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Science

Archimedes' Lost Words Yield To RIT Scientists 178

Posted by timothy from the castle-aaaaaahhhhhhh- dept.
cCranium writes: "Scientists at Rochester University have apparently restored the only known copy of Archimedes' original text, describing his theory of floatation of bodies." From the article: "They're able to do this because every mark the Greek mathematician made on the vellum parchment, a writing surface made from animal skin, left a residue that can be uncovered even a millennium later." Now if you had some of Archimedes' writings around the house, would you erase them so you could resuse the paper?! Priorities sure change, I guess. [Updated 12 July 3:44GMT by timothy] As many people have pointed out, the submission's phrasing is incorrect; Rochester University is a different school. The ongoing work on Archimede's manuscript is being done at Rochester Institute of Technology, as per the headline. [Updated 12 July 17:01 GMT by timothy] Sigh. As even more people have pointed out, that's "University of Rochester," not "Rochester University." All set? :)
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Archimedes' Lost Words Yield To RIT Scientists More

Archimedes' Lost Words Yield To RIT Scientists

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  • Check out http://www.longnow.org/ for information on preserving information for thousands of years. Even if your CDs do last, will anyone be able to read them in the future? Who even has a 5.25" floppy drive these days?

    Steve

  • How will we ever preserve things for future generations with our current technologies?

    This is a very interesting question indeed. We're spending enourmous amounts of resources on restoring old paper records, yet we store much of our current data on media that degrades even faster than paper. Very few organizations consider this at all, unless they actively need the data on a regular basis. I'll bet a lot of data is currently archived on tapes that will degrade before anyone needs them again.

    Another thing that can keep data accessible is increased storage needs: At the Danish Meteorological Institute where I sysadmin'ed at one point, they need to access their terabytes of old weather data for research projects. More importantly, they store more and more weather data, and so their storage needs grow fast enough that they actually migrate all existing data to a new tape system every 10 years at the very least. This is unfortunately rare.

    An ironic thing about this whole data preservation problem: With privacy being such a hot topic, it's interesting to note that the data being compiled by DoubleClick and their ilk is exactly the kind of data that future historians would love to get their hands on! Is our privacy more important than future generations? I know, a spurious question, but it leads to an important point: Historians are increasingly focusing their efforts on discovering how the common man/woman lived. Data about these things is as important to preserve as headlines and politics. This kind of data is currently being collected (and massively, at that), but is it preserved? Will anyone want to make that data live on when DoubleClick dies, if the data isn't personally identifiable?

    Also, somewhat off-topic, current IP legislation means that copyright lasts longer than most media. This is definitely not helping us preserve our cultural heritage.


    "A *person* is smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals and you know it."

  • Re:That's not an Archimedes original. (Score:5)

    by BrianH ( 13460 ) on Wednesday July 12, 2000 @01:26AM (#941037)
    Many ancient Greek writings would be lost to history if not for Arab scholars. Because there were no printing presses a few thousand years ago, maintaining the writings of Hippocrates, Archimedes, and other ancient Greeks required that their texts be rewritten by hand from time to time. Once the Greek civilization began it's decline there simply wasn't anyone with the time, inclination, or resources to devote to the maintenance of these great texts. Luckily for us today many of these texts were taken to the Middle East, where Arab scholars recognized their lasting value and maintained them for centuries.

    By the time historical interest in ancient Greece began to resurface (a few hundred years ago), the Arab copies were the only sizeable collection of ancient Greek literature left in existence. Because of that, practically all of the Greek literature we read today has gone through several langage translations which can, unfortunately, distort the original meaning of the texts(eg. Greek>Arab>Latin>English).

    Finding an original Greek text (or Greek language copy) is a GREAT find for historians because it will allow us to examine the writings without worrying about misinterpretations and other unintentional distortions.
  • If this isn't a Dark Ages, what is?

    Umm, the Dark Ages? You know, when the Church ruled and people got burned alive and ideas required official approval and you were assigned a station in life at birth?

    Really, this is just a little hysterical. It's like invoking the Holocaust when some schmuck calls you a name.
  • The vast majority of Greek literature that's translated into English is translated directly from Greek texts. Greek civilization had an active tradition of manuscript copying long after its supposed decline. Many of the texts we have today of famous literary authors (playwrights like Euripides, Sophocles, and Aeschylus, lyric poets like Pindar, etc.) derive from editions put together for use in schools during the Byzantine empire in the 9th-11th centuries AD.

