Slashdot Mirror
Giant Greek Tomb Discovered
schwit1 writes Archaeologists have uncovered the largest tomb ever discovered in Greece and think it is linked to the reign of Alexander the Great. "The tomb, dating to around 300 BC, may have held the body of one of Alexander's generals or a member of his family. It was found beneath a huge burial mound near the ancient site of Amphipolis in northern Greece. Antonis Samaras, Greece's prime minister, visited the dig on Tuesday and described the discovery as 'clearly extremely significant'. A broad, five-yard wide road led up to the tomb, the entrance of which was flanked by two carved sphinxes. It was encircled by a 500 yard long marble outer wall. Experts believe a 16ft tall lion sculpture previously discovered nearby once stood on top of the tomb."
Or Enceladus perhaps?
It should be a requrement for people to include all of the measurments in metrics so people shouldn't be requred to dechipher how many feetsies are there in a yard and how much that is in crows wings, car tyres, pencil lenghts, cat paws etc.
Complete lack of photos or any actual indication of size (other than the burial mounds size) or layout.
It should be a requirement for people leaving primary school to be able to convert units.
... Is he dead?
Oh look, I discovered my car keys! I thought I'd lost them but they were in my pocket all along. What a discovery!!
Sort of
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-...
"Kill 'em all and let Root sort 'em out"
How do you determine it to be an authentic Greek tomb?
The men are buried face-down.
In the first moment I thought they found someones petrified basement
what kind of grease?
Giant geek tomb?
Unit conversions are a different thing entirely. If you think you are so hot convert 5 hoppus foot to qubic inches. Yes, that's how everyone else feels like reading about feet and yards and pencil lengths.
I almost spewed my coffee all over my keyboard when I read this the first time. I read: "Giant GEEK tomb discovered".
Internetogists have discovered a vast tomb that they believe is connected with the reign of Dice, who conquered vast swathes of the ancient Internet. The tomb, dating to around 2014AD, may have held the archive of pre-beta slashdot. It was found beneath a huge burial mound near the ancient site of Andover.net in northern Cyberspace. Rick Astley visited the dig on Tuesday and described the discovery as "clearly extremely significant". A broad, five Tb pipe led up to the tomb, the entrance of which was flanked by two carved goatse.
[...] the ancient site of Amphipolis in northern Greece.
...what we Greeks always called and still call Macedonia*!
Sadly some Slavs -settled in the northern part of that region a millenium after Alexander's** death- with serious identity problems -caused by the former communist imperialism and current lack of effective "state building" ethnology- try to convince the rest of the world that you can be what ever you declare...
* Macedonia - meaning "highland" in Greek (and without any meaning in any other language).
** Alexander - meaning "protector of man" in Greek (and without any meaning in any other language).
And was pondering what would be in a geek tomb. Probably old Dilbert dolls, models from the original Star Trek, B5 and Firefly and a large pile of dirty laundry. Naturally it'd be found in Alexander the Great's basement.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
It is a requirement leaving primary school to be able to do a division. it is not a requirement to know what feet or yard or stones or furlong are. When you have an international audience, it is polite to use the international measurement methods that about 95% of the world use maybe put it in parenthesis near the medieval unit. like say 500 yards (about 450 meters).
This has an ecological impact by the way, because if thousand of people google "500 yards to meter" the electricity and time lost, would have been better spent on something else. If one person the submitter does it it is maybe 5 second lost to him and no big deal. If say 10000 persons do it, guessestimate international audience slashdot, that's 50000 seconds lost, electricity, bandwidth usage and so forth. Not a lot but cumulated over the years ? And jsut because the submitter does not want to make 1 step, he forces those loss on everybody else
It was full of old Texas Instruments calculators, Star Trek memorabilia, and coffee beans for the after life.
Wait, you said a Greek tomb? Why would we care about some dead frat boy?
Did anyone else read that as giant geek tomb discovered?
One of the problems with the historical sites in Greece is so many of the large ones have been stolen from over the centuries. Want to see the full Parthenon? Better book a trip to the Vatican, Louvre in Paris and the British Museum what's still left for public viewing. Various conquers and rulers have been selling off bits and pieces of greek history for as long as Europeans have been collecting art.
