#carbonising

[catilinas]

THEY FUCKING DID IT!!!!!!!!!!!!

#tagamemnon #villa of the papyri #it is. seemingly more philodemus #but like. who cares about philodemus they have a method of digitally unwrapping + reading 2000 year old carbonised papyri #holy SHIT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! #beeps

[thepastisalreadywritten]

Scholars of antiquity believe they are on the brink of a new era of understanding after researchers armed with artificial intelligence read the hidden text of a charred scroll that was buried when Mount Vesuvius erupted nearly 2,000 years ago.

Hundreds of papyrus scrolls held in the library of a luxury Roman villa in Herculaneum were burned to a crisp when the town was devastated by the intense blast of heat, ash and pumice that destroyed nearby Pompeii in AD79.

Excavations in the 18th century recovered more than 1,000 whole or partial scrolls from the mansion, thought to be owned by Julius Caesar’s father-in-law.

However, the black ink was unreadable on the carbonised papyri and the scrolls crumbled to pieces when researchers tried to open them.

The breakthrough in reading the ancient material came from the $1m Vesuvius Challenge, a contest launched in 2023 by Brent Seales, a computer scientist at the University of Kentucky, and Silicon Valley backers.

The competition offered prizes for extracting text from high-resolution CT scans of a scroll taken at Diamond, the UK’s national synchrotron facility in Oxfordshire.

On Monday, Nat Friedman, a US tech executive and founding sponsor of the challenge, announced that a team of three computer-savvy students, Youssef Nader in Germany, Luke Farritor in the US, and Julian Schilliger in Switzerland, had won the $700,000 (£554,000) grand prize after reading more than 2,000 Greek letters from the scroll.

Papyrologists who have studied the text recovered from the blackened scroll were stunned at the feat.

“This is a complete gamechanger,” said Robert Fowler, emeritus professor of Greek at Bristol University and chair of the Herculaneum Society.

“There are hundreds of these scrolls waiting to be read.”

Dr Federica Nicolardi, a papyrologist at the University of Naples Federico II, added:

“This is the start of a revolution in Herculaneum papyrology and in Greek philosophy in general. It is the only library to come to us from ancient Roman times.”

“We are moving into a new era,” said Seales, who led efforts to read the scrolls by virtually unwrapping the CT images and training AI algorithms to detect the presence of ink.

He now wants to build a portable CT scanner to image scrolls without moving them from their collections.

In October, Farritor won the challenge’s $40,000 “first letters” prize when he identified the ancient Greek word for “purple” in the scroll.

He teamed up with Nader in November, with Schilliger, who developed an algorithm to automatically unwrap CT images, joining them days before the contest deadline on 31 December.

Together, they read more than 2,000 letters of the scroll, giving scholars their first real insight into its contents.

“It’s been an incredibly rewarding journey,” said Youssef.

“The adrenaline rush is what kept us going. It was insane. It meant working 20-something hours a day. I didn’t know when one day ended and the next day started.”

“It probably is Philodemus,” Fowler said of the author.

“The style is very gnarly, typical of him, and the subject is up his alley.”

The scroll discusses sources of pleasure, touching on music and food – capers in particular – and whether the pleasure experienced from a combination of elements owes to the major or minor constituents, the abundant or the scare.

“In the case of food, we do not right away believe things that are scarce to be absolutely more pleasant than those which are abundant,” the author writes.

“I think he’s asking the question: what is the source of pleasure in a mix of things? Is it the dominant element, is it the scarce element, or is it the mix itself?” said Fowler.

The author ends with a parting shot against his philosophical adversaries for having “nothing to say about pleasure, either in general or particular."

Seales and his research team spent years developing algorithms to digitally unwrap the scrolls and detect the presence of ink from the changes it produced in the papyrus fibres.

He released the algorithms for contestants to build on in the challenge.

Friedman’s involvement proved valuable not only for attracting financial donors.

When Seales was meant to fly to the UK to have a scroll scanned, a storm blew in cancelling all commercial flights.

Worried they might lose their slot at the Diamond light source, Friedman hastily organised a private jet for the trip.

