Ben Harris-Roxas

A great story about uncovering the words locked inside carbonised Roman scrolls. We should be using machine learning for more things like this, and using it to impersonate humans less.

In the modern era, the great pioneer of the scrolls is Brent Seales, a computer science professor at the University of Kentucky. For the past 20 years he’s used advanced medical imaging technology designed for CT scans and ultrasounds to analyze unreadable old texts. For most of that time he’s made the Herculaneum papyri his primary quest. “I had to,” he says. “No one else was working on it, and no one really thought it was even possible.”

Progress was slow. Seales built software that could theoretically take the scans of a coiled scroll and unroll it virtually, but it wasn’t prepared to handle a real Herculaneum scroll when he put it to the test in 2009. “The complexity of what we saw broke all of my software,” he says. “The layers inside the scroll were not uniform. They were all tangled and mashed together, and my software could not follow them reliably.”…

Unlike today’s large-language AI models, which gobble up data, Farritor’s model was able to get by with crumbs. For each 64-pixel-by-64-pixel square of the image, it was merely asking, is there ink here or not? And it helped that the output was known: Greek letters, squared along the right angles of the cross-hatched papyrus fibers.

Can AI Unlock the Secrets of the Ancient World? - Businessweek

“The beach has always been a special privilege to us. It has enriched our quality of life despite the low pay that is available to us,” Serrano said. “Traditionally, people have called it the Poor People’s Beach.” Now, the tourists who visit the shore (when it isn’t closed to beachgoers) to gawk at the SpaceX rockets in the distance have a different name for it, Serrano said: Elon’s Beach.

Elon Musk’s Texas Takeover - Mother Jones

Village Landais, which opened in 2020 and was recently highly commended in Dezeen’s annual design awards, aims to give as much agency and freedom, real and apparent, to the villagers, as the staff call them, as possible. The five-hectare complex has a fence around it, as it must for the safety of vulnerable residents, but within its boundary people can come and go, more or less as they choose. They can stroll around the open spaces (or run, or cycle, as people with Alzheimer’s can also be physically fit), visit their neighbours, go to the restaurant or to a show in the village auditorium, attend to animals and plants in a mini-farm and a kitchen garden.

Hopefully this kind of approach can be made more accessible, and not simply for the rich.

‘They don’t just stay in a room waiting to die’: new buildings giving older people beauty, freedom and dignity - The Observer

Interesting piece by Siva Vaidhyanathan in the Guardian:

Billions of people use such a device now, but hardly anyone peeks inside or thinks about the people who mined the metal or assembled the parts in dangerous conditions. We now have cars and appliances designed to feel like an iPhone – all glass, metal, curves and icons. None of them offer any clue that humans built them or maintained them. Everything seems like magic.

Forty years ago Apple debuted a computer that changed our world, for good or ill - The Guardian

I was incredibly excited when my father bought a Mac in 1985. I even made the invitations for my eighth birthday party in Paint.

Vaidhyanathan is right though. It represented a clear transition, where computers began to mask their origins and impacts. They were seen as countercultural items for those seeking to be "both hip and rich”. The first objects from interstitial space, rather than markers of those spaces.

Image credit: Mac by Thomas Hawk

From Scientific American:

Archaeologists recently rediscovered the long-hidden traces of an ancient Indigenous society in western Ecuador’s Upano Valley: more than 6,000 earthen platforms that once supported houses and communal buildings in 15 urban centers, set amid vast tracts of carefully drained farmland and linked by a network of roads

Link to peer reviewed publication

The picturesque Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan holds general elections on Tuesday with serious economic challenges calling into question its longstanding policy of prioritising “Gross National Happiness” over growth.

Both parties contesting the vote are committed to a constitutionally enshrined philosophy of a government that measures its success by the “happiness and well-being of the people”.

Bhutan to vote as economic strife hits ‘national happiness’ - RTL

I’ve been fortunate to meet John Cook to discuss this work in the past. The crackpot relative is a great framing device, and interesting that it’s so universal:

“Everyone has a variation of that cranky uncle,” Cook says. “But climate misinformation is a very western construct and now we are going into countries that are culturally quite different.

“But we’re finding that the cranky uncle is a universal human experience.”

Climate and vaccine misinformation seemed worlds apart – but it turned out the Cranky Uncle was a universal figure - The Guardian

Nasri, from Iraq’s Assyrian Christian minority, has come to be known as the “father” of Iraqi counterfeit cigarettes. Starting in the late 1980s, he built alliances with powerful political figures and monopolized the smuggling of black-market tobacco into Iraq before constructing a network of facilities to produce his own knock-off brands.

From last year, and an amazing story.

Smoke and Mirrors: How the “Father” of Iraq’s Cigarette Smugglers Built An Empire - OCCRP