    Greek wasn't widely known in Latin-speaking western Europe at this point, but there was close contact between western Europe and the Islamic world, since the Arabs controlled Spain and Sicily. Because of this western scholars had better access to Arabic translations of Greek medical and scientific literature than they had to the Greek originals.

    The translations stimulated interest in the orignals, though: in the 13th century, the great popularizer of Aristotle in the west, St. Thomas Aquinas, has Greek manuscripts of Aristotle and translates him into Latin. As another poster points out, Archimedes was translated from Greek into Latin by the archbishop of Corinth during the same period, though the manuscript was subsequently lost. When the Turks conquered Constantinople in 1453, many Greek scholars decided it might be time to move to Italy. They brought a lot of Greek manuscripts with them, and knowledge of Greek language and literature became widespread (which was probably a factor in the Renaissance). By the end of the 15th century printed editions of Greek texts start being widely disseminated, and in the following centuries Greek becomes an essential component of higher education.

    There is a very small amount of ancient Greek works known only from translations in other languages. But as for Archimedes, many of his works have been available in Greek since the Middle Ages; as far as I know only three books survive in Arabic only. The Hippocratic Corpus (not all written by "Hippocrates") survives in many Greek manuscripts, as well as translations in Hebrew, Latin, and Arabic. The amount of ancient Greek works that exists in Arabic only is probably very, very small; I'd say that 99.9% of the Greek material we have is preserved in Greek.

  • Rejecting the "great man" theory tends to imply that humans are not capable of large leaps in thinking, limiting the scope of an individual. You should likely reconsider this theory, without the connotations that the words "great man" imply.

    I'm not sure which connotations you mean, but you may have misunderstood my stance. I fully believe that people are capable of great leaps and momentus thoughts. I simply don't believe that many of the "great men" history credits with changing the world were actually nessaccary or sufficient to do so.

    For instance, I spent one semester studying the life and writings of Martin Luther, generally credited with most of the protestant reformation. I certainly would say that he was a great thinker, and had made great intellectual/faith leaps. However, my final paper argued that he was not nessaccary or sufficient for the reformation. That is, the reformation would have happened without him (several other theologins had similar ideas in the same 50 year time period) and had he lived a few hundred years earlier, his ideas alone would not have brought about the reformation (technological, economic and political developments all made his heresey possible.)

    So rejecting the "great man" view of history doesn't mean that I don't believe in great men (or women) it just means that in most cases where history gives one man or woman credit for a major change, I find that a careful examination shows that without that great person, another equally as great would have emerged, and had that great person been born 100 years earlier or later, they would not have had the impact they did.

    -Kahuna Burger

  • Also consider the fact that when the prayer book was written, this probably was not the only remaining copy of the Archimedes text. It can very well have been one a several known to still exist. So, if they were short on raw materials for their important new task, why not reuse this one?

    --

  • I go to RIT, yet this is the first I've heard about this. I guess I'll go back to my school-mandated Pepsi (with no alcohol, of course.)
  • "Fell behind a copier"
  • For all you know, the poster is Christian and means BC, not BCE. Furthermore, isn't this whole "Common Era" thing a bit of bowdlerian BS?
  • This [rit.edu] is probably the department that's doing the work.

    These guys are just down the road from me and they do all kinds of cool work. Including a bunch of restoration of the Dead Sea Scrolls(DSS). There are huge reproductions of the DSS in the hallways in the buildings.

    -Rob

  • Agreed, and I wasnt holding up one over the other, thats not my place since I'm a member of neither :) - it was simply that one religion lent itself to reactionary behaviour of one kind and the other to a different emphasis. In both cases it was not the faith that encouraged the reactionary behaviour but the politics associated with it. The reason I found it interesting was that whilst both cultures had their reactionary episodes, the results in each one were very different.
    # human firmware exploit
    # Word will insert into your optic buffer
    # without bounds checking

  • (Postus Interruptus)

    Is it just a coincidence that the "Common Era" started at the same time agreed on by Christians as the birth year of Jesus? What other than the fact that the Christians were successful in getting the rest of the world to adopt their calendar makes the era "common"?
  • This is a big worry of mine, too. I've spent the last several years keying in several thousand pages of manuscript. How do I preserve this file now?

    CDR's have limited lifespans -- not much better than floppies for the cheaper varieties -- and laser printer output is heat sensitive. (Doubt me? Put a hundred pages of printouts in a car on a hot summer day -- the toner melts and sticks the pages together.) Inkjet is actually a bit more reliable than you suggest. Sure, it's water soluble and not lightfast, but the same is true of 5,000-year-old Egyptian papyri. The paper, on the other hand, may disintegrate because of acid content, and who knows about the acidity of all those secret ink formulas?

