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Archimedes' Lost Words Yield To RIT Scientists
cCranium writes: "Scientists at Rochester University have apparently restored the only known copy of Archimedes' original text, describing his theory of floatation of bodies."
From the article: "They're able to do this because every mark the Greek mathematician made on the vellum parchment, a writing surface made from animal skin, left a residue that can be uncovered even a millennium later." Now if you had some of Archimedes' writings around the house, would you erase them so you could resuse the paper?! Priorities sure change, I guess. [Updated 12 July 3:44GMT by timothy] As many people have pointed out, the submission's phrasing is incorrect; Rochester University is a different school. The ongoing work on Archimede's manuscript is being done at Rochester Institute of Technology, as per the headline. [Updated 12 July 17:01 GMT by timothy] Sigh. As even more people have pointed out, that's "University of Rochester," not "Rochester University." All set? :)
Check out http://www.longnow.org/ for information on preserving information for thousands of years. Even if your CDs do last, will anyone be able to read them in the future? Who even has a 5.25" floppy drive these days?
Steve
How will we ever preserve things for future generations with our current technologies?
This is a very interesting question indeed. We're spending enourmous amounts of resources on restoring old paper records, yet we store much of our current data on media that degrades even faster than paper. Very few organizations consider this at all, unless they actively need the data on a regular basis. I'll bet a lot of data is currently archived on tapes that will degrade before anyone needs them again.
Another thing that can keep data accessible is increased storage needs: At the Danish Meteorological Institute where I sysadmin'ed at one point, they need to access their terabytes of old weather data for research projects. More importantly, they store more and more weather data, and so their storage needs grow fast enough that they actually migrate all existing data to a new tape system every 10 years at the very least. This is unfortunately rare.
An ironic thing about this whole data preservation problem: With privacy being such a hot topic, it's interesting to note that the data being compiled by DoubleClick and their ilk is exactly the kind of data that future historians would love to get their hands on! Is our privacy more important than future generations? I know, a spurious question, but it leads to an important point: Historians are increasingly focusing their efforts on discovering how the common man/woman lived. Data about these things is as important to preserve as headlines and politics. This kind of data is currently being collected (and massively, at that), but is it preserved? Will anyone want to make that data live on when DoubleClick dies, if the data isn't personally identifiable?
Also, somewhat off-topic, current IP legislation means that copyright lasts longer than most media. This is definitely not helping us preserve our cultural heritage.
"A *person* is smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals and you know it."
"A *person* is smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals and you know it."
- 'K' in Men in Black.
Many ancient Greek writings would be lost to history if not for Arab scholars. Because there were no printing presses a few thousand years ago, maintaining the writings of Hippocrates, Archimedes, and other ancient Greeks required that their texts be rewritten by hand from time to time. Once the Greek civilization began it's decline there simply wasn't anyone with the time, inclination, or resources to devote to the maintenance of these great texts. Luckily for us today many of these texts were taken to the Middle East, where Arab scholars recognized their lasting value and maintained them for centuries.
By the time historical interest in ancient Greece began to resurface (a few hundred years ago), the Arab copies were the only sizeable collection of ancient Greek literature left in existence. Because of that, practically all of the Greek literature we read today has gone through several langage translations which can, unfortunately, distort the original meaning of the texts(eg. Greek>Arab>Latin>English).
Finding an original Greek text (or Greek language copy) is a GREAT find for historians because it will allow us to examine the writings without worrying about misinterpretations and other unintentional distortions.
There is nothing so pathetic as seeing a beautiful young theory roughed up by a tough gang of facts.
If this isn't a Dark Ages, what is?
Umm, the Dark Ages? You know, when the Church ruled and people got burned alive and ideas required official approval and you were assigned a station in life at birth?
Really, this is just a little hysterical. It's like invoking the Holocaust when some schmuck calls you a name.
Greek wasn't widely known in Latin-speaking western Europe at this point, but there was close contact between western Europe and the Islamic world, since the Arabs controlled Spain and Sicily. Because of this western scholars had better access to Arabic translations of Greek medical and scientific literature than they had to the Greek originals.
The translations stimulated interest in the orignals, though: in the 13th century, the great popularizer of Aristotle in the west, St. Thomas Aquinas, has Greek manuscripts of Aristotle and translates him into Latin. As another poster points out, Archimedes was translated from Greek into Latin by the archbishop of Corinth during the same period, though the manuscript was subsequently lost. When the Turks conquered Constantinople in 1453, many Greek scholars decided it might be time to move to Italy. They brought a lot of Greek manuscripts with them, and knowledge of Greek language and literature became widespread (which was probably a factor in the Renaissance). By the end of the 15th century printed editions of Greek texts start being widely disseminated, and in the following centuries Greek becomes an essential component of higher education.
There is a very small amount of ancient Greek works known only from translations in other languages. But as for Archimedes, many of his works have been available in Greek since the Middle Ages; as far as I know only three books survive in Arabic only. The Hippocratic Corpus (not all written by "Hippocrates") survives in many Greek manuscripts, as well as translations in Hebrew, Latin, and Arabic. The amount of ancient Greek works that exists in Arabic only is probably very, very small; I'd say that 99.9% of the Greek material we have is preserved in Greek.
I'm not sure which connotations you mean, but you may have misunderstood my stance. I fully believe that people are capable of great leaps and momentus thoughts. I simply don't believe that many of the "great men" history credits with changing the world were actually nessaccary or sufficient to do so.
For instance, I spent one semester studying the life and writings of Martin Luther, generally credited with most of the protestant reformation. I certainly would say that he was a great thinker, and had made great intellectual/faith leaps. However, my final paper argued that he was not nessaccary or sufficient for the reformation. That is, the reformation would have happened without him (several other theologins had similar ideas in the same 50 year time period) and had he lived a few hundred years earlier, his ideas alone would not have brought about the reformation (technological, economic and political developments all made his heresey possible.)
So rejecting the "great man" view of history doesn't mean that I don't believe in great men (or women) it just means that in most cases where history gives one man or woman credit for a major change, I find that a careful examination shows that without that great person, another equally as great would have emerged, and had that great person been born 100 years earlier or later, they would not have had the impact they did.
-Kahuna Burger
...will work for Chick tracts...
--
Linux user since early January 1992.
I go to RIT, yet this is the first I've heard about this. I guess I'll go back to my school-mandated Pepsi (with no alcohol, of course.)
"Fell behind a copier"
For all you know, the poster is Christian and means BC, not BCE. Furthermore, isn't this whole "Common Era" thing a bit of bowdlerian BS?
These guys are just down the road from me and they do all kinds of cool work. Including a bunch of restoration of the Dead Sea Scrolls(DSS). There are huge reproductions of the DSS in the hallways in the buildings.
