beer drinking goes waaaay back
Even kids drank (weak) beer, in part because the alcohol content kills pathogens. Even today clean water can be tough to find for some folks.
Oldest recorded transaction
51–60 of 112 posts
Re: Oldest recorded transaction
#52Earlier 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.
Text is better together with specific formats like Circa, ranges, exact years or dates, and unknown.
Re: Oldest recorded transaction
#53Wow, so much older than the oldest known complaint
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complaint_tablet_to_Ea-n%C4%...
Re: Oldest recorded transaction
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
> Once you've got a few logographs, it becomes apparent immediately that you can't extend that approach to everything you can say. The converse is just as true. Not all things you can think, you can say. I remember sometime in my teens realizing that my thoughts are constrained by my language, an epiphany that sparked a life long interest in language. Now some 30 years later, I feel that I can feel ideas that I don't…
Bit of a tangent, but have you followed dynamic land at all? Their whole thing is expressing ideas through a dynamic medium, to convey things we can't explain through speech. You might find it interesting :)
Re: Oldest recorded transaction
#55It might be that tally sticks go back further, maybe "between 44,200 and 43,000"¹ years ago.
so about 42175 BC
:)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tally_stick#Possible_palaeolit...
Re: Oldest recorded transaction
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
The modern Chinese writing system is fully phonetic, just with extremely complex spelling. There is no pretense that characters represent ideas or words. They represent syllables.
Phonetic use of the characters was immediate. The go-to example here is 來, which depicts a stalk of wheat. It is the spelling of the verb "come", and the verb is spelled that way because the character for "wheat" was borrowed with no alterations to represent its own pronunciation, which was shared with the verb.
Re: Oldest recorded transaction
#57Interesting 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.
Thanks for the confirmation that "politics" just means "facts".
Re: Oldest recorded transaction
#58"Six thousand years ago, Sumarians invented writing for transaction processing."... is the first sentence of the "Transaction Processing" book... https://www.amazon.com/Transaction-Processing-Concepts-Techn...
Wow that is the book to read for legacy systems
Re: Oldest recorded transaction
#59I'm 52 years old and it has been this way since I can remember but for some reason I can't make it not bug me. Any time we have the biggest/oldest/smallest/fastest/etc example of something, it's described without any qualification of seen, known, observed, etc.
For example, this isn't oldest recorded transaction, it's the oldest widely known record of a transaction (probably).
Why does that still bother me? Obviously nobody is saying it's the oldest recorded transaction, right? That would make it the first recorded transaction, and nobody is calling it that.
And here I am likely triggering your own pet peeve of useless comments on HN. xD
Re: Oldest recorded transaction
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Once you've got a few logographs, it becomes apparent immediately that you can't extend that approach to everything you can say. The converse is just as true. Not all things you can think, you can say. I remember sometime in my teens realizing that my thoughts are constrained by my language, an epiphany that sparked a life long interest in language. Now some 30 years later, I feel that I can feel ideas that I don't…
Bit of a tangent, but have you followed dynamic land at all? Their whole thing is expressing ideas through a dynamic medium, to convey things we can't explain through speech. You might find it interesting :) https://dynamicland.org/
Never heard of it, thank you!