5 ms·

All that glitters is not gold – emulating luxury in the ancient Greek world

76 points by diodorus 3y ago

rwmj 3y ago
Remarkable that a ceramic pot could have survived for 2,500 years. I break cups all the time. There's a permanent display of Eastern ceramics at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge (UK) which has some incredibly old pieces. Worth visiting even if you know nothing about pottery. https://fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk/about-us/collections/arts-of-asia https://fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk/about-us/collections/arts-of-as...
- marktani 3y ago
  That a specific ceramic pot survives is very unlikely, but some surviving it of a huge group less so. I guess you also have some cups left in your cupboard! This of course is the statistical view point. On another level, seeing artifacts survive for thousands of years is fascinating and awe-inspiring.
  - goeiedaggoeie 3y ago
    This is the statistical long tail indeed. I would also expect that a lot of these vases were buried in soil or on the sea floor where they were undisturbed for many years.
  - ericmcer 3y ago
    I was fighting with someone about this exact concept for hours. They kept exclaiming how amazing it was that we (as specific people) were born and how infinitesimal the odds were.
    - antipotoad 3y ago
      Roll 12 6-sided dice in turn, record the sequence. What are the chances that specific sequence should be rolled? Less than 1 in 2 billion. Anything remarkable about that? Clearly not. If your counterpart thinks otherwise, well…
- dan-robertson 3y ago
  That museum as a whole is great. It’s got a bit of loads of different things but it is a much more manageable size than the big museums in capital cities / New York.
gilleain 3y ago
Interesting quote: > Athens' prolific potters looked for new ways of manufacturing vessels in affordable clay to imitate metal wares – a process known as skeuomorphism ... [ jugs] even has discs on the handle to mimic rivets necessary for metal attachments but serving no purpose in clay. Not just icons on applications, then.
- kemayo 3y ago
  Yeah, I'm so used to seeing skeuomorphism used in terms of UI design that this felt a bit jarring to read. Makes perfect sense, of course. The word just means imitating the design of something made of a different material.
- jareklupinski 3y ago
  > mimic rivets necessary for metal attachments but serving no purpose in clay where is the line between cargo-cult and skeuomorphism
alanmbyrne 3y ago
[dead]
NoboruWataya 3y ago
If anyone is ever in Santorini in Greece, check out the Museum of Prehistoric Thera. They have some stuff from around 2,000 BC. Just mindblowing to think how different things were when those pieces were manufactured.
blitz_skull 3y ago
It’s a testament to his prolific writing that without questioning I had assumed this was an acoup.blog article.
jjtheblunt 3y ago
"all that glitters is not gold" != "not all that glitters is gold". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Morgan%27s_laws#Extension_to_predicate_and_modal_logic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Morgan%27s_laws#Extension_t... I feel like one ever present takeaway from logic courses is that universal quantifiers and negation don't commute, DeMorgan's various rules, and so on.
- pxc 3y ago
  In natural language, usage is prior to grammar, and in this case, actual usage doesn't reflect the apparent rule. If you want to look up research on this particular rule and its observance (or not) the term is 'scopal isomorphism', where the isomorphism is between the scopes of the quantifiers in the surface structure and those in the logical form. That said, this is a pet peeve for me, too. Strikes my ear as wrong every single time I hear it, and drives me nuts.
  - jjtheblunt 3y ago
    i'd never seen the term "scopal isomorphism" : thanks! and yeah, i hear it all the time and it is like fingernails on a chalkboard.
    - pxc 3y ago
      I found the terms when I went on an angry research binge in search of a name for my preference and frustration. What I discovered, in addition to the name, was an interesting twist: Scopal ambiguity and isomorphic readings have played an interesting role in research on linguistic development for a long time. It turns out that little, little kids also strongly prefer isomorphic readings of statements involving quantifiers like this. But as they grow up, the 'inverse scope reading becomes accessible' to them— they gain the ability to correctly interpret the common way of phrasing these things which strikes you and me as 'wrong'. I have a lot of thoughts about this, but I've never really followed up on that initial research or asked a linguist what they think all that's about. I think for me, my preference for isomorphic readings and phrasings definitely relates to at least these two things: 1. I'm neurodivergent and part of what that means for me is that context is difficult, and I tend to prefer explicit syntax over reliance on context. 2. I work in a profession where (a) I deal with machines/languages that (obviously) always expect scopal isomorphism and (b) we often care about a quantification (all X are not Y) that is rarely actually intended in natural language. The more I revisit it, the more curious I get about this difference in handling 'ambiguity' (it doesn't feel ambiguous to me at all! lol) and where it comes from. :) If you wanna crawl into this rabbit hole, have at it: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C3&q=scopal+ambiguity+isomorphism+inverse https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C3&q=scop...
mayd 3y ago
“All that glisters is not gold” - William Shakespeare, "The Merchant of Venice."