    IMHO, this is a very big problem as we rush to move everything over to digital media. I can't think of a single commonly-available digital format that doesn't have a much shorter shelf-life than traditional media. Your vinyl records will still be playable centuries after your CDs oxidize. Even acid-rich greenbar printouts will outlast their magnetic-media sources by decades.
  • Not to mention DejaNews getting rid of all its pre-1999 archive.
  • some people have thought about this already -- a company called 'norsam' is producing 2" nickel coated silicon wafers which will last thousands of years and are viewable using simply a microscope. they can hold 10K pages of analog text, potentially including instructions on how to build e.g. an 8" floppy drive, or grammars/structures of languages that are dying out. anyway, read more at http://www.norsam.com/rosetta.html [norsam.com]
  • By the time historical interest in ancient Greece began to resurface (a few hundred years ago), the Arab copies were the only sizeable collection of ancient Greek literature left in existence. Because of that, practically all of the Greek literature we read today has gone through several langage translations which can, unfortunately, distort the original meaning of the texts(eg. Greek>Arab>Latin>English).

    Far from it. The role of Arabic-speaking scholars in preserving ancient Greek works was enormous, but the great majority of "the Greek literature that we read today" survives in Greek, and often in pretty good shape. There was indeed a time when scholars in the Latin west had access to an extremely limited range of material, and then only through (ancient) Latin translations. Beginning in about the 11th century, however, material began to filter into western Europe from the Islamic world. Much of this was initially Latin translations of Arabic translations of Greek texts (or Latin translations of Arabic translations of Syriac translations of Greek texts), often done by a bilingual team of an Arabic and a Latin speaker; there were in effect various translation factories in parts of the world where Christian and Islamic civilizations came into contact, such as Spain. However, by the 13th century the Latins were beginning to learn a little Greek themselves (or at least to hire people who spoke Greek), and Latin translations made directly from Greek were becoming available Most Latin-speaking scholars still didn't know much if any Greek, but there were professional translators, typically (as you might expect) Greek speakers from the Eastern Roman empire (the Byzantine empire, which continued to exist until the 15th century). It's in Byzantium, in turn, that most of the Greek manuscripts we now rely on were produced. After Byzantium finally collapsed in the 15th century, a large number of Greek-speaking scholars migrated to Europe, taking their Greek (and their manuscripts) with them, and this gave rise to that second flowering of European interest in ancient Greece called the Renaissance.

    As for original ancient Greek documents: if by that you mean physical documents from the time of, say, Archimedes, we just don't have very much of that at all. Until about 300, the principal writing material for publications was papyrus, which is not nearly as durable as parchment (unless you're lucky enough to live in an extremely dry climate, e.g. Egypt, and have a way of putting your manuscript in a really secure and very dry place, e.g. a tomb). And Archimedes wouldn't have written originally on papyrus: authors drafted their works on wax-covered tablets, writing with a stylus (you can erase wax: you turn the stylus around and smooth out the wax with the blunt end, like using a pencil eraser). A professional then copied the result out of the wax onto papyrus scrolls.

    The fact that our oldest and best manuscripts of many Greek authors often date from a millennium or more after that author's time doesn't mean that we don't have good texts. We have copies, but we have a lot of copies in many cases, descending through a variety of different paths. Since the 15th century, scholars have developed techniques of textual criticism that try to recover the most likely original text from which a collection of originals descended. Those techniques are now pretty sophisticated; they're not all that distant from other methods for trying to repair damaged data (for a quick account see the article on "textual criticism" in the Oxford Classical Dictionary).

    A side remark about durability: seems to me the clear winner in the durability category is the Babylonian cuneiform tablet. Really hard to damage (can be used as building material, for instance), impervious to magnetic fields, coffee, insects, water, fire. Can be stored in an enormous range of environmental parameters. Some problem with bandwidth, but you have to expect a few tradeoffs.

  • Indeed the practice of erasing vellum scrolls for reuse was so common they had a name for the recycled scrolls. Vellum was highly prized for its durability--it was usually reused this way. Paper and parchment at the time had to be made a sheet at a time in a very labor-intensive process. The first European paper mills didn't come into existance until the 14th century and weren't widespread until the 16th.

    What's most interesting about this is the synecdoche of the whole story: A monk sees a 170-page vellum manuscript, flips through it, thinks, "Bah! Just a bunch of math. Who cares about math? I'll just erase it and use the paper for a morally superior purpose: spreading my religion."