-Rob
Agreed, and I wasnt holding up one over the other, thats not my place since I'm a member of neither :) - it was simply that one religion lent itself to reactionary behaviour of one kind and the other to a different emphasis. In both cases it was not the faith that encouraged the reactionary behaviour but the politics associated with it. The reason I found it interesting was that whilst both cultures had their reactionary episodes, the results in each one were very different.
# human firmware exploit
# Word will insert into your optic buffer
# without bounds checking
I had a
(Postus Interruptus)
Is it just a coincidence that the "Common Era" started at the same time agreed on by Christians as the birth year of Jesus? What other than the fact that the Christians were successful in getting the rest of the world to adopt their calendar makes the era "common"?
This is a big worry of mine, too. I've spent the last several years keying in several thousand pages of manuscript. How do I preserve this file now?
CDR's have limited lifespans -- not much better than floppies for the cheaper varieties -- and laser printer output is heat sensitive. (Doubt me? Put a hundred pages of printouts in a car on a hot summer day -- the toner melts and sticks the pages together.) Inkjet is actually a bit more reliable than you suggest. Sure, it's water soluble and not lightfast, but the same is true of 5,000-year-old Egyptian papyri. The paper, on the other hand, may disintegrate because of acid content, and who knows about the acidity of all those secret ink formulas?
IMHO, this is a very big problem as we rush to move everything over to digital media. I can't think of a single commonly-available digital format that doesn't have a much shorter shelf-life than traditional media. Your vinyl records will still be playable centuries after your CDs oxidize. Even acid-rich greenbar printouts will outlast their magnetic-media sources by decades.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
Not to mention DejaNews getting rid of all its pre-1999 archive.
some people have thought about this already -- a company called 'norsam' is producing 2" nickel coated silicon wafers which will last thousands of years and are viewable using simply a microscope. they can hold 10K pages of analog text, potentially including instructions on how to build e.g. an 8" floppy drive, or grammars/structures of languages that are dying out. anyway, read more at http://www.norsam.com/rosetta.html
-- andrew international ? consonants : http://grkvlt.blogspot.com/
Far from it. The role of Arabic-speaking scholars in preserving ancient Greek works was enormous, but the great majority of "the Greek literature that we read today" survives in Greek, and often in pretty good shape. There was indeed a time when scholars in the Latin west had access to an extremely limited range of material, and then only through (ancient) Latin translations. Beginning in about the 11th century, however, material began to filter into western Europe from the Islamic world. Much of this was initially Latin translations of Arabic translations of Greek texts (or Latin translations of Arabic translations of Syriac translations of Greek texts), often done by a bilingual team of an Arabic and a Latin speaker; there were in effect various translation factories in parts of the world where Christian and Islamic civilizations came into contact, such as Spain. However, by the 13th century the Latins were beginning to learn a little Greek themselves (or at least to hire people who spoke Greek), and Latin translations made directly from Greek were becoming available Most Latin-speaking scholars still didn't know much if any Greek, but there were professional translators, typically (as you might expect) Greek speakers from the Eastern Roman empire (the Byzantine empire, which continued to exist until the 15th century). It's in Byzantium, in turn, that most of the Greek manuscripts we now rely on were produced. After Byzantium finally collapsed in the 15th century, a large number of Greek-speaking scholars migrated to Europe, taking their Greek (and their manuscripts) with them, and this gave rise to that second flowering of European interest in ancient Greece called the Renaissance.
As for original ancient Greek documents: if by that you mean physical documents from the time of, say, Archimedes, we just don't have very much of that at all. Until about 300, the principal writing material for publications was papyrus, which is not nearly as durable as parchment (unless you're lucky enough to live in an extremely dry climate, e.g. Egypt, and have a way of putting your manuscript in a really secure and very dry place, e.g. a tomb). And Archimedes wouldn't have written originally on papyrus: authors drafted their works on wax-covered tablets, writing with a stylus (you can erase wax: you turn the stylus around and smooth out the wax with the blunt end, like using a pencil eraser). A professional then copied the result out of the wax onto papyrus scrolls.
The fact that our oldest and best manuscripts of many Greek authors often date from a millennium or more after that author's time doesn't mean that we don't have good texts. We have copies, but we have a lot of copies in many cases, descending through a variety of different paths. Since the 15th century, scholars have developed techniques of textual criticism that try to recover the most likely original text from which a collection of originals descended. Those techniques are now pretty sophisticated; they're not all that distant from other methods for trying to repair damaged data (for a quick account see the article on "textual criticism" in the Oxford Classical Dictionary).
A side remark about durability: seems to me the clear winner in the durability category is the Babylonian cuneiform tablet. Really hard to damage (can be used as building material, for instance), impervious to magnetic fields, coffee, insects, water, fire. Can be stored in an enormous range of environmental parameters. Some problem with bandwidth, but you have to expect a few tradeoffs.
What's most interesting about this is the synecdoche of the whole story: A monk sees a 170-page vellum manuscript, flips through it, thinks, "Bah! Just a bunch of math. Who cares about math? I'll just erase it and use the paper for a morally superior purpose: spreading my religion."
Of course, I have to wonder if he just flipped through it at random, decided to erase it, started erasing at page one and handing the pages one at at time to whoever was inscribing the prayer book, and when he got to the last page and saw "Love, Archimedes" written there, and had that hideous sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach. Remember when you were a junior in high school and accidently overwrite your English term paper with the lyrics to a Rush song and had no idea how to get it back and had to start over? Well this was much, much worse.
--
This is not my sandwich.
I agree with you - that people should not be forced to pay for sins their ancestors committed. However, I think that corporations should be forced to pay for evil things they have done. This is why neither I nor anyone in my family buys Volkswagon vehicles, Krupps machinery or coffeymakers, Bayer Drugs, ect... These companies used slave labor and forced human test subjects during the Holocaust, for that, they deserve to loose their right to operate business.
I dont have a
To pick even more nits, Archimedes integrated volume of sphere, though he didn't prove any theorems about it. He was so proud of it he asked to make a relevant drawing on his tomb (an ancient equivalent of FIRST POST, or something). Newton and Leibnitz were great, but Archimedes 0wnz them both.
The inverse, differentiation, came much later (generally attributed to Fermat or Barrow, early - mid C17th). The two ideas were then related and developed into a unified theory calculus independently by Newton and Leibniz. The grudge developed because both wanted to claim to have been the first to 'invent' it - evidence now indicates that Newton did the work first, but Leibniz pulished first.
What we now term calculus uses methods based primarily on Newton's theory and notation based on Leibniz's work.
At least they didn't say "the alleged vanishing"
matt
Another program on the BBC about the public records office had one of their archivists saying that the biggest problem was not recently created systems, the ammount of space on new technology always exceeded the ammount of space on the older technology to such an extent that it was relatively simple to keep an up to date copy of the records.
They reckon the big problem for records is earlier in the century, with the take up of the telephone, with the novelty of that there is a vastly reduced ammount of official paperwork for the historian.