Beyond the hundreds of Herculaneum scrolls waiting to be read, many more may be buried at the villa, adding weight to arguments for fresh excavations.

"The same technology could be applied to papyrus wrapped around Egyptian mummies," Fowler said.

These could include everything from letters and property deeds to laundry lists and tax receipts, shining light on the lives of ordinary ancient Egyptians.

“There are crates of this stuff in the back rooms of museums,” Fowler said.

The challenge continues this year with the goal to read 85% of the scroll and lay the foundations for reading all of those already excavated.

Scientists need to fully automate the process of tracing the surface of the papyrus inside each scroll and improve ink detection on the most damaged parts.

“When we launched this less than a year ago, I honestly wasn’t sure it’d work,” said Friedman.

“You know, people say money can’t buy happiness, but they have no imagination. This has been pure joy. It’s magical what happened, it couldn’t have been scripted better."

Source: The Guardian

How the Herculaneum Papyri were carbonised in the Mount Vesuvius eruption – Video

5 February 2024

#Herculaneum Papyri #Mount Vesuvius #volcanic eruption #antiquity #artificial intelligence #papyrus scrolls #Pompeii #AD79 #Herculaneum #Youtube #carbonised papyri #$1m Vesuvius Challenge #Brent Seales #Diamond #papyrologist #Herculaneum papyrology #Ancient Rome #CT images #ai algorithms

[bearbench-img]

イワナ

イワナは、日本やロシアなどの寒冷な地域に生息する淡水魚の一種です。学名はSalvelinus leucomaenisです。イワナはサケ科に属し、美しい斑点模様が特徴です。主に川や湖の清流で見られ、清冽な水域を好むことが知られています。

イワナは肉食性であり、昆虫や小魚、甲殻類などを捕食します。また、成長に伴って水中生物だけでなく水生昆虫や淡水甲殻類、小魚などの動物質を主食に変化することもあります。

一般的に、イワナは美味であり、特に釣りの対象として人気があります。そのため、釣り愛好家やアングラーにとって魅力的な対象となっています。一方で、一部の地域では生息数が減少しているため、保護の対象とされることもあります。

イワナはその美しい体色や流れのある清らかな水域に生息する姿から、自然の美しさと調和を象徴する存在としても評価されています。

手抜きイラスト集

#岩魚 #Char #Car #Carbonizarse #Verkohlen #Carboniser #手抜きイラスト #Japonais #bearbench

[lucubratemagazine]

Educate for Brown or Green Jobs?

Both green and brown jobs require workers to that are dedicated to their employers’ success.

Lucubrate Magazine, February 15th, 2023 Young people will be disproportionately affected by climate-driven erosion of their ecosystems and traditional work sources such as fishing, farming, and manufacturing. At the same time, we can see the creation of new green and blue jobs across almost every sector – in smart agriculture, renewable energy, electric vehicles, and more.  De-carbonising the…

View On WordPress

#Brown jobs #De-carbonising #Development #Education #Environment #Future #Global #Green #Green economy #Green Employment #Green jobs #Green skills #Green Transition #Greener production #Greening #Job #Mining #Skills #Wildlife #work #World

[probablyasocialecologist]

