[HN Gopher] First glimpse inside burnt scroll after 2k years
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First glimpse inside burnt scroll after 2k years
Author : goodcanadian
Score : 46 points
Date : 2025-02-05 17:12 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.bbc.co.uk)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.bbc.co.uk)
| generalizations wrote:
| > The document, which looks like a lump of charcoal, was charred
| by the volcanic eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79AD and is too
| fragile to ever be physically opened.
|
| > But now scientists have used a combination of X-ray imaging and
| artificial intelligence to virtually unfurl it, revealing rows
| and columns of text.
|
| "scientists"
|
| They talked to the head of the vesuvius challenge, which is the
| actual project that figured out how to read the scrolls, the head
| of the library that holds the scrolls, and the guy who runs the
| xray machine. But the people who solved this weren't scientists.
| They were largely college kids.
|
| This has a lot more interesting detail. https://scrollprize.org/
| gkbrk wrote:
| College kids can be scientists. Anyone doing science is a
| scientist.
|
| There are even middle-school kids doing science. Or random
| adults with non-STEM jobs collecting data as a hobby for
| Citizen Science.
|
| We should be careful not to gatekeep the words science or
| scientist. The more mad scientists we have throwing spaghetti
| on the wall to see what sticks, the more things we can
| discover.
| generalizations wrote:
| I absolutely agree, and the (possibly badly said) intention
| was to highlight that credit is not being given where credit
| is due. "scientists" being a way to obscure the actual people
| who pulled this off.
| moonlet wrote:
| Yup as long as it's done in a scientific way and published
| under peer review doesn't matter who did it - that's the
| great thing about blind publication review in a lot of fields
| hinkley wrote:
| You're gonna be shocked to learn how many research papers the
| "primary author" is the faculty advisor, that the second author
| is a grad student who wrote the entire paper, and the professor
| only observed/inspired the project and proofread the paper.
| generalizations wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42985972
| timewizard wrote:
| I completely agree. They even have a picture of the light
| source used to do the scans as if that's more important than
| the people who did the actual work.
|
| I can't understand the editorial bent in this article. I think
| editors believe scientists to be vaunted and inaccessible
| creatures that live in the rarefied climbs of "science
| mountain." Meanwhile it's just some kid down the block who
| would love to be interviewed by the BBC.
| dang wrote:
| Recent and related:
|
| _News from Scroll 5_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42955356 - Feb 2025 (3
| comments)
| NaOH wrote:
| Additional backstory:
|
| _First word discovered in unopened Herculaneum scroll by CS
| student_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37857417 - Oct
| 2023 (210 comments)
|
| _Vesuvius Challenge 2023 Grand Prize awarded: we can read the
| first scroll_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39261861 -
| Feb 2024 (216 comments)
| focusgroup0 wrote:
| Free Big Balls
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(page generated 2025-02-08 23:00 UTC)