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A data table thousands of years old (2020)
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- mcphage 2y ago> I'm pretty confident, though, that in another thousand years there will still be ancient data tables "archived" underground in Iraq, while todays' billions of spreadsheets in digital form and on non-archival paper will have long since disappeared. Probably, but you never know. The Mesopotamians didn’t intend their tablets to last this long, either—but they often got burned in fires, which hardened them so they lasted. So some of our artifacts might get accidentally preserved as well.
- ggm 2y ago"Memoirs found in a bathtub" by Stanislaw Lem. Printouts preserved in mud deep in a fictitious pentagon basement for thousands of years after nuclear holocaust wipes computer memories.
- mcphage 2y agoThat book is wonderfully unsettling. The ending was perfect.
- ggm 2y agoThe star diaries are my favourite, more whimsical. I'm very fond of his robot stories. I've never re-read the Memoirs, they were .. very unsettling. As was the futurological congress. Solaris is too overlayed by the Tarkovsky film for me now, i used to make shredded paper to hang in my office airvents as a homage.
- psd1 2y agoPeace On Earth is my favourite Lem by a long way. The English translation has aged better than Memoirs, too.
- TZubiri 2y agoThe older the stuff you read is, the stronger the selection bias. There must be a huge amount of civilizations that were writing on paper or papyrus around that era, but they just didn't survive. The success of purposeful creation of monuments is usually attributed to their size, like pyramids. Turns out making it big is a pretty good strategy if you want something to last and (not loose it). I'm sure in mileniums we will have both purposefully long lasting small and big monuments, as well as unintentional long lasting records.
- micromodel 2y ago> There must be a huge amount of civilizations that were writing on paper or papyrus around that era, but they just didn't survive. I don't think this part is true. Papyrus wasn't cheap.
- Cthulhu_ 2y agoThis is what I don't really understand about modern-day rich / famous people; they'll build big houses and yachts, and some governments even build government seats and palaces which might be preserved for the ages. But it doesn't feel like they're building "monuments" per se. Then again, survivorship / selection bias like you said; we don't yet know what the Wonders of the World built today will be in 2000-4000 years, because we don't know what will remain or what will be considered significant. I mean there's huge skyscrapers, ostentatious buildings built in the richer cities. There's a giant clock in Mecca, the Venetian and Grand Lisboa in Maccau, the New Century Global Complex in China, etc. But few or none built to just exist, like the pyramids that were sealed off. After solving world hunger etc, if I were stupidly rich, I'd have a monument built. Sealed off containing the world's knowledge in redundant and multiple mediums. And with a visitor center / museum because people will be curious, of course.
- mncharity 2y ago> some of our artifacts might get accidentally preserved as well IIRC (not likely these decades later), when recovering old MIT AI Lab backups (9-track tape goes slowly by a read head, yielding bits, plastic backing, and a pile of magnetic dust), one lisp machine backup contained a core dump file, which included the screen buffer. A single moment of someone's long-ago day, with assorted windows, including the cause of the dump. And a bit of graphics fun - a critter crawling across the screen - frozen in time.
- runevault 2y agoWhat are the odds any electronic data store, tape or SSD or anything in between, could last that long? I guess some random store keeps getting moved from one storage device to another by accident, but beyond that I'm not sure if it is reasonably possible.
- fc417fc802 2y ago[dead]
- panstromek 2y agoMicrosoft is has been developing one for quite some time. Glass structure that should last thousands of years.
- TZubiri 2y agoThe advantages of tables, are that you can visually or geometrically read the contents easily, whether it is reading a row and only a row, or wether it's reading the contents of a column sequentally. While we had spreadsheets since the 90s, which visually allow the user to create tables. Relational database take this concept to the very architecture in both the storage format and as in the data retrieval mechanisms. Relational databases define schemas with fixed length fields, and by extension each row has a fixed length. This is equivalent to the horizontal length of a column, but in terms of bytes. This allows for quickly finding the nth row of a table, or the ith field of a column. Query languages formalize the algorithm for reading a traditional table. Going row by row checking the description of each transaction (Select * from table), comparing it to our searched term (where description = salary), then going to the column with the destination account, and looking for that in another table with a similar process. Just that, interesting how the same metaphor lead to 2 very different types of accounting software.