What Newton and Leibniz did was create a general symbolism and series of formal rules. But Greeks
like Archimedes, Eudoxus, and Antiphon were
interested in computing volumes, areas, and
length of arcs and developed methods to do just
that. On top of that you could say
differentiation was started by Fermat and Kepler.
We shouldn't take too much away from Newton and
Leibniz though, without them calculus would
be much more painful than it already is.
--- Shad's Fiction and Such http://shadgregory.net
Unless we make them ourselves.
The headline reads "RIT," as does the article. Now, I know cCranium is the one who wrote it, but TImothy really should have corrected the "Rochester University" bit there. There is no Rochester university.
Source for text
Other links of interest.....
Where link was located
More info
My point was that other sources exist, I know the arabic scholars created a vast wealth of knowledge, but translations from the greek were made at much later dates than that which we base our work on.
HTH
Working for the (other) man
RIT owns those lewser at UofR, how dare you compare them or you shall feel the wrath of #gayteens !@#!@$!@#!@#
"I wonder how much more would be left of the great library at Alexandrea hadn't been the worlds greatest book burning
party."
I'm betting that the whole contents of that library would fit on a CD-ROM.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
Yeah, I thought this article surely would have been from the Eureka! department.
R.I.T. R.I.T. WOOOO GO TEAM!
(lots of lowercase text inserted to get past the caps filter)
Actually, I read that "miniature" mining "small thing" is popular etimology linking the small paintings made with minium and another small ("minimum") things.
__
__
Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
What we now term calculus uses methods based primarily on Newton's theory and notation based on Leibniz's work.
Actually, from what I have been told, we use primarily Leibniz for both theory and notation. From my understanding, Newton didn't really have a grasp of the infintesimal, he obviously used it to a degree but his notation doesn't lend itself to the introduction of it, where as Leibniz notation does.
To clarify for those who have had calculus but don't know the difference, Newton used the "prime" notation.
x - variable
x' - first derivative
x'' - second derivative
Leibniz used the d/dx notation.
f(x) - variable with respect to x
df(x)/dx- first derivative
etc...
Disclamer - Opinion of Person
Hey, I've been out of school over ten years...you can't expect me to get all the details correct ;) I did break out my old history books though, and you are indeed correct. For a period of time the Arabic scholars were the sole source of ancient Greek texts, but that is no longer true today. I guess I should stick to code and quit quoting history :)
Note to moderators: If there are any moderators still reading this discussion, please feel free to moderate my original post back down to 2. While I appreciate the occasional karma point or four, I really don't deserve points for a factually incorrect comment, no matter how well written it might have been. Chris Lovell and Nicomachus probably deserve a couple points themselves for setting the record straight.
There is nothing so pathetic as seeing a beautiful young theory roughed up by a tough gang of facts.
Thank goodness for permenent markers, eh?
Jaeger
http://334.se2600.org
http://jump.to/jaeger
So what did they find? Where's the text?
When my Grandma dies, 87 odd years of knowledge and experience will vanish in the blink of an eye.. stories about *her* grandmother living during the civil war and arguing with the Yankee captain over a stolen watch, growing up during the depression.. WWII and opening her home up to wives of soldiers " gone off to war.." , her secret bait for catching red snapper by the creel, losing 2 husbands and a son.. all told with an incredibly dry sense of humor and no bitterness in her deep 'suthren' accent.. I have been trying to get as much on as I can on tape for transcription and storytelling but it's pretty much dipping a spoon into a firehose of knowledge.. I have her recipe for pecan pie and peach cobbler, but it won't be the same as when she makes it and diddles with the mix..
We worry over lost bits of paper and degrading magnetic media, while all around us 99% of the really valuable information winks out of existance in retirement homes...
On that note: CALL YOUR GRANDMA! Get her to tell you stories about when she was young...
( My grandma can describe for you the exact experience of riding in an old ford , 60 miles an hour down a back road in Willow,SC at midnight....with 'shine in the trunk. Priceless! )
3Cats
--Fesh
--Fesh
Kill -9 'em all, let root@localhost sort 'em out.
Well, partly because there is a difference between a copy and a translation -- the copy may well have transcription errors, but those are likely to be easier to catch than translation problems.
Would you rather have a Xerox of a diagram, or a sketch made from the diagram? Better yet, and more applicable to many religious texts (Biblical or otherwise), a sketch made from a description given by somebody who saw the diagram when he was a young man?
Lastly, of course, one might argue that the relative importance of the works calls for different standards. My feeling is that if Archimedes had never lived, somebody else would have come up with his work. Would you say that of Christ?
This next song is very sad. Please clap along. -- Robin Zander
Well, the Colosseum in Rome, along with many
other buildings, had its marble stripped for
recycling into churches etc.
-- You've got to get a hat if you want to get ahead.
One of the worst IT programs? Are you in it? Its a common belief that IT (at RIT) is easy. For the lower level classes I'll agree with you. IT is such a diverse subject, that RIT is forced to INTRODUCE as much of it to you as they possibly can...(database, programming, networking, web design, etc) Meanwhile, CS is programming. and programming... While CS gets progressively harder, IT bounces from one intro class to another. I didn't realize when i went to RIT that I'd like to get into networking. IT helped me realize that, now I have concentration classes (and difficult ones btw) for me to focus upon. Which brings me to my point..the learning curve is just delayed...it does get harder.
I agree with your note on keeping things in perspective. An interesting observation would be that maybe it was a good thing it got overwritten with something religious. That way its "survivability" thoughout the darkages was highly increased and may be the reason it still exist today. Had it been used for recording financial transactions another possible choice it would most probably have vanished.
Help fight continental drift.
Some things change, some stay the same: I just erased my pr0n collection to compile 2.4.0-test3. There's always something you never have enough of.
Now I need more bandwidth to get my pr0n back... ;)
How do we know that when we throw todays AOL cd into the bin, we aren't destorying something that future generations would love to have?
Most of us modern day monks really wish AOL would press their software onto CD-RWs or CD-Rs with space left so we can rewrite over them with more useful stuff. An uncanny parallel to our brethren of long ago...
Someone ought to fix that.
I agree with you - that people should not be forced to pay for sins their ancestors committed. However, I think that corporations should be forced to pay for evil things they have done. This is why neither I nor anyone in my family buys Volkswagon vehicles, Krupps machinery or coffeymakers, Bayer Drugs, ect... These companies used slave labor and forced human test subjects during the Holocaust, for that, they deserve to loose their right to operate business.
IIRC, Volkswagen was started in the early 50's (with British help) to give the Germans employment.
It is true the Volkswagen was designed under Hitler's directive (by a famous tank designer by the name of Porsche, I think he made cars too), so are you against a postwar corporation for using a wartime design?
If so, better not patronize any company that uses jets, or radar, etc, etc.
And forget about NASA, they were full of Nazi's in the 50's and 60s'.
George
...the math demonstrated "the roots of the gravitational theory and modern calculus."