76 points by diodorus 3y ago

rwmj 3y ago

Remarkable that a ceramic pot could have survived for 2,500 years. I break cups all the time. There's a permanent display of Eastern ceramics at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge (UK) which has some incredibly old pieces. Worth visiting even if you know nothing about pottery. https://fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk/about-us/collections/arts-of-asia https://fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk/about-us/collections/arts-of-as...

marktani 3y ago
That a specific ceramic pot survives is very unlikely, but some surviving it of a huge group less so. I guess you also have some cups left in your cupboard! This of course is the statistical view point. On another level, seeing artifacts survive for thousands of years is fascinating and awe-inspiring.
- goeiedaggoeie 3y ago
  This is the statistical long tail indeed. I would also expect that a lot of these vases were buried in soil or on the sea floor where they were undisturbed for many years.
- ericmcer 3y ago
  I was fighting with someone about this exact concept for hours. They kept exclaiming how amazing it was that we (as specific people) were born and how infinitesimal the odds were.
  - antipotoad 3y ago
    Roll 12 6-sided dice in turn, record the sequence. What are the chances that specific sequence should be rolled? Less than 1 in 2 billion. Anything remarkable about that? Clearly not. If your counterpart thinks otherwise, well…
dan-robertson 3y ago
That museum as a whole is great. It’s got a bit of loads of different things but it is a much more manageable size than the big museums in capital cities / New York.

gilleain 3y ago

Interesting quote: > Athens' prolific potters looked for new ways of manufacturing vessels in affordable clay to imitate metal wares – a process known as skeuomorphism ... [ jugs] even has discs on the handle to mimic rivets necessary for metal attachments but serving no purpose in clay. Not just icons on applications, then.

kemayo 3y ago
Yeah, I'm so used to seeing skeuomorphism used in terms of UI design that this felt a bit jarring to read. Makes perfect sense, of course. The word just means imitating the design of something made of a different material.
jareklupinski 3y ago
> mimic rivets necessary for metal attachments but serving no purpose in clay where is the line between cargo-cult and skeuomorphism

alanmbyrne 3y ago

[dead]

NoboruWataya 3y ago

If anyone is ever in Santorini in Greece, check out the Museum of Prehistoric Thera. They have some stuff from around 2,000 BC. Just mindblowing to think how different things were when those pieces were manufactured.

blitz_skull 3y ago

It’s a testament to his prolific writing that without questioning I had assumed this was an acoup.blog article.

jjtheblunt 3y ago

"all that glitters is not gold" != "not all that glitters is gold". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Morgan%27s_laws#Extension_to_predicate_and_modal_logic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Morgan%27s_laws#Extension_t... I feel like one ever present takeaway from logic courses is that universal quantifiers and negation don't commute, DeMorgan's various rules, and so on.

pxc 3y ago
In natural language, usage is prior to grammar, and in this case, actual usage doesn't reflect the apparent rule. If you want to look up research on this particular rule and its observance (or not) the term is 'scopal isomorphism', where the isomorphism is between the scopes of the quantifiers in the surface structure and those in the logical form. That said, this is a pet peeve for me, too. Strikes my ear as wrong every single time I hear it, and drives me nuts.
- jjtheblunt 3y ago
  i'd never seen the term "scopal isomorphism" : thanks! and yeah, i hear it all the time and it is like fingernails on a chalkboard.
  - pxc 3y ago
    I found the terms when I went on an angry research binge in search of a name for my preference and frustration. What I discovered, in addition to the name, was an interesting twist: Scopal ambiguity and isomorphic readings have played an interesting role in research on linguistic development for a long time. It turns out that little, little kids also strongly prefer isomorphic readings of statements involving quantifiers like this. But as they grow up, the 'inverse scope reading becomes accessible' to them— they gain the ability to correctly interpret the common way of phrasing these things which strikes you and me as 'wrong'. I have a lot of thoughts about this, but I've never really followed up on that initial research or asked a linguist what they think all that's about. I think for me, my preference for isomorphic readings and phrasings definitely relates to at least these two things: 1. I'm neurodivergent and part of what that means for me is that context is difficult, and I tend to prefer explicit syntax over reliance on context. 2. I work in a profession where (a) I deal with machines/languages that (obviously) always expect scopal isomorphism and (b) we often care about a quantification (all X are not Y) that is rarely actually intended in natural language. The more I revisit it, the more curious I get about this difference in handling 'ambiguity' (it doesn't feel ambiguous to me at all! lol) and where it comes from. :) If you wanna crawl into this rabbit hole, have at it: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C3&q=scopal+ambiguity+isomorphism+inverse https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C3&q=scop...

mayd 3y ago

“All that glisters is not gold” - William Shakespeare, "The Merchant of Venice."