griffzhowl

6 ms·

31.
by griffzhowl 9mo ago
That's cool isn't it? Even to the Akkadians, Sumerian was an ancient language (prehistoric!), that became sacred. Aren't there also bilingual texts that are used for learning it? Or maybe I'm thinking of different versio
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by griffzhowl 9mo ago
Yeah, the meteor story is rubbish. Strange Bristol Uni published this. They're an actual, legitimate, good university.
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by griffzhowl 9mo ago
Yeah, my bad for sharing. I mainly did it for the pictures because it looks spectacular, and just read through the story quickly, looked like book published by Bristol University? But as per references from other comments here, the landslid
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by griffzhowl 9mo ago
Thanks for the landslide info! Good to have the proper knowledge. Shame there's no reliable stuff about the tablet. Maybe it hasn't been translated by a sane, competent professional
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by griffzhowl 9mo ago
If you're looking for a source on the landslide, another commenter here posted this, that seems more reliable than wikipedia. Searching for Kofel's impact, rather than landslide, brings up nonsense because there's only pseudo
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by griffzhowl 9mo ago
Ah, oh well. Was an interesting story. But I mainly shared this to remind myself of this incredible star map, or whatever it really is... Seems not easy to find bona fide information on it, maybe because it's untranslated/decoded
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Sumerian Star Map Recorded the Impact of an Asteroid (2024)(archaeologyworlds.com)
154 points by griffzhowl 9mo ago|55 comments
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by griffzhowl 9mo ago
So you're confidently stating it's not the normal behaviour... Can you tell me what the average speed is for human drivers outside elementary schools at drop-off times?
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by griffzhowl 9mo ago
Well, this is exactly the problem. This tactic works until you get to a problem that nobody has solved before, even if it's just a relatively minor one that no one has solved because no one has tried to because it's so specific. I
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by griffzhowl 9mo ago
> in a physical sense free will does not exist There can be similar problems with having clear definitions of free will as there is for consciousness. For example, if I define free will as the capacity to formulate and evaluate various p
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Oldest cave painting could rewrite human creativity timeline(bbc.com)
3 points by griffzhowl 9mo ago|0 comments
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by griffzhowl 9mo ago
The wiki article doesn't say domestication occurred roughly 14k years ago, it says at least 14k years ago, because that's the earliest definitive evidence of a domesticated dog. Here are the next two sentences from the wiki articl
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by griffzhowl 9mo ago
True, maybe full formalisation is too strict and the evaluation should be fuzzier
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by griffzhowl 9mo ago
True, they use the word "reasoning". Part of my point was just to focus on the more concrete concept: the capacity to produce and evaluate arguments.
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by griffzhowl 9mo ago
Whether the Holy Grail is unreachable or not is the question. Of course, the problem in full generality is hard, but that doesn't mean it can't be approached in various partial ways, either by restricting the inputs as you suggest
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by griffzhowl 9mo ago
> the current algorithms are clearly a dead end for thinking machines. These discussions often get derailed into debates about what "thinking" means. If we define thinking as the capacity to produce and evaluate arguments, as t
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by griffzhowl 10mo ago
A decline in number of questions asked can also be because most people's questions are already answered in the database. How would you query this for post views over time?
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by griffzhowl 10mo ago
> A government right now is using its power to selectively defund and wipe out big chunks of scientific research and communications that ultimately exist to protect your future. This is the significant point. The govt is defunding yet an
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by griffzhowl 10mo ago
Yes, it can easily just mean that he has some kind of inside information about progress that he doesn't want to divulge, but this is still far from "crypto is broken, guize" Still, if that's true, it's an example of
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by griffzhowl 10mo ago
Aaronson says: > This is the clearest warning that I can offer in public right now about the urgency of migrating to post-quantum cryptosystems... That has a clear implication that he knows something that he doesn't want to say publ
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by griffzhowl 10mo ago
> We know that the Inca didn't build Sacsayhuaman because they said that they didn't. Where are you getting this from? The Spanish chroniclers report Inca tradition that the 15th century leader Pachacuti initiated the building.
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by griffzhowl 10mo ago
That's funny, I thought Worcestershire sauce was based on some Asian fish sauce because it has the colonial ingredients like tamarind etc. I had a look on wiki and seems it's not known where the recipe comes from but it dates from
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by griffzhowl 10mo ago
Amazing, thanks for pointing it out. In the meantime, there's been some rejigging of the classification so it's this related genus where they've found the melanosomes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huadano
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by griffzhowl 10mo ago
There might even be a directish connection, one way or the other, between garum and SE Asian fish sauce, since Roman coins have been found in Vietnam. Can't find the better source on that specifically now but this is a nice article abo
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by griffzhowl 10mo ago
They only started adding feathers after they found evidence of them being feathered, though. Plus there's zero direct evidence for their colours so there's no option but to use guesswork in these cases. And a lot of dinosaur recon
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by griffzhowl 10mo ago
Yes, the suggestion that they're trolling goes too far. However, I did a tiny bit of investigating, and according to this write-up it does seem like Brinkmann presents his work as resembling the originals https://www.smithso
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by griffzhowl 10mo ago
Yes, this is what tfa says, and it's a good point. But tfa also points out that the archaeologists/reconstructionists know that what they're producing differs from the original. The thing is the discipline of reconstruction m
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by griffzhowl 10mo ago
Thanks for the context, but there hasn't been a general tech sector crash since 2019, so I don't think the 2000-03 comparison is apt. And while 2019 might have been third-highest year for investment in 2020, according to this it&#
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by griffzhowl 10mo ago
He always has these brilliant ond original perspectives on even the simplest concepts. He also has this series of talks beginning with the question "What is probability, what is randomness?" https://www.youtube.com&#x2F
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by griffzhowl 10mo ago
How much of the article did you read? The main substance of it is not that the UN rankings are flawed, but how the rankings change based on the broader analysis by Blanchflower and Bryson. That result can't so easily be read off from o

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