And here's the oldest recorded customer complaint https://www.thearchaeologist.org/blog/complaint-tablet-to-ea...
dude probably needed to make some swords or something
Oldest recorded transaction
41–50 of 112 posts
Re: Oldest recorded transaction
#42I think these numerical constraints are because range trees use numerical averages to construct themselves. This is important for OVERLAPS queries common with dates. But you could construct interval tree indexes lexicographically using text but they are quite uncommon. It’s something I’ve experimented with a decent amount though.
https://github.com/ccorcos/database-experiments/blob/master/...
Re: Oldest recorded transaction
#43Interesting write-up marred by the injection of politics: Maybe if I’m a British Museum manager, and I want to keep -theft- inventory details Ideological jabs like this are fine in political discussions but they don't add anything elsewhere and serve only to lower the trustworthiness of what is written due to implied bias.
As an aside to this aside on the aside…
I've gotten into reading Tintin books with my kid, as I did when I was about his age. They're grand adventures and sort-of progressive, for their era.
But the basic structure of many of the stories is still basically "let's get this rare artifact from [South America, Africa, Asia] out of the hands of the thieves stealing it, and back into a museum in England, where it belongs!" And I gotta say it grates.
Re: Oldest recorded transaction
#44I expected there would be constraints, but the chosen range is quite intriguing. The PostgreSQL spec says the 4-byte date type spans 4713 BC to 5,874,897 AD. It gives much more headroom for future dates—did they assume preserving data before 4713 BC is unlikely?
Re: Oldest recorded transaction
#45Quote: I wonder how people store dates older than this. Maybe if I’m a British Museum manager, and I want to keep theft inventory details. How do I do it? As an epoch? Store it as text? The answer: Text. Many items in museums have no specific date but Circa X. I have spent a lot of time in the early 2000s to enable "Sort by date" in museum registrars software I was maintaining despite having it textual
> Sort by date" in museum registrars software This sounds like the perfect invitation for some old school over engineering. I'm already having so much fun running through every possible input in my head, and I would inevitably write a serious mountain of steaming code to support it.
Tiny language model.
Re: Oldest recorded transaction
#46Quote: I wonder how people store dates older than this. Maybe if I’m a British Museum manager, and I want to keep theft inventory details. How do I do it? As an epoch? Store it as text? The answer: Text. Many items in museums have no specific date but Circa X. I have spent a lot of time in the early 2000s to enable "Sort by date" in museum registrars software I was maintaining despite having it textual
> Sort by date" in museum registrars software This sounds like the perfect invitation for some old school over engineering. I'm already having so much fun running through every possible input in my head, and I would inevitably write a serious mountain of steaming code to support it.
That's got to be a study in exceptions. Let's start with which calendar we're referencing. C14 anybody?
Re: Oldest recorded transaction
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
That was not by (deliberate) choice. The earliest writings were actually logographic or semasiographic, meaning they represented ideas, objects, or concepts directly rather than the sounds of a specific spoken language. We actually don't know what language(s) was/were spoken by the people who recorded the earliest tablets (not sure if that also applies to this particular one, though). Phonographic writing developed m…
> Phonographic writing developed much later Well, the earliest signs are logographic. But phonographic writing didn't take long to develop. Once you've got a few logographs, it becomes apparent immediately that you can't extend that approach to everything you can say.
> But phonographic writing didn't take long to develop.
But it did. It took around 1500 years from the first writing systems to fully phonetic systems. And we still have Chinese characters even now, or the Tibetan writing system.
For some reason, writing systems tend to stay stuck on mixed logographic and phonetic systems.
Re: Oldest recorded transaction
#48The idea that artifacts belong forever to whoever inhabits the land today is going to put under increasing pressure as ancient DNA continues to reveal the number and severity of population replacements over time.
Re: Oldest recorded transaction
#49Quote: I wonder how people store dates older than this. Maybe if I’m a British Museum manager, and I want to keep theft inventory details. How do I do it? As an epoch? Store it as text? The answer: Text. Many items in museums have no specific date but Circa X. I have spent a lot of time in the early 2000s to enable "Sort by date" in museum registrars software I was maintaining despite having it textual
> Sort by date" in museum registrars software This sounds like the perfect invitation for some old school over engineering. I'm already having so much fun running through every possible input in my head, and I would inevitably write a serious mountain of steaming code to support it.
I simply built a side table in the DB, whereas any expression was associated with a range of a 2 YEARS (numbers).
any time they enter and expression (auto complete), it they introduce a new one, they needed to add the range.
this did the job.
the time I spent the most was to sort the existing data and restore it in the new dictionary.
Re: Oldest recorded transaction
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Sort by date" in museum registrars software This sounds like the perfect invitation for some old school over engineering. I'm already having so much fun running through every possible input in my head, and I would inevitably write a serious mountain of steaming code to support it.
I assume an integer field is sufficient since mostly it's only the year that they know not the exact date.
No, you need a lot more complexity if you really wanted to represent it semantically. The assumption that people in the past used calendars with sequentially numbered years you just need to offset, is simply wrong.
You have things like "in the Xth year of the reign of King Y", where we can easily relate multiple entries with different values for X, but don't actually know which CE years they correspond to. Even weirder is the Roman habit of recording "the year of the consulship of X and Y", which doesn't even allow you to relate any two different years at all without a reference table (which we don't have completely). And no, "years from the foundong of the city" wasn't a thing.