[HN Gopher] Spatializing 6k years of global urbanization from 37...
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       Spatializing 6k years of global urbanization from 3700 BC to AD
       2000
        
       Author : talonx
       Score  : 28 points
       Date   : 2025-06-15 06:53 UTC (3 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.nature.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.nature.com)
        
       | AlotOfReading wrote:
       | This is one of those datasets that no one besides an academic
       | with a very narrow research question is likely to find useful.
       | It's not reflective of what we understand about the extent of
       | historical urbanism today, it's just a synthesis from two
       | earlier, systematically flawed datasets into a machine readable
       | form. It misses a lot, like the entirety of ancient urbanism in
       | North Mexico/the American southwest, Numidia, Axum, large urban
       | centers in central Asia, etc. The authors were aware of many of
       | these shortcomings when they published this, but didn't want to
       | add additional shortcomings from omissions beyond what the
       | original datasets had.
        
         | jxjnskkzxxhx wrote:
         | > The authors were aware of many of these shortcomings
         | 
         | Soft sciences are rife with "yeah I'm aware of the problems
         | with the thing I'm doing, but I'll do it anyway. I've presented
         | a disclaimer, that should be enough to cover my ass".
        
           | rhcom2 wrote:
           | Part of science is incremental work
        
           | JumpCrisscross wrote:
           | > _Soft sciences are rife with "yeah I'm aware of the
           | problems with the thing I'm doing, but I'll do it anyway.
           | I've presented a disclaimer, that should be enough to cover
           | my ass"_
           | 
           | It's not to cover one's ass but communicate limitations. If
           | you think the hard sciences don't do this, I've got a cosmic
           | distance ladder to sell you.
        
           | mcphage wrote:
           | Think of it like Unicode. The Unicode Consortium's job isn't
           | to create character encodings. Instead, it's to unify
           | encoding that already in common usage. If the encoding that
           | is In standard usage for a language is missing something, or
           | there's an issue with it, they're not going to fix that.
        
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       (page generated 2025-06-18 23:01 UTC)