    Of course, I have to wonder if he just flipped through it at random, decided to erase it, started erasing at page one and handing the pages one at at time to whoever was inscribing the prayer book, and when he got to the last page and saw "Love, Archimedes" written there, and had that hideous sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach. Remember when you were a junior in high school and accidently overwrite your English term paper with the lyrics to a Rush song and had no idea how to get it back and had to start over? Well this was much, much worse.

    --

  • I agree with you - that people should not be forced to pay for sins their ancestors committed. However, I think that corporations should be forced to pay for evil things they have done. This is why neither I nor anyone in my family buys Volkswagon vehicles, Krupps machinery or coffeymakers, Bayer Drugs, ect... These companies used slave labor and forced human test subjects during the Holocaust, for that, they deserve to loose their right to operate business.
  • To pick even more nits, Archimedes integrated volume of sphere, though he didn't prove any theorems about it. He was so proud of it he asked to make a relevant drawing on his tomb (an ancient equivalent of FIRST POST, or something). Newton and Leibnitz were great, but Archimedes 0wnz them both.
  • We already know that, in one sense, Archimedes used methods that would now be recognised as a form of integration - specifically the method of exhaustion (originally developed by Eudoxus, C4th BC), where a series of inscribed and exscribed polygons is use to find successively better approximations to the area under curves (or using polyhedra for volumes).

    The inverse, differentiation, came much later (generally attributed to Fermat or Barrow, early - mid C17th). The two ideas were then related and developed into a unified theory calculus independently by Newton and Leibniz. The grudge developed because both wanted to claim to have been the first to 'invent' it - evidence now indicates that Newton did the work first, but Leibniz pulished first.

    What we now term calculus uses methods based primarily on Newton's theory and notation based on Leibniz's work.

  • At least they didn't say "the alleged vanishing"

    matt
  • Another program on the BBC about the public records office had one of their archivists saying that the biggest problem was not recently created systems, the ammount of space on new technology always exceeded the ammount of space on the older technology to such an extent that it was relatively simple to keep an up to date copy of the records.
    They reckon the big problem for records is earlier in the century, with the take up of the telephone, with the novelty of that there is a vastly reduced ammount of official paperwork for the historian.
  • What Newton and Leibniz did was create a general symbolism and series of formal rules. But Greeks
    like Archimedes, Eudoxus, and Antiphon were
    interested in computing volumes, areas, and
    length of arcs and developed methods to do just
    that. On top of that you could say
    differentiation was started by Fermat and Kepler.
    We shouldn't take too much away from Newton and
    Leibniz though, without them calculus would
    be much more painful than it already is.
  • Finding an original Greek text (or Greek language copy) is a GREAT find for historians because it will allow us to examine the writings without worrying about misinterpretations and other unintentional distortions.

    Unless we make them ourselves.

  • The headline reads "RIT," as does the article. Now, I know cCranium is the one who wrote it, but TImothy really should have corrected the "Rochester University" bit there. There is no Rochester university.
  • More recently, the BBC deleted a vast number of its tapes because they wanted the storage space.
    Do you think the restoration method mentioned will help restore the Doctor Who episodes that were erased? OTOH, I can understand it if the BBC don't want to keep Cheggers Plays Pop or Noel's Public Humiliation & Execution show.

  • Re:That's not an Archimedes original. (Score:3)

    by Yaruar ( 125933 ) on Wednesday July 12, 2000 @01:48AM (#941062)
    William of Moerbeke (1215-1286) was archbishop of Corinth and a classical scholar whose Latin translations of Greek works played an important role in the transmission of Greek knowledge to medieval Europe. He had two Greek manuscripts of the works of Archimedes and he made his Latin translations from these manuscripts. The first of the two Greek manuscripts has not been seen since 1311 when presumably it was destroyed. The second manuscript survived longer and was certainly around until the 16th century after which it too vanished. In the years between the time When William of Moerbeke made his Latin translation and its disappearance this second manuscript was copied several times and some of these copies survive. Up until 1899 Heiberg had found no sources of Archimedes' works which were not based on the Latin translations by William of Moerbeke or on the copies of the second Greek manuscript which he used in his translation.

    Source for text [st-and.ac.uk]

    Other links of interest.....

    Where link was located [st-and.ac.uk]

    More info [drexel.edu]

    My point was that other sources exist, I know the arabic scholars created a vast wealth of knowledge, but translations from the greek were made at much later dates than that which we base our work on.

    HTH

  • RIT OWNS UofR (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    RIT owns those lewser at UofR, how dare you compare them or you shall feel the wrath of #gayteens !@#!@$!@#!@#
  • "I wonder how much more would be left of the great library at Alexandrea hadn't been the worlds greatest book burning
    party."