- gerdesj 2y ago"While we had spreadsheets since the 90s" I was using SuperCalc in the '80s.
- TZubiri 2y agoMy bad. Also lotus 123.
- thristian 2y agoVisiCalc, the first computerised spreadsheet, was released in 1979. Presumably there were non-computerised spreadsheets, actual large sheets of paper, used for calculations before that.
- TZubiri 2y agoThe tab character, along with record separators were present in the OG ascii block too, so they were probably always there.
- niobe 2y agoExcel is in our DNA and will never die
- TZubiri 2y agoFunnily enough our DNA does not use a fixed-length offset mechanism. It uses null termination sequences (and start sequences too, for some reason.) Which is closer to the storage mechanism of excel (XML), and not to it's visualization interface (tables).
- klabb3 2y agoInteresting. Well yeah null termination seems better if (a) you don’t have an integer encoding and (b) you have random ”bit” flips.
- TZubiri 2y agoI don't think you need integer encoding to process fixed lengths. They do it just fine at the word level for codons. You would need a specific mechanic processors for each different schema length pattern though. I think bit flips have no effect on the appropriateness of either fixed length or null termed. But omissions and comissions are probably why anything fixed length doesn't work.
- jon_richards 2y agoUnfortunately our DNA is also in excel. Several genes had to be renamed because they kept being identified as dates.
- smcin 2y agoExcellent
- jbkcc 2y agoThis is amazing. I’ve been collecting images of tables in an are.na album for a while, trying to get a handle on all the ways they show up in visual culture. This one is by far the oldest I’ve ever seen! If you’re interested in this you might enjoy the album, too. It’s https://www.are.na/joshua-kopin/tabular-presentation https://www.are.na/joshua-kopin/tabular-presentation
- eieio 2y agoIs there a good word for "obvious" that doesn't have negative connotations? When I see something like this it makes me think about how a spreadsheet structure is "obvious" - but I mean it positively! It's a beautiful, intuitive, almost inevitable way to lay out data, and I'm delighted that folks came up with something like this so long ago. I feel this way about a lot of my favorite posts on HN, whether they're a bit of history, a totally new invention, or something different entirely. And I certainly feel it here.
- highwind 2y agoHow about self-evident?
- hammock 2y agoInnate, instinctive, intuitive, natural, automatic. I don’t think obvious is a bad word though. Descartes did not invent x-y coordinates until the 1600s, yet a table of columns and rows is totally natural and emergent given a two-dimensional recordkeeping medium
- HappMacDonald 2y agoI'm never not going to be gobsmacked that Euclid didn't ever try using a coordinate grid as a tool. 8I
- hammock 2y agoColumn headers as well, as per modern convention, as opposed to row headers.
- notorandit 2y agoUsually we put "properties" as column headers while rows represent entities whose those properties are assigned or recorded. It would be interesting to understand why it's not been the other way around or whether Sumerians used both orientations.
- BeefWellington 2y agoThanks for sharing this. Pretty awesome to see how old aspects of technology are, especially as relates to clear and concise communication.
- 29athrowaway 2y agoIf you like history and you like tables, these are some of the most historically relevant tables: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfonsine_tables https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfonsine_tables
- ecocentrik 2y agoNot quite as ancient but still very cool. "Nicolaus Copernicus bought a copy while at the University of Cracow, and cared about it enough to have it professionally bound with pieces of wood and leather.[9] Alexander Bogdanov maintained that these tables formed the basis for Copernicus's development of a heliocentric understanding in astronomy."