Newton's work on gravitational theory, although started on his own, was fueled by letters from Hooke (the spring man). Acording to a lecture givin by an expert on Newtons life, Hooke was working on gravitational theory, trying to solve Keplers laws, by use of geometry and was hitting some problems and sent some letters to Newton. Newton at the time was only considered the greatest geometrist around (he hadn't published calculus yet), Hooke was asking for some help with his math. Apparently Newton sent back a letter with a few calculations of his own on gravitational theory, almost mocking Hookes attempts to create a theory of gravity. Hooke continued to ask for help, sending more letters with more of his work, and apparently Newton used some of his ideas. If Hooke had been a better mathematician, it might have been Hookes theory of gravity.
Disclamer - Opinion of Person
In actuality, there is very little in the way of ink that cannot be erased if you have access to the right chemicals.
I followed the link from the news page to a site about Archimedes and they had this pretty cool Cattle Puzzle that Archimedes created.
Well if I was a Greek monk and my choices were hang on to an old Math book or write a prayer book, I'm sure my priority would be the prayer book
It's more likely that the text was wiped because writings by Archimedes and others were considered unacceptable at the time. They were either viewed as naive attempts to understand the world (which contemporary thinking claimed was all God's doing), or dangerous sources of heresy.
For a fictional, but highly thought provoking account of what ideas were prevalent at the time check out 'The Name of the Rose' by Umberto Eco. For a more fact based but drier account see any books on the treatment of 'heresy' by the churches of the Middle Ages. I'm a particular fan of books on the Baltic crusades - although it's not very well documented.
Chris
um... yes, it probably could as there would be residue, etc. I'll bet the FBI does it routinely.
But that aside, your whole premise is flawed, I think. I'd be willing to bet that by far, more information from today will be saved for the future than ever before. Archeologists someday will dig up my laptop and find persistent doubleclick cookies still tracking me :)
What you have to remember is that books of the time where written on vellum which is prepared from calf skins. Trying to compare values with 1000 years ago isn't easy but cattle where a very valuable resource. Slaughtering them when they're still juvenile just to write something down would be costly. Basically if paper was $100 a sheet, you'd be wanting to reuse it to.
Reuse of vellum was so common, (overwritten documents are called palimplests) it's probably best to think of a monastic library as the monastery's hard drive. Files that are no longer wanted are just erased to make space for new ones.
Priorities do indeed change over time! The monks of the Middle Ages are credited by history books to have "preserved" the classical texts of ancient Greece and Rome- classical drama and mythology, history poetry and all that other garbage that I couldn't personally give a flying
you-know-what about. So, let's see, mathematical texts didn't make it on the list of things to preserve?! Who the f#!k made that decision? Or was this particular monk just ignorant? It didn't occur to him that "Hey! This thing is antique and it's written in Greek. Maybe it's...important?"
Oh no! "Let's just go ahead and write our flaming little bullshit prayerbook and waste somebody else's work!"
I hope that scroungy little e-wok died of the plague...and the rest of his monastery too!
Die!
IT WAS A JOKE!
For example, I know that fish aren't built by people, and that the point of this work was historical, not to find out the secret of floatation.
${YEAR+1} is going to be the year of Linux on the desktop!
Hi,
My name is Archimedes. A few moons ago I was nearly in debtors prison, until I came across this simple formula. Now, I am awash in drachma, copper ingots, silver, gold and other precious materials.
If you follow these simple steps, you too can have the wealth of Croesus
There's an interesting article on the origins of mathematical physics, based largely on the material in this manuscript, in the June 2000 issue of Physics Today.
I decided that behaving ethically was the most nihilistic thing I could do. - Paul Pavel
Firt off, both RIT and UofR are great schools....both in a heavy competition to be called the best. And, RIT and UofR have both done that in select field. UofR probably has a better science program, but RIT has its own status and is Internationally known for the following: Information Technology, Comp Sci, Mech Engineering, Electrical Engineering, MicroElectronic Engineering, American School of Crafts, Photography, Computer Graphic Design, Printing, and Business/Finance. As far as Information Technology goes, no other school in the nation comes even close. RIT has been doing this program for 7 years. Other great schools like RPI and Penn State claimed to have IT programs but only supported 3 students last year in the program for RPI and around 30 for Penn State. There is no set format on how the IT program should be organized as to what classes make up the degree...every college is completely different for IT. Yes, I also agree the program is easy at first, but gets significantly harder in the last 2 years. I went through the entire program. As far as people falling back on IT in case that can't hack the engineering or CS depts, that changes as of next year.....You now need a 3.8 to TRANSFER into IT form another program......thats means, if you fail someone else, don't comes looking to IT. The IT dept is successfully weeding out the students and continually making the environment more strict with harder classes. The problems lies in the fact that most people who know computers know nothing about Information Technology but they have to start somewhere....nowadays, high school students are finally learning the skills to "Get started" and so the level at RIT can extend higher one more step. Ok, now about Computer Science....first off, RIT won the National competition this past year along with 1 other school for programming. Our boys, Steven Rhorda and Paul Mason, got tickets to the Netherlands for the international competition. The fact is RIT has one of the top 5 Computer Science programs in the nation. Canada won BTW. Engineering! Please.....any time you try to compare a technical school with a science school, you are going to mix up facts. RIT has been noted for being the 4th best in the nation in Engineering. Many great schools strive to be on the list, but the fact is RIT supports a co-op programs that gives students the chance to work then come back to school and understand the "why question." Having 2 years work experience enables RIT engineers to have the absolute highest job placement of any school in the united states. Umm, doee that sound like a good deal? I could go on and onabout all the other schools I listed above because I personally know about them all, but I will spare the details. Basically, RIT is a GREAT school. The University of Rochester had a better reputation for years (being 25th in the nation), but I am unsure which school is really better now. I have heard stories how UofR wanted to strengthen its standings by limiting students with even higher SAT scores, but many policies instituted by the President of UofR have fallen apart thus backfiring the project. So who cares? Me? Not really....I went to RIT and now have a great job because of the co-op program. I bet I would have had a great job if I attended UofR.
I knew I should have posted the whole quote:
They're able to do this because every mark the Greek mathematician made on the vellum parchment,
a writing surface made from animal skin, left a residue that can be uncovered even a millennium later.
Actually, I am wrong though. I originally thought this was a quote from the scholar, but it looks like the reporte can't count his millennia.
Except it's not particularly clear that it *was* stolen, as opposed to sold out the back door.
That is highly doubtful since they were copied by another Monk just 200 years earlier
The views of the Papacy changed over time just like the views of any other political institution. It just happens that by the Middle Ages the Papacy had started to view it's pagan heritage as a bit of a liability - especially so when their arch-enemies the Muslims were keen on the writings of Greek philosphers, etc.
Chris
Hey if Mac could take a completely burned note and make it readable, restoration of anything should be possible!