There are enough highways, apartments and offices, malls and hotels, restaurants and theme parks—this despite an ongoing crisis of housing affordability. In the over-carbonised economies of the world’s wealthiest countries, maybe we don’t need to build any more, or only do so in a very targeted manner: hospitals and archives, cooling centres, housing and amenities for climate refugees. Even in these cases, there is often the capacity to reuse and redistribute what we have—to reconsider the role of design as one of maintenance, repair, and adequate comfort.  Some buildings are needed. Class A office space and luxury condominiums, not so much. After the Covid lockdowns, the vacant office space in New York City could fill twenty-six Empire State Buildings. Seems like enough. Yet there are still cranes in the sky, still new towers on the boards—indeed, the production of the built environment (and not only in New York) is essential to a growth economy. Any form of enough-ness goes against this premise of relative economic strength being measured by growth, or really by the growth of growth—how much has the GDP gone up, and at what rate? To suggest that, individually or collectively, we already have enough goes against the very foundation of consumer culture. Many life worlds are organized largely, if not exclusively, around accumulation, wanting and getting more—more stuff, more space, more savings.  The health of the US economy in particular is measured by rates of consumer spending, and through this measure implicitly directs the global supply chain. What, for example, is the carbon cost of the resurgence of interest in Barbie? The plastics, the shipping, the advertising, the repainting of houses. And given the carbon intensive energy regime that hums beneath this always-growing global economy, all of this—stuff, space, savings—is dripping in oil, vibrating with carbon intensity, keeping the arrow of emissions pointed inexorably upwards. The Austrian/Puerto Rican economist Leopold Kohr referred to this as Skyscraper Economics—how high can we build? How much can an economy grow? Is there a measure of health, or wealth, that is not about this competitive increase, but about a horizontal redistribution? At last year’s Beyond Growth Summit in Brussels, this was framed as a distinction between “ecologically harmful growth competition and well being cooperation.” Architecture’s fealty to growth, investment, and financialization is caught up in this distinction, and faces the challenge of finding opportunities for creativity within a new set of constraints. Why, when a new building is announced on Instagram or in a glossy magazine by some proud firm or client, do we see square footage, a few swanky features, but no mention of the estimated carbon emissions of the building’s life-cycle?

#degrowth #climate change #architecture

[sunshinemoonrx]

800 new deciphered classical texts about to drop, thanks to volcano

So when Vesuvius erupted and buried Pompeii, it also buried the nearby town of Herculaneum, which contained a library of papyrus scrolls, about 800 of which were recovered. Being carbonised preserved them from the fragility papyrus normally exhibits anywhere wetter than Egypt, but also presented a new problem: You can't unroll them without disintegrating them, so how do you read them?

Well, these days we have Technology that emits Particles, and someone just won a prize for figuring out how to read the scrolls with CT scanning:

Youssef Nader, Luke Farritor, and Julian Schilliger demonstrated their technique by translating the end of one of the scrolls, which turned out to be an Epicurean discourse on material pleasures, words not read for almost 2,000 years:

...as too in the case of food, we do not right away believe things that are scarce to be absolutely more pleasant than those which are abundant[...]Such questions will be considered frequently.

In the closing section of the text our author takes a parting shot at his adversaries, who “have nothing to say about pleasure, either in general or in particular, when it is a question of definition.” Finally the scroll concludes: “… for we do [not] refrain from questioning some things, but understanding/remembering others. And may it be evident to us to say true things, as they might have often appeared evident!”

The process is currently time-consuming, hence the small amount of text translated now, but the organisers hope to improve its efficiency now they have a workable method, and aim to have mostly-complete translations of a handful of scrolls within the next year.

Safe to say everyone who works in a field with a holy-grail lost classical text they'd resigned themselves to never being able to read is crossing their fingers right now!

#classics #herculaneum

[catilinas]

call my penis quadratus the way it was carbonised in the eruption of mount vesuvius

#BREAD JOKE #beeps

[ebookporn]

Researchers use AI to read word on ancient scroll burned by Vesuvius

University of Kentucky challenged computer scientists to reveal contents of carbonised papyrus, a ‘potential treasure trove for historians’

by Ian Sample

When the blast from the eruption of Mount Vesuvius reached Herculaneum in AD79, it burned hundreds of ancient scrolls to a crisp in the library of a luxury villa and buried the Roman town in ash and pumice.

The disaster appeared to have destroyed the scrolls for good, but nearly 2,000 years later researchers have extracted the first word from one of the texts, using artificial intelligence to peer deep inside the delicate, charred remains.

The discovery was announced on Thursday by Prof Brent Seales, a computer scientist at the University of Kentucky, and others who launched the Vesuvius challenge in March to accelerate the reading of the texts. Backed by Silicon Valley investors, the challenge offers cash prizes to researchers who extract legible words from the carbonised scrolls.

Two computer science students, Luke Farritor in Nebraska and Youssef Nader in Berlin, who took up the Vesuvius challenge, improved the search process and independently hit on the same ancient Greek word in one of the scrolls: “πορφύραc”, meaning “purple”.