Here is a better article with actual pictures
Odds of an alien civilization using something that easily converts to Metric? Pretty much zero. Decimal is an arbitrary base. The kilometer was based on the size of our planet originally. The metric system was later revised to be based on atomic measurements which are universal, but the bizarre selection of atoms isn't.
Of course the old units also fail the alien test.
Use Planck units, or you're just talking out of your ass.
It's one thing to read about finding traces of ancient civilization using new RADAR and LIDAR technology over the South American jungle, a huge area where ground travel is rare and difficult; it's another to find "new" ancient ruins (not so ruined!) in a mostly modern country like Greece. Also, as with so many other constructs, impressive to see how much was done with sheer muscle power (including animals) and what we consider a low level of technology.
but how hard is it to "discover" a tomb that has a 5 yard wide road leading to its entrance? With carved sphinxes on either side? Encircled by a 500 yard long marble wall? Seems sort of obvious to me.
It is pretty damn remarkable. A lot of it is just a matter of time and money. A dig like this is expensive, because you need to do it with some delicacy. We could rip the top off that mound in an afternoon with bulldozers, losing huge amounts of information in the process. Instead it takes an army of grad students and many months.
Greece (and in fact the entire area through the Middle East) is just covered with such sites, where the locals know that something is buried under some hill or other, waiting for their Schliemann to decide to put forth the effort to dig it up and catalog it.
We're really fortunate about these sites, where something important happened and was then largely abandoned, or at least never progressed to becoming big population centers. Sadly, many sites continued to be used and are now modern, thriving cities, and the artifacts were either ripped out or buried in a way that we'll never be able to reach.
How many pints when in one's cups?
--- Mercutio was right.
Pro-metric folks talk about the ease of metric conversions, but that's mostly useless. Few calculations are of the shift the decimal place around. Rather, most calculations require more arithmetic than most people can comfortably handle without paper or a calculator.
But, even more important, the most relevant aspect of using either any system of measurement, be it metric or English, is gut feelings. That's what used daily over and over again. I have a gut feel for how big 100 miles, 1 gallon, 160 lbs, etc. are, but I have to do the conversion from metric quantities to understand metric units. I can do the conversions, and I understand the math, but it's the intuitive understanding of the quantities that is useful. It is this one quality of measurement systems that allows the English system to continue to flourish despite its mathematical limitations.
The broad's name is Xena.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
I went on a Mediterranean tour a few years back. An ancient history fan, visited all the big ruins and historical sites. I was disappointed.
1) Pretty much everything has been "restored". Very little is actually original. Most have tried to recreate as close as possible, but it is exactly that, a recreation.
2) One the most disappointing and disgusting things things I went to was the Vatican. Basically they looted and pillaged all the "Pagan" temples and historical sites of anything valuable to construct their own monuments. Valuable is pretty loose term considering the length of time it was done over. Stuff like marble and bronze and the like were the first to go, but even using sites as a convenient source of stone got pillaged. Looking at the astounding amount of wealth in the Vatican and the amount of history destroyed just makes me sick.
Though while the Vatican is a extreme example they are not alone, and in general the practice was pretty ubiquitous. Hadrian's Wall which was a HUGE artifact is basically gone, and many historians believe that it was just a convenient source of local stone that over time just got purposed in various local buildings. Though that seems a bit less villainous than the intentional destruction of historical sites for valuable material.
here
If it's anything like a Greek salad or Greek yogurt... I'm in.
Chrisanthi Likousi Kazumi from Erotic Dream 2012 Chrysanthi Lykousi
Back when I was in school ('70-'80), they taught Metric as well as American units. And they did not teach the more unusual of the american units much at all.
They said that we would convert "soon". My second job was helping to convert machine drawings to metric units.
But to use metric for those machines ended up with long decimals. Not good, and the machines had to be supported and even new ones built, until the markets would buy new designs.
After a while it got to be way too much trouble, for not enough benefit. The trouble was actually more than the trouble of keeping two types of spare parts.
So now some things are one and some the other, and techs use either as needed. Most people don't bother, but find it interesting that the speedometer in their car is marked with both. 8-)
(By the way, get off of my lawn!)