If it was considered unacceptable, then why did they make the manuscript in the first place
The lists of authors censured by the Papacy weren't fixed, so the teachings of Archimedes just fell out of favour over time.
Chris
Yes I most certainly would. There will never be any shortage of religious nonsense. The religious folks would most probably attending Gnostics gatherings today if Jesus had not been around. They only vanished as they were not as militant as the Christian Ubermacht.
Help fight continental drift.
but translations from the greek were made at much later dates than that which we base our work on. I always thought they were made mainly in X-XII centuries. Time to brush up my history :(
That's an excellent point you make about personal information.
I think it would be perfectly acceptable for the bulk of a persons personal information to be made public at some point in the future.
In the UK all our census details go completely public after 100 years, and as such my parents have a 50 cd set with all the records from the 1881 census.
Whilst the advances in medicine are pushing lifespans beyond 100 years now, I wouldn't be the slightest bit concerned if in 2130 (150 yrs after my birth) all my now confidential details were turned over to historians.
A slight concern could be that in the future details will become more and more accesible. Whilst anyone doing enough research could quite correctly conclude that one of my ancestors was stoned as a witch, it's not the sort of thing people at school would ever research or tease me about.
However with advances in AI etc.. it may soon be possible to just dig up dirt on a person and this is a more frightening concept.
As much as I dislike my school... he's got a point... it is "Rochester Institute of Technology".
-Misch
--You will rephrase your request for me to go to hell. Goto statements are not acceptable programming constructs
the more they stay the same.
And you thought it was hard wiping every last trace off your HD!
Weapons of Mass Analysis
kill -9 -1
===
More important is format obsolescence. We may be able to read a 2K-year-old parchment, but how many of us can read a 20-year-old 8" floppy, even if it's in perfect condition? How many CD drives will be around in 20 years? Probably very few, as some new whiz-bang medium will replace CDs a few years from now and some even more whiz-bang medium will make that obsolete in short order.
It's not surprising that it was re-used as a manuscript. Manuscript writing was a great art and a worthwhile hobby for bored monks, practised widely up to the middle of the millenium. A lot of the works were of religious/Christian content, and some were historic (generally sponsored by rich patrons). Vellum, or processed calf skin, was written on using pigments and natural minerals which varied from crushed beetles to lapis lazuli. Frequently, gold leaves were used to emboss ornamental designs.
Perhaps the most famous lost and found manuscript is the book of Kells. Written by Irish monks in the 8th century, it was lost during viking attacks on monastaries, found buried underground and unearthed, and today resides at Trinity College, Dublin. It's regarded as Ireland's national treasure. (BTW, the word "miniature" used to describe these manuscripts has nothing to do with size, but indicates drawn inline images, from Latin miniatus, past participle of miniare, to color with minium, from minium red lead.)
If you get a chance to see manuscripts at a nearby exhibition, don't miss it. They are fabulous. And simply looking at words written centuries ago in ink on parchment is quite an indescribable feeling.
(In related news: one of the greatest wonders of the ancient world was completely recycled. The bronze Collossus of Rhodes was sold as scrap metal.)
Check out this link to look at some of the old manuscripts of mathematics.
w/m
I believe a guy I was at school with was involved in some java controlled precision cutting tools.
That might be what you want
Of course, back when they were trying to raise me as a Catholic, Thomas was my favorite apostle.:)
This next song is very sad. Please clap along. -- Robin Zander
Problem is many of them were burned so there's nothing to restore. We are lucky that some episodes have been found in station valts, private collections and some footage was left from what censors in some contries cut out (ironic that).
Alas I'm much of the destroyed Doctor Who is lost to us.
The article is about people having erased Archimedes' writings and you mention BBC tapes and complain about "the present generation"?
I think the point to be taken from the article is that this particular behavior is not limited to the "present generation."
My feeling is that if Archimedes had never lived, somebody else would have come up with his work. Would you say that of Christ?
yes....
the masses always need new savours.
nmarshall
#include "standard_disclaimer.h"
R.U. SIRIUS: THE ONLY POSSIBLE RESPONSE
nmarshall
The law is that which it boldly asserted and plausibly maintained..
--Colonel Burr 1783
My favourite 'This hour has 22 minutes' sendup has Rick Mercer going to American Ivy League universities and asking all and sunder about current issues like the Canadian cultural tradition of setting their old afloat on ice flows in the Artic Ocean. Some of the responses are priceless.
No, but really, I love you guys south of the border (BTW, we're on the north bit, Mexico is the other one.)
:wq
Am I just crazy or do all of these self-proclaimed lords of grammar intentionally put spelling mistakes in their correction posts to indicate that they are joking?
OTOH, he's not called "The Spelling Nazi".
-------
-------
"It was people! People soiled our green!"
How much do you want to bet that Archimedes' last words were "Wazzzzzuuuup"? I knew that Budweiser ripped that off from somewhere...
-----
"The only difference between me and a madman is that I'm not mad." - Salvador Dali (1904-1989)
For what it's worth, I believe we're rapidly entering a Dark Ages of our own.
The Internet had the potential to be the greatest tool ever invented for the sharing of knowledge and ideas.
The current governments are hellbent on restricting its use. Look to Britain's RIP, USA's Carnivore, Singapore's and China's filtering, Australia's restrictions and so on.
Look at the use of patents to repress development of competing technologies.
Look at the use of lawsuits to destroy information-sharing, including music, business reporting and political reporting.
Our newspapers are public mindset manipulation tools for big business, television is a pacifier for the masses, and Hollywood is hellbent on rewriting history.
The public, and the American public in particular, is becoming massively misinformed and ever more ignorant of history, business practices and the proper role of government.
If this isn't a Dark Ages, what is?
--
--
Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
don't worry, i backed up the net last night =)
"I don't need a compass to tell me which way the wind shines." - Mr. Furious, Mystery Men
wooo! I think #rit did this and not Rochester University, since there is no Rochester UNiversity@!
It has everything to do with money and fame. That is one of the main reasons things get studied. Do you really think that different universities would try to sequence the human genome if they didn't get money (in the form of grants) and fame for being the first to sequence it? It is the same with the studying of the document. The whole point for studying it is to get fame and to get grants.
--------
Pi Are Squared.
The quality of writable cds in general looks pretty poor to me. Even if you can read them, straight away, on the same cd player (or another on the same pc), its not consistant, and its months, not years, before they get worse.
Who here has not heard the phrase `anyone got a cd player they want to test this disk with`? Why? Why dont they just work, all the time, like floppies? Shite technology, rushed onto the market?
This has been said before, but I feel it needs to be reiterated as previous posters have left out important information.
RIT, where this progress is being made, is the Rochester Institute of Technology.
The University of Rochester, (U of R), is not where this is being done.