“This is the first recovered text from one of these rolled-up, intact scrolls,” said Stephen Parsons, a staff researcher on the digital restoration initiative at the university. Researchers have since uncovered more letters from the ancient scroll.

READ MORE

#ancient greek #volcanes #librarians #archeology #literary anthropology #ai #artificial intelligence #vesuvius #libraries #archives #purple

[whumptober]

To the anon who asked about the tags - I volunteer as a Tag Wrangler for AO3 so I may be able to give some insight. Yes, if a tag reaches RO3 (that is, being used by at least 3 unique users for WORKS) then it becomes a "canonical" freeform tag and will show up on the drop-down list.

Seeing as you're making your works drafts, it could be the case that some wranglers will wait until actual works are published before carbonising a tag, but others may canonise it as soon as it looks like usage will pick up.

Don't worry about it too much yet, and happy Whumping!!!

Thank you for your insight! This is all very useful to know :)

#asks #mod kitty

[bougiebutchbitch]

Who of the ofmd crew is fulfilling the crucial job and is the designated dad cooking on the BBQ? Which one of these boys can work a grill?

THE MOST IMPORTANT QUESTION OF ALL TIME

okay okay okay SO roach CAN work a grill because cooking is his passion and he has Ye Olde Michelin Stars but my man deserves a night off so for the purpose of this, he's outta the running

Izzy has the Dad Energy and the Tits that would look great beneath a 'kiss the cook' apron, but this man cannot create edible foodstuff. I refuse to believe it. I draw a hard line. Izzy can whittle and he can fight and he can look cute as all heckie doing it, but he cannot cook. He's off the grill crew for Crimes Against Cow. He has the concentration! He has the dedication! He would dutifully watch that meat sear, and it'd somehow taste absolutely shite.

No one knows how he does it. It's a gift and a curse.

Ed has ADHD brain and should not be left unattended in the kitchen (....horribly relatable). He claims to love burnt food and that everyone else just doesn't have his palate, because anything he's making invariably turns out carbonised. He gets distracted waaaaay too easily, because just Standing There and Watching The Meat does NOT have enough enrichment for that super-speedy brain. Also banned from the grill, for life.

Stede has never lifted a finger for himself in his entire life sdhklgfhdfshgsdl

The obvious grillmaster daddy among them? JIM.

#or Archie #ofmd #our flag means death

[omgreally]

The Doomed, Part One - T - Din Djarin/Reader - 800 words Part Two here - E-rated

Mando has a monopoly on wanting things he shouldn't.

(Mutual pining with a side of angst.)

If he’s being perfectly honest with himself, Din Djarin never expected to live this long.

It’s the life of a Mandalorian, and especially the life of a bounty hunter, a warrior, to die young. To burn bright and blaze out fast like the fading trail of a descending comet. A brief flash in the atmosphere, and then gone.

As the years tick by, and the jobs get progressively more dangerous, and the ache in his back grows, the Mandalorian wonders - will this be it? Is this the final time he will take up his blaster, the last time he will start the engine of the Razor Crest, to soar off past the horizon without the promise of return?

He is always surprised when it isn’t, but not always grateful. Sometimes it feels like too much work, patching his burned and broken body, feeling a little worse each time as the scar tissue grows. He’s tired. But it never ends, although it gets very close sometimes.

Those times he knows it would be so easy to give up, like he’s seen happen to dozens of hunters before him. But he’s not like them. Something sets him apart, and it’s not just the helmet or the armour. He wonders if he’s imagining it sometimes. But he never has time to fully examine it; he’s too busy surviving.

And then one day he meets a Child, and everything Mando thinks he knows about himself changes.

And then he meets you and it happens again.

Most people don’t get second chances at living a different life. Din Djarin figures he’s on his third, maybe fourth. But he forgets that when he sees your smile, or the way you duck your head to hide your expression behind your hair. He finds himself memorising the curve of your neck and the set of your shoulders. The sound of your laugh. Waiting for the day when you leave, and he’ll never hear it again. Wondering why the thought of you leaving feels akin to another little death.

