrolls. As far as I know no physical unrolling has been attempted since the 80s and I believe that now only non destructive methods are being employed. For fragments and already shattered and opened, unrolled scrolls a variety of imaging techniques exist and are still being improved upon by teams and research groups we are not associated with. For unrolled scrolls, I believe at this point no one will ever attempt physical unwrapping ever again.
Re: An entire Herculaneum scroll has been read for the first time
#378Earlier quoted context omitted.
did anything progress on trying to dig more out of the ground? i know that there was thinking that a lot of scrolls might still be down there
Not yet, as far as I am aware. Digging progress is decided by the Italian government at multiple levels and would be a many year long thing. We have our hands full for the forseeable future with the 30 or so scrolls we've already scanned. We're getting more and more efficient on the scanning and automation fronts, though, and are hoping that we can get our hands on the other 300 or so intact scrolls, but that in and…
Funding wise I asked a year or so back about crowd funding, but hear nothing back. My means are limited but I'm sure there are a lot of people like me who could band together. The project seems content on the big doners right now?
Re: An entire Herculaneum scroll has been read for the first time
#379Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you only care about the two surfaces matching each other, you don't even have to worry about your indicator. Just grind them against each other, or use some lapping compound to speed up the process. If you want to get the surfaces truly flat, then you use three surfaces that you successively grind against each other. https://www.ericweinhoffer.com/blog/the-whitworth-three-plat...
That's a fascinating link, and it sounds like what I'm talking about is what's called "engineer's blue" in the link. But I think it would be vastly more difficult to grind two massive stone blocks against each other than to just ram one against the other. Not unless you stacked them, anyway, and if you stacked them I'm not sure if you could move the top one side to side in order to do the grinding. Maybe with some ki…
Re: An entire Herculaneum scroll has been read for the first time
#380Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not yet, as far as I am aware. Digging progress is decided by the Italian government at multiple levels and would be a many year long thing. We have our hands full for the forseeable future with the 30 or so scrolls we've already scanned. We're getting more and more efficient on the scanning and automation fronts, though, and are hoping that we can get our hands on the other 300 or so intact scrolls, but that in and…
Funding wise I asked a year or so back about crowd funding, but hear nothing back. My means are limited but I'm sure there are a lot of people like me who could band together. The project seems content on the big doners right now?
We will gladly take your money. There's a link on our homepage to give us money. We list a lot of sponsors and appreciate all that we have been given. Most of that was given in 2023 and 2024 and most/all of it had been spent. As far as I am aware we now rely solely on our internal funding from our founding sponsors. We are a separate entity from both U of K and the University of Naples and receive zero dollars from either of them, though their faculty and staff work closely with us in our goal of reading the scrolls.
I couldn't tell you about our future funding efforts or possible crowd funding. That's not in my wheelhouse.