The University of Rochester (about 4,000 undergrads) is a higher ranked school than RIT, since it is a national university. It consistently ranks in the top 30 in the oh-so-wonderful US News and World Report. RIT is a regional school (about 8,000 undergrads) but it is one of the top-ranked schools in the northeast. To call it an IT school is being rather harsh, RIT is a technical institute, along the same lines as Caltech and MIT, though RIT isn't as rigorous or demanding as either of those institutions. Contrary to what a previous poster said, RIT does have a computer science degree program. RIT also has a software engineering degree program. There is a large difference, and the school acknowledges this. Both schools are in the same town. They are also practically right next to each other in Rochester (I would know, I've lived in Rochester my entire life).
More on-topic, RIT is able to do such advanced imaging work because Kodak is based in Rochester. The George Eastman house is a historical landmark here in Rochester, and Kodak contributes a great deal to RIT and the U of R, allowing both of them to be at the front of their fields in a great deal of imaging technology. I work with an optical engineer who graduated from the U of R two years ago. RIT has a large film and imaging department. They are both good schools, neither deserves to be slighted.
Course, neither is as good as Caltech. And about U of R students being mad because they're confused with RIT students...don't bitch. I say I go to Caltech and people think I mean ITT tech.
Its just art that will be kept...no-one is interested in book-keeping from 300 years ago are they?
Most of the good stuff is on vinyl which should last some time.
Not sure how many cds/movies from the last 50 years will be that interesting in 300 years time though.
Note that the reel-to-reel tapes are analog audio, which can stand quite a bit of degradation and still be recognizable... a file table entry or an opcode is blasted away by a bit or two getting flipped/destroyed. Digital is great, until you lose any part of the signal. Analog dies more gracefully... I've lost a bunch of CD-Rs myself... nothing real useful, though.
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
Seems appropriate. A lot of information about the lifestyles of early "common people" was retrieved by sifting through piles of garbage where the lack of oxygen to objects deep inside the pile preserved them. I think it would be perfect for the future to learn about our p0rn viewing habits from Doubleclick- the modern equivalent of a massive garbage pile ;)
"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"
They have found it they have found it. sorry just had to say it
Jon Bardin
RIT, is a different school, even in a different town
;-)
Different town... oh yes... we're in South Henrietta... That really makes us the South Henrietta Institute of Technology... or S.H.I.T.
A little school conceited, huh? We're really only a 5 minute drive apart...
And we have a reputation too! okay... not a great one... but we have a reputation!
-Misch (Flamebait, I know
--You will rephrase your request for me to go to hell. Goto statements are not acceptable programming constructs
A couple of Bach's Brandenburg concertos had been used for fish wrapping, so I'm not at all surprised that someone wanted to re-use some paper...
So, where can I get acid-free printer paper (or, vellum that'll fit my printer :-) and an inkjet printer that uses non-water-soluable ink? I'll just make hardcopy backups of everything...
And for binary data, there's mylar tape (like paper tape only on mylar (or some similar tough plastic) so it won't tear. Or perhaps punched cards onto thin sheets of e.g. stainless steel.
Mind, the problem with any storage technology is that durability tends to be inversely proportional to density and read/write time. Hieroglyphs carved on granite may last a long time, but where do I find a SCSI or USB equipped engraver/reader for those?
-- Alastair
I was so sorry when AOL started sending out CDs instead of floppies. I think there was a 2-year period where I didn't buy a single floppy, just harvested them from the mail.
May I suggest GrammarNazi??
We don't need no Net Explorer We don't need no Thought control
not as diverse as in NYC but they are diverse. Yes, each town is rather homogeneous but there is a great deal of variety between the different suburbs surrounding rochester and in the city itself (since the entire are is known as the "Greater Rochester Area").
Trust me, I've lived here my entire life, and I'm going to college in California. I prefer Rochester. The people are diverse, just look at the differences between the various highschools. You have many different ethnicity's represented in quite large and active groups.
But there is the problem that the entire country is too homogeneous. The problem that the majority of highschool kids dress in A&F, Old Navy, and American Eagle. The problem that 6-9th grade girls have become teenyboppers seeking to imitate britney spears. The problem that nearly all twenty-somethings have the same hair cut and dress the same way. But this problem isn't limited to Rochester, it happens everywhere.
Moller
I miss those days. I remember being handed a shoe box full of aol floppys and being asked to reformat them for a class.
The cds aren't so bad though, they keep soda cans from leaving rings on my table.
--Have a Johsonville brat.
"It lies in the Castele..... aghhhhhhhh"
First, the article notes that this was a copy of Archimedes' manuscript made in the 10th century (Archimedes lived in the 3rd). Nice technology, but much cooler had it been used on the original Archimedes text.
Christian monks were (and I think still are) multilingual and well educated. Liturgical texts are almost entirely in Latin, but parts are in Greek (Kyrie Eleison). Most modern translations of the Bible are taken from Greek texts.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
First of all, Rochester University does not exist. It's the University of Rochester, or UR. Second of all, Rochester Institute of Technology, or RIT, is a different school, even in a different town. I looked at both, and graduated from UR. We UR people really don't like getting confused with RIT. UR is a science and humanities school. Our Computer Science program is a science program, not a technical one. RIT is a technical school. UR is smaller, but its reputation is much greater, and has been invited at least once to join the Ivy League.
...and 'surface' means someone brought it back (and maybe knocked down the thief in order to do that)
And 'stolen' - what a harsh word. 'the
That's like I use a wire cable lock to prevent my motorbike helmet from 'walking away'...
Newspeak improves your language - you'd never guess how many synonymes there are until you tried...
Use The Source, Luke!
By feeding these with some specific low-frequency light rays, one could "store" some bits of information in these.
The fact is that these bacteries are able to live hundreds of thousands of years and using many of these could be a good way to store data.
No, once again there are problems:
- What if everybody starts its own bio-culture? Wouldn't this cause some ecological problems by breaking an existing equilibrium?
- If data can survive for millenia, will there still be whatever needed to read it again after that time?
And now, suppose that this has already been done a long long time ago on either Earth or any other place. How long will it take before we guess that somebody once left a message in, say... organic mollecules?Now, even worse: If at this time people usually encoded their data a really nasty way (like we are starting to do at these times with RSAA, PGP, encoded JPEG, MP3, DVD, etc.), how will we even be close to decoding it?
--
Trolling using another account since 2005.
All the more reason to carry on and finish the restoration - Ancient greek science is something we have only dimly been able to view through the distorting lens of several translations preceding the earliest documents in our posession and through the well-intentioned manipulations of monastic editors.
There is abundant evidence that ancient greek society had a far greater understanding of many aspects of the world they lived in that the societies that followed them. Whilst crude by todays standards greek medicine was at a level that was not matched until long after the dark ages. Mathematics in ancient Greece was sufficiently advanced to be the realm of philosophical research and a fundamental tool in their analysis of their world - a level that was not matched in western societies until the time of Galileo.
In contrast the arabic world gladly absorbed all the knowledge the greek philosophers produced and combining it with their own insights went on to build upon it. Why do you think that most of the named stars have names derived from arabic languages?