- Cthulhu_ 2y agoThat's a neat example of how "boring" statistical data / record keeping can lead to great scientific results.
- 29athrowaway 2y agoScientific theories are models, and models are based on data.
- numpy-thagoras 2y agoSumerian Spreadsheets. This means only one thing: the History channel will find a way to attribute the creation of spreadsheets to aliens.
- Cthulhu_ 2y agoOr maybe it was a time traveling accountant? Either way, the truth is out there...
- OrvalWintermute 2y agoNotice how it includes the Igigi (lesser gods of their pantheon) and mention great weapons of An[u], Enlil & Enki, the Ruling gods of their pantheon, associated with city destruction
- closed 2y agoIt's neat to see tablets discussed in the context of modern tools. I recently helped edit an article for Great Tables[1] that discusses the history of tables like this, and recently Hannes mentioned a protocuniform tablet in his duckdb keynote at posit::conf()[2]. There's something really inspiring from realizing how far back tables go. [1]: https://posit-dev.github.io/great-tables/blog/design-philosophy/ https://posit-dev.github.io/great-tables/blog/design-philoso... [2]: https://youtu.be/GELhdezYmP0?si=bSISmFjeRpKxfLWq https://youtu.be/GELhdezYmP0?si=bSISmFjeRpKxfLWq
- kijin 2y ago"Table" and "tablet" literally have the same root. It's flat surface, a two-dimensional blank space that is perfect for laying out data, dinner, or anything else you'd like to display.
- notorandit 2y agoWhat it's not obvious it the amount of technical and cultural advancements Sumerians did. We don't know enough about them as their history has been mostly lost and only crumbles and leftovers can be recovered from the dust of the millennia. Besides a bunch of words still in use, in some form, in modern languages, the writing itself seems not to be the greatest invention, while bringing humanity from prehistory silence to history chatter. I wouldn't be surprised if we found evidence of more technical and social advancements we have given for granted in the past thousand years.
- rezmason 2y agoFor years I've wondered what the first, earliest color lookup table was. Like any mapping from an index to a color value. Like a design for a Roman mosaic that indexes tesserae, or a declaration of which parts of a statue or mural would receive which color paint. Or even the inventory of someone who traded in pigments.
- smpx7 2y agoExcel -2k
- psd1 2y agoOh god. Debugging macros was horrible before VB.Cuneiform. You had to sprinkle your code with because there was no support for
- nuancebydefault 2y agoStill trying to debug those 2 sentences...
- psd1 2y agoMy heiroglyph emojis seem not to render in my client. That ruins the comment. Don't worry, you didn't miss much...
- GnarfGnarf 2y agoI'm working on a project to 3D-print tablets of text, press them onto clay slabs, and fire the latter in a kiln. Should preserve the information, such as biographies, for as long as Babylonian tablets.
- jvm___ 2y agoI've wondered if you could stamp them into an aluminum can. Like with a typewriter (obviously too weak) or some vintage typesetting press device. Not sure if the aluminum would last it probably would.
- yurishimo 2y agoDepends on how thick the metal is. I’ve seen aluminum cans be eaten away by time. Something a few millimeters should suffice.
- GnarfGnarf 2y agoI did this for a while. I found a roll of heavy-duty aluminum foil (not quite pie-plate thick), and scavenged some old dot-matrix printers. Removing the ribbon, I printed text and low-res images on the foil. I inserted a roll containing my father's biography in the ashes of his funeral urn. Should be readable by archaeologists centuries from now.
- uncomplexity_ 2y agothat's a heavy ass ipad to bring around
- yzydserd 2y agoRumor has it the ancient Chinese were using Pandas even earlier.
- jcarrano 2y agoI wonder what would happen if we had a time machine and could bring one of those ancient accountants to the modern age. Maybe in just a couple of weeks they would be able to fill in Excel sheets with ease.
- nunez 2y agoAmazing. I wonder what their generations "AI" was.