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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

#391

Post by cindyllm »

card_zero wrote: post #389
thinkingemote wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 1 Are there really people ... Why would their lives be assumed not to be "real", what even is that mindset? Yes, there are a very great many! The philosopher David Gray says that most modern thinking sees our way of life and liberalism and "progress" as meaning growth and change. It implies it is inevitable, a kind of always changing improvement. Change that has occurred is for the good and its impossible to go bac…

OK, one of those "we need humbling" assertions. No we don't need humbling. I reckon you motivation is the other way round from what you state. Claiming to be empathetic about how people 2500 years ago are the same human beings as we are, and claiming that others miss this, is a way to oppose those who think of the world as always improving and evolving for the better. So it serves your goal, which is to dish out a hu…

[dead]

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

#393

Post by qingcharles »

equalbeforegod wrote: post #388
verditelabs wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Where are the shattered scrolls? Is there a list somewhere?

There's a photo of one on this page; they basically explode into dust:

https://gizmodo.com/in-a-first-scientists-fully-deciphered-c...

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

#394

Post by tsol »

verditelabs wrote: post #21
tsol wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do get to do that? As in what did you study to get the prerequisite knowledge, and how did you find this particular job? When I see interesting jobs I'm anyways curious what path lead there

I am a computer scientist. I studied CS in university, worked in the semiconductor industry for a while, got started as a participant in the challenge aspect of the Vesuivus Challenge. They were hiring, I sent in an application, interviewed, and was offered the job.

Very cool that you got in just through your interests. It's anyways cool to see stories where that works out! Good to know it's possible to get that kind of job

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

#395

Post by solumunus »

ricardobayes wrote: post #327
solumunus wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You know I really don't know about that. Generally speaking people had more dispensable income after WW2 in the west than right now. People had a job lined up if they wanted to work, work was abundant. Back then any kind of job would pay well and most households had one earner. Being able to earn money through the internet today doesn't really replicate what these people had back then. If you wanted to start a band y…

But that economic situation is not contingent on the Internet, it’s unrelated.

> I would argue some of the best known bands came from the pre-internet era (Beatles, Rolling Stones etc).

Of course, that’s what you would expect. Pre Internet music was more curated, there were less bands finding ears but the bands that were popular were therefore much more popular. The internet gives the music consumer WAY more options. The biggest bands are less big and less successful, but on the other end of that is it’s WAY more possible to have a music career as a niche artist today. A huge percentage of the music I listen to is music that would have been completely inaccessible to me pre-internet.

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

#396

Post by bhaak »

card_zero wrote: post #389
thinkingemote wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 1 Are there really people ... Why would their lives be assumed not to be "real", what even is that mindset? Yes, there are a very great many! The philosopher David Gray says that most modern thinking sees our way of life and liberalism and "progress" as meaning growth and change. It implies it is inevitable, a kind of always changing improvement. Change that has occurred is for the good and its impossible to go bac…

OK, one of those "we need humbling" assertions. No we don't need humbling. I reckon you motivation is the other way round from what you state. Claiming to be empathetic about how people 2500 years ago are the same human beings as we are, and claiming that others miss this, is a way to oppose those who think of the world as always improving and evolving for the better. So it serves your goal, which is to dish out a hu…

They are like us. If you could take a baby from the past and let it grow up in our time, you wouldn't be able to distinguish it from a baby born in modern times.

If you see value in travelling to other countries and appreciate experiencing the different human cultures there, you should also appreciate experiencing human cultures from the past.

They are separated from us not by distance but by time which makes it harder to experience their culture.

So much was lost that we can only get glimpses on how lives were back then. So anything that expands our knowledge on the variety of human beings experiences is worth it.

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

#397

Post by cwmoore »

adriand wrote: post #126
cwmoore wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would Epicurean philosophy be unfortunate? I was under the impression that there was almost nothing left of that school of thought, and that it’s writings had been destroyed. What would you like to have instead?

> What would you like to have instead? History! That's what intrigues me the most: texts with accounts of events that have otherwise vanished from the historical record.

Past events, and the ideas behind them, are both first-class history topics.

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

#398

Post by Tepix »

fluoridation wrote: post #335
Tepix wrote: post #288

What if we want to put something on paper today for it to survive as long as possible? 1-minute research: Paper: 100% cotton rag or linen rag paper with alkaline reserve. Acid-free and lignin-free. Ink: Genuine carbon ink applied with a classic dip pen. Storage: ISO 16245 archival box, Less than 15°C, 30-50% humidity, dark, no oxygen exchange. Always store horizontally. Wear white 100% cotton gloves. Printing: If you…

Instead of pigmenting the paper, punch holes through it. Then you're relying on the physical durability of a single substance, instead of two.

Interesting. Reminds me of this gaston cartoon (at 5:51) https://youtu.be/OqIjS7Yb8y8

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

#399

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#400

Post by TeMPOraL »

taneq wrote: post #315
TeMPOraL wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Huh, you're right, scribes copying texts are actually a great analogy for evolutionary perspective on life! The information in the books is what matters, and from the POV of a scribe, a book is useful only so that it can be copied, and afterwards, with new copies safe and in circulation, the old ones may just as well rot or burn.

The "selfish gene" perspective is that genes are the information, and life is just a mechanism for "scribes" to continuously copy over the text to propagate that information, with a little twist that the information itself plays active part in creating scribes (neatly self-referential, biology is).

Problem: in this analogy, humans are books. We'd very much like to last forever, even though the system around us only carries about preserving some patterns inscribed in us, that we couldn't really care less about ourselves. Hence the conflict.

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