So why the divergence in the way these societies researched and used their knowledge? The only answer I can come up with is the question of religion. I have to say in advance that I am only commenting on the political aspects of the dominant religions rather than the principles on which they are based - after all I cant expect you to respect my faith if I dont respect yours, right? The catholic church dominated western societies and strongly discouraged questioning the fundamental mechanisms by which the world operated, punishing those who attempted to interfere with "the natural order of things" very harshly. Islamic culture on the other hand whilst it had rigid frameworks of its own was not barred from this kind of investigation. This being the case it was inevitable, purely on political grounds, that the two cultures would collide and the social debris of that collision are still being cleaned up today.
Just as ever more powerful telescopes and particle accelerators are being used to more finely analyse the world we live in, documents such as this allow a closer look at the history of scientific thought and a greater understanding of the forces that shape us socially, along with the physically shaping forces that we are getting so good at describing.
# human firmware exploit
# Word will insert into your optic buffer
# without bounds checking
I had a
University of Rochester is different than RIT... So which is it?
MOO
Every few months someone posts a scare story to Slashdot, concerned that current magnetic and optical media has a shorter lifespan than the more traditional 'pen and ink' methods of archiving information. Although there may be some truth to this, I believe that the fact that data in a digital format can be so easily duplicated and distributed actually gives the data a better chance of survival. For example, consider a hypothetical work of literature which is distributed both in the traditional dead-tree format and in a (free to copy) electronic format. The fact that the printed version of this information has a physical presence in meatspace will reduce the chance that it can be widely distributed - books take time to print, cost money to print, and are bulky and expensive to transport around the world. However, the electronic format of the information can be quickly, cheaply and easily shared between people and international boundaries provide no obstacle to the transfer of the information. This more widespread distribution of the digital information gives it a very good chance of survival.
People have also wondered what will happen if the medium onto which the data is archived becomes obsolete. Again, I wonder if this is really an issue. Although my Sinclair Spectrum computer and its Microdrive (a 4cm x 3cm x 0.5cm tape cartidge, which was actually pretty fast, in case you're interested) no longer work and my original Spectrum games cassettes have long since rotted away, emulators allow me to relive the glorious golden age of Spectrum computing. With emulators and tape images of software, the spirit of the hardware and software lives on by making use of today's superior technology.
Provided the data is wothwhile, I am sure that people will make the effort to ensure that it survives in some form and is readable on whatever technology is widespread at the time.
This may be (likely?) related to this story. This manuscript was sold at auction a couple of years ago. There is another article that I read online that gave a little bit more detail about the manuscript.
I'm very curious to know if there is a systematic effort underway to search our (limited) stock of ancient parchment scrolls for previous works. It seems like an obvious project, but as underfunded (and competitively proprietary) as archeology and analysis of ancient texts are, I wonder if this has been undertaken.
Anyone out there know anything about this? If so, links, please!
With each passing year, we may be losing what little remains of the 'lost' pre-Alexandrian texts
The truth about trolls: They're just spammers, wasting our time/bandwidth and calling it 'free speech'
Well, I had the writings of Bill Gates' minions on my new laptop for about 14 hours until I erased it so I could put something useful on it.
This guy's right on -- moderators, maybe you could see your way to recognizing that fact?
I am, therefore you think.
This is, BTW, why I never buy that people should be made to pay for the sins of their ancestors. There's not a person alive who could afford to pay for their own ancestors crimes.
Cool! I want to steal precious documents!
The statute of limitations is your friend.
pornking
Now if you had some of Archimedes' writings around the house, would you erase them so you could resuse the paper?! Priorities sure change, I guess
Well if I was a Greek monk and my choices were hang on to an old Math book or write a prayer book, I'm sure my priority would be the prayer book. It's easy to look back now and sneer at choices that people made a thousand years ago, after all hindsight is 20/20. But who is to say what future generations will think about ours.
I can easily imagine snide comments that will be made about how we callously destroyed the environment, pumped millions in a giant Internet Ponzi scheme when there were more worthwhile causes to support and amassed Nuclear weapons whose poisonous waste will exist for longer than humanity has existed. Think about that next time.
>Maybe poverty will appear just as shocking as
>slavery is to us
I sure hope so. If what you say actually happens, then that means two things: the world would still be here, and it would be a better place than it is today.
As far as the attitudes of some people towards reason, that can be explained:
"Jesus saith unto him, Thomas, because thou hast
seen me, thou hast believed: blessed are they that
have not seen, and yet have believed." John 20:29
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
It's not Rochester University, there is no Rochester University. The school that did this is RIT (Rochester Institute of Techonology). There is a University of Rochester but that's a seperate school.
left a residue that can be uncovered even a millennium later.
Archimedes lived circa 250 BC. That would put it about 2.25 millennia.
Before the development of mass-produced paper, writing materials were very expensive and hard to come by, so it's not particularly unusual to find valuable documents written on materials that have been used two, three or even more times.
Posting to undue an inadvertent moderation.
What is great about this manuscript is that it
gives Archimedes's writing in the original Greek, rather than Arabic.
Whoops. I'd better start burning my documents.
Pinky: "What are we going to do tomorrow night Brain?"
Brain: "I would tell you Pinky but this 120 char limi
A human, for example, has so much redundant DNA that using a large chunk of it for extra storage would not be a hassle. And if the humans got to the point of decoding it, well, they would be sufficiently advanced to handle it. The degeneration over generations would be handled by redundancies, etc.
Wait a minute . . .
this sounds suspiciously like something some nutcase came up with once - - it can't be true, it can't be true .....
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
I can confirm this. A couple of different brands and formulations are affected, Scotch [3M] 226 being the most common. Note that it can be avoided with proper storage and damaged tapes can actually be (temporarily) repaired by slowly baking them in a convection oven (how's that for counterintuitive?).
Nothing like rewinding a tails-out reel of 2" and filling the control room with expensive rust-colored snow flakes.
k.
--
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people
are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
Read the article for once timmy boy. All it said was that they were working on the project, not that they were done. This is old news anyway. They have been doing this since 1998 when some rich guy baught it from Christies auction house in London. We watched a video on this in my math history class last semester. Pretty cool story. Monk turns it into a prayer book. Some how the book gets lost. The book ends up in a church in france somehow. They loose it and it turns up at Christie's. Some rich dude who doesn't wish to be named buys it and gets it restored.... cool stuff but they aren't done yet.
bash-2.04$
bash-2.04$yes "Don't you hate dialup connections?"| write USERNAME
Information which we presently deem as useful will be mirrored and copied all over the network, whereas unused information will be slowly phased out.
Sadly the same is true in real life. The monk that cleared archimedes parchment clearly thought that his information was of far greater value than archimedes'. At the time i'm sure the majority of the people agreed with him and there would have been a consensus that it was appropriate to discard that knowledge.