He’s lost the Child once, and got him back, and he almost didn’t survive that. He doesn’t think the carbonised, atrophied lump of his heart could take another loss.

So he tries to pretend you aren’t there. A little practice for the inevitable. You notice, though - question the back of his helmet, his shoulder so resolutely turned to you, where before he would speak - not effusively, but enough for you to gauge his interest. Now it’s like a duracrete wall.

“Mando, did I do something wrong?”

He flinches like he’s been shot at. The question drills into his chest and lodges there like an ugly, bloodied splinter. The kid coos from his lap, reaching for you, and you take him up into your arms - a place Mando could never hope to belong - he feels a pang of misplaced jealousy and chides himself inwardly. And still, he is silent.

“Okay, well, I’m gonna feed the little guy. Again,” you chatter, hoping by ignoring the wall between you it might somehow crumble of its own volition - or his. “You know where I’ll be if you decide to stop sulking.”

Mando grunts - sulking? - but he lets you go, climbing down into the belly of the Crest with the kid tucked into the crook of your arm. You’re gone by the time he concocts a suitable retort. I'm not sulking. Yeah, real convincing.

He thinks you should probably leave as soon as possible, before it hurts too much to say goodbye. But as he listens to the sound of your voice drifting up from the hold, lifted in mirth as you try to stop Grogu getting rations all over himself, he wonders if it’s not already too late.

He's screwed.

In more ways than one.

Sometimes, Mando wishes he hadn't lived this long to face this particular problem. He's never wanted someone before. Not like this. Nothing like the fierce, lava-hot lance of desire lodged seemingly permanent in his chest.

It's uncomfortable. And although he's survived worse, he's already wondering how he's going to patch this particular wound once the inevitable happens. Bacta isn't going to cut it.

Din groans to himself and resists the urge to slam his head against the control panel. Instead he sets the ship to auto-pilot and rises to his feet - ignoring the pang that surfaces occasionally in his knee - to go join the two of you in the hold.

He's never been one to run away from a fight, after all.

At least, not without a plan.

He's not sure what he's going to say to you without one. But a bounty hunter learns to improvise.

Which is all well and good right up until he lets go of the ladder and turns to face your smile.

Dank farrik, he thinks; This time - I'm doomed.

Little does he know, you are, too.

#din djarin/f!reader #din djarin/you #din djarin x reader #mando x reader #mando x you #mando/you #mando/reader #mando fic

[marcelwrites]

you taste the familiar acridity of ashes, but could've sworn, you'd never let this happen again, how does it feel, to have the bitter grit, cover your teeth and tongue, there's no flavour but rank carbonisation, but the shame is worst of all.

'carbon' a poem by matthew marcel

#marcelwrites #poem #poetry #writing #words

[tournevole]

Collages

Ces jours-là, Jours de énième scandale pédophile, Énième bavure policière, énième féminicide, Énième incident mortel dans une usine, Ces jours-là, Lendemains d’élections, d’attentat, de cataclysme, Ces jours-là, Une lave noire et visqueuse déboule dans ma gorge et carbonise toutes mes belles petites phrases humanistes qui me sauvent tous les jours sauf ces jours-là.

Jours de paires de ciseaux, d’images en noir et blanc, de précision et de silence.

Une main qui tient une paire de ciseaux Ne peut rien faire d’autre que tenir une paire de ciseaux.

Soit tu découpes des corps dans le papier glacé, Soit tu t’enfonces la pointe de tes ciseaux dans l’œil.

Ces jours-là.

Lisette Lombé

[ancientstuff]

Well, this is incredibly exciting! Finally a really good use for AI (yes, I'm aware there are others - I've just been dealing with a lot of AI-generated cheating at work).

#archaeology #burned scroll #Vesuvius #AI assistance #University of Kentucky

[hirocimacruiser]

Toyota GT86 with some carbonisation

#GT86 carbon bonnet #GT86 #Toyota GT86

[tobacconist]

fell asleep with chicken burgers in the oven, when i awoke they were completely carbonised

#actually quite upset about it