The historian was looking for conceptual connections between Ptolemy and Galileo, but the discovery of Galileo’s handwriting in Ptolemy’s book seemed to be a surprise.
I interpreted the fact that he was reviewing multiple copies of the same text as him searching for Galileo’s notes, but I suppose it’s possible that the motivation was the possibility of discrepancies between printings.
Owen Gingerich was a historian of astronomy who did a census of printed early editions of Copernicus' book De revolutionibus. He found a tradition of students copying annotations from teachers readings into their own copies of the book. I recollect that he was able to trace various traditions of commentary each stemming from a well known astronomy teacher.
I suppose that checking early printings of key works looking for annotations is a pretty standard thing to do now.
The Almagest was hand written about 1400 years before Galileo lived, so it's not so much looking at different printings as at different editions that are based on different set of copies of the copies of the copies etc, further many editors would try to "fix" the ancient work, removing material they didn't like and adding their own stuff or material from other works... it can get very messy.
I've always wanted to make a virus like those of the olden days. I wouldn't do anything malicious with it, but maybe I would deploy it to a friends computer if it wasn't very destructive. What resources are there to learn about viruses?
No one actually knows what the payload from basemetrika.ru contains, though. So it's possible it was originally intended to be more damaging. But no matter what it would have caught attention super fast, so there's probably an upper limit to how sophisticated it could have been.
> The S, K combinators defined by Moses Schönfinkel on December 7, 1920, are together known to be computation universal. On December 7, 2020, Stephen Wolfram made the suggestion that S alone might also be universal.
I wonder how long in advance Stephen Wolfram first had this thought and waited until the centennial to publicize the suggestion.
I’ve talked with him in person for a couple of hours once and he was the most endearing kind of grandfatherly person. Really caught me off guard how pleasant and open he was. Somehow I was expecting someone a lot more adversarial.
So wonderful that someone at WED Enterprises chose to reply encouragingly to a 10-year-old kid. “They rejected it straight away, they don't accept unsolicited ideas” or ignoring altogether seems to be the standard legally-defensive response.
Adding the obligatory disclaimer: Berkshire Hathaway selling $1.7B of Amazon stock is likely a decision by Ted Weschler or Todd Combs, still notable but not necessarily Warren Buffett himself.
Cost of electricity. Accelerators consume huge amounts of power and require the appropriate infrastructure. For example in RIKEN, Japan, agreement is made beforehand with electric companies to provide power to the accelerator during specific spring and fall months, where demand for air conditioner and heaters are at the lowest.
NSRL is like $7k/hr and required over a dozen physicists when running the beam. The point is to get the most amount of experiments performed while everyone is available to do so. We would work like a 12 hour day when running tests at NSRL without any days off until we were done.
Doesn't power costs also affect shutdown periods? I know that CERN would shutdown in winter due to increased power costs and power demands around then. I suppose something similar may affect accelerators in the US.
Sites are tracked by cultural ministries using restricted site inventories that are only open to government officials and established researchers. There are many more known sites than there is funding to excavate them so this one was likely known for decades before they got around to it.
These site inventories are generally filled using cultural resource management records submitted by surveyors, miners, construction companies, etc. who are often legally required to file them. A few tour guides I’ve used in Mexico found new ruins in the jungle and submitted their records with GOS coordinates and pictures. If locals knew about it, someone likely recorded the location a while ago.
This is fascinating, I had no idea it worked this way. I just always sort of assumed people happened upon random places that eventually make the news, not that there's a backlog of places to explore.
The backlog has actually gotten really bad in the last decade because of all the LIDAR surveys. There are many large settlements in the jungles of Central and South America that have been discovered in recent years that are both more expensive to study because they're so inaccessible and much larger so they're difficult to keep secret.
But, on the whole, the server seems to be doing well enough for something near the top of HN. The website is served by nginx and appears to be mostly static pages.
The historian was looking for conceptual connections between Ptolemy and Galileo, but the discovery of Galileo’s handwriting in Ptolemy’s book seemed to be a surprise.