How do we know that when we throw todays AOL cd into the bin, we aren't destorying something that future generations would love to have? Addind up the free hours probably takes us into the next millenium anyway
Any medium that requires human maintenance to persist is surely also prone to being destroyed by other, well meaning humans, trying to save something else. Those spectrum games are only playable now because some forward thinking geek backed them up onto the net.
In this information age we have too much information and need to somehow select which is relavant to keep and which to discard, it's just like clearing out ur hard disk and realised you've deleted your mail archive.
don't worry, i backed up the net last night =)
Can I get a copy? I'll send you a few blank CDs.
Thanks,
George
Many artists have been known to paint over other paintings just because they couldn't afford a new canvas. I never knew that the same happened to writings, but I guess that it's not too surprising.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Rochester has two distinct Universities. The University of Rochester (U of R) and Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT). The breakthrough was made at RIT.
Just clarifying since I went to RIT.
Lets face it, a print out from a laser printer seems to fade away after a few years.
An inkjetted page could never be recovered after it's been washed, and if you get one of those crappy thermal receipts from McDonalds you cant even read it after it's been sitting next to your fries for 5 minutes.
How will we ever preserve things for future generations with our current technologies? (assuming that at some point in the future the internet gets wiped out)
>How will we ever preserve things for future
>generations with our current technologies?
>(assuming that at some point in the future the
>internet gets wiped out)
If anything the net will increase the rate of erasure. Maybe in one or two areas it'll make preservation easier, but with paper copies it takes a certain number of years for them to deteriorate or a conscious effort to destroy them. With a web page it takes an effort to keep it going. Consider the fate of dejanews' archives.
It's really quite pathetic. We already know about his principles.
The entire thing is just a ploy by the different schools to get money so they can buy more expensive toys. They said it themselves: "The RIT team is working on five pages of the text as part of a competition that will decide who will study the more than 170-page document. "
I have no problem with people trying to preserve the past out of curiosity but doing it just for money or fame is, IMHO, stupid.
--------
Pi Are Squared.
For example, some CDRs that I burnt 4 years ago can't be read anymore though I only used them a few times.
But the worse is that I am not even worried because the information I saved this way also became obsolete :
- 0.99v13 version of Linux
- Pre-1 JDK
- Old versions of ARChimedes games that don't run anymore on StrongARM'ed RiscPC.
- ARM and Unix FAQs
- etc.
I'll just have to find a way to preserve my own music, though...Maybe on tape ?
--
Trolling using another account since 2005.
"Vanished"??? What a civilized way of saying "was stolen".
As far as : . [Updated 12 July 17:01 GMT by timothy] Sigh. As even more people have pointed out, that's "University of Rochester," not "Rochester University." All set? :) The Univeristy of Rochester soccer team all wear shirts that say "RU" on them, not "UR".
We had some discussion about the Long Now library on Slashdot a while back. Much of it is relevant to your question.
I beg to differ, I live in Rochester by choice.
I can only compare Rochester to the places I've lived, which include:
and Rochester comes out on top, with Raleigh second (I missed winter in Raleigh, and Raleigh needs a downtown).
Of course, the above places aren't anything special, but if you're looking for a reasonably priced, computer aware place to live and raise a family, you could do far worse than Rochester.
George
Well, I'm glad I at least did not say that the situation was obviously ironic or anything.
Ah, another fun slashdot game.
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"It was people! People soiled our green!"
RIT has one of the worst IT programs I've seen. :p CS isn't that bad. Not sure about Soft Eng.
As for Kodak pouring money in, it comes with a price. God forbid you try to buy anything but Kodak products on campus. Or Pepsi, for that matter. For the love of /dev/null, they've gotten rid of nearly all coke products. *sob* I miss my snapple machines. Administrative bastards! RIT = Sold Out.
Yeah, offtopic. All ye wee little ones pay attention though if you're considering RIT.
I just heard on NPR yesterday about researchers looking at old letters from the time of the American Revolution. The words on the paper are important, of course, but medical historians want the actual letters themselves. To smell them.
It seems that when cholera broke out in a town, the mail was sprinkled with vinegar to help sterilize it before it was carried away. Even two hundred years later one can detect the odor of vinegar on many of them, and this offers clues as to the spread of the disease in the colonies at the time.
Just naively archiving old documents onto CD-ROM or something can miss a great deal...
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
So why the divergence in the way these societies researched and used their knowledge? The only answer I can come up with is the question of religion.
This is an interesting point, but I notice you didn't follow the logical, non-PC extrapolation from this, which is that now the situation is reversed. Societies based on Judeo-Christian religions are open to new knowledge, while Islamic societies are closed.
In the end, religion can't be the determining factor. Every major religion has at times presided as the dominant force in a conservative, reactionary society, and at other times in the same geographic region it has been a part of an open, curious society. While it's true that religious zealotry is the hallmark of a closed society, I'm inclined to see it more as a symptom than the cause.
You should make the distinction that RIT has an IT department and an Engineering department. There's a large difference between the two. People who can't cut it in the Engineering school drop to the IT department. And just about anyone can make it in the IT department.
RIT's engineering school is quite good. They were the first school in the nation to have an accredited microelectronic engineering program, with cleanrooms and supplies donated by Intel and AMD.
That's kind of funny, that exact scenario (Coke vs Pepsi) happened at RIT...
or maybe you knew that?
--
Search first, ask questions later.
Bingo. The key factor is that 12th century Europe was The Dark Ages, when the Church was Life and knowledge was scarce. Paper was a terribly difficult and expensive commodity to manufacture, so recycling old non-religious (i.e. non-useful) paper to make more hymnals was a brilliant move at the time.
I saw the Archimedes Palimpsest last year at The Walters Art Gallery. Note that the paper was not written directly by Archimedes, or even by his students. It's a (presumably) good copy made by later scribes which seems authentic.
The pages had been washed, scraped, cut in half, and rotated 90 degress to make a relatively clean surface for the prayers, then bound with stitching. When you reassemble the parts in the right order and look at it with UV light, the original is mostly visible. If only the ancient Greek and Chinese civilizations had survived and continued their scientific progress, we'd be on interstellar colony ships by now.
What I found far more fascinating is the assertion that the math demonstrated "the roots of the gravitational theory and modern calculus." Now I had been taught that Calculus grew out of a problem solving grudge between two famous mathmeticians. Not being a proponent of the "great man" theory, I tended to assume that this breakthrough built on advancements in theorums up to that point.
However, if this text actually shows that Archimedes had the beginnings so many years before, I might be forced to conceed at least a "great man of math" theory. Though considering the dark ages in between, perhaps an examination of the history will show an evolution and reevolution rather than two poles of brilliance.
-Kahuna Burger
...will work for Chick tracts...
Well cos by the time you've left the drive thru and you realise they've f**ked up your order.. it'd be nice to have a legible receipt to have them use to fix it.
Seriously though my dad used to get payslips printed on that stuff and within 2 years in a dark drawer they were totally blank.