    I'm betting that the whole contents of that library would fit on a CD-ROM.
  • Yeah, I thought this article surely would have been from the Eureka! department.
  • R.I.T. R.I.T. WOOOO GO TEAM!

    (lots of lowercase text inserted to get past the caps filter)
  • the word "miniature" used to describe these manuscripts has nothing to do with size, but indicates drawn inline images, from Latin miniatus, past participle of miniare, to color with minium, from minium red lead


    Actually, I read that "miniature" mining "small thing" is popular etimology linking the small paintings made with minium and another small ("minimum") things.
    __
  • What we now term calculus uses methods based primarily on Newton's theory and notation based on Leibniz's work.

    Actually, from what I have been told, we use primarily Leibniz for both theory and notation. From my understanding, Newton didn't really have a grasp of the infintesimal, he obviously used it to a degree but his notation doesn't lend itself to the introduction of it, where as Leibniz notation does.

    To clarify for those who have had calculus but don't know the difference, Newton used the "prime" notation.
    x - variable
    x' - first derivative
    x'' - second derivative
    Leibniz used the d/dx notation.
    f(x) - variable with respect to x
    df(x)/dx- first derivative
    etc...
  • Hey, I've been out of school over ten years...you can't expect me to get all the details correct ;) I did break out my old history books though, and you are indeed correct. For a period of time the Arabic scholars were the sole source of ancient Greek texts, but that is no longer true today. I guess I should stick to code and quit quoting history :)

    Note to moderators: If there are any moderators still reading this discussion, please feel free to moderate my original post back down to 2. While I appreciate the occasional karma point or four, I really don't deserve points for a factually incorrect comment, no matter how well written it might have been. Chris Lovell and Nicomachus probably deserve a couple points themselves for setting the record straight.

  • Archimedes (Score:4)

    by hexdef6 ( 141919 ) <crotalus.gmail@com> on Wednesday July 12, 2000 @12:07AM (#941070) Homepage
    Thank goodness for permenent markers, eh?

    Jaeger
    http://334.se2600.org
    http://jump.to/jaeger

  • Okay (Score:1)

    by coli ( 64530 )
    So what did they find? Where's the text?
  • When my Grandma dies, 87 odd years of knowledge and experience will vanish in the blink of an eye.. stories about *her* grandmother living during the civil war and arguing with the Yankee captain over a stolen watch, growing up during the depression.. WWII and opening her home up to wives of soldiers " gone off to war.." , her secret bait for catching red snapper by the creel, losing 2 husbands and a son.. all told with an incredibly dry sense of humor and no bitterness in her deep 'suthren' accent.. I have been trying to get as much on as I can on tape for transcription and storytelling but it's pretty much dipping a spoon into a firehose of knowledge.. I have her recipe for pecan pie and peach cobbler, but it won't be the same as when she makes it and diddles with the mix..

    We worry over lost bits of paper and degrading magnetic media, while all around us 99% of the really valuable information winks out of existance in retirement homes...

    On that note: CALL YOUR GRANDMA! Get her to tell you stories about when she was young...

    ( My grandma can describe for you the exact experience of riding in an old ford , 60 miles an hour down a back road in Willow,SC at midnight....with 'shine in the trunk. Priceless! )

    3Cats
  • It also sounds supspiciously like the resolution to Gregory Benford's Galactic Center series... Figure that one out.


    --Fesh

  • Well, partly because there is a difference between a copy and a translation -- the copy may well have transcription errors, but those are likely to be easier to catch than translation problems.

    Would you rather have a Xerox of a diagram, or a sketch made from the diagram? Better yet, and more applicable to many religious texts (Biblical or otherwise), a sketch made from a description given by somebody who saw the diagram when he was a young man?

    Lastly, of course, one might argue that the relative importance of the works calls for different standards. My feeling is that if Archimedes had never lived, somebody else would have come up with his work. Would you say that of Christ?

  • Well, the Colosseum in Rome, along with many
    other buildings, had its marble stripped for
    recycling into churches etc.
  • One of the worst IT programs? Are you in it? Its a common belief that IT (at RIT) is easy. For the lower level classes I'll agree with you. IT is such a diverse subject, that RIT is forced to INTRODUCE as much of it to you as they possibly can...(database, programming, networking, web design, etc) Meanwhile, CS is programming. and programming... While CS gets progressively harder, IT bounces from one intro class to another. I didn't realize when i went to RIT that I'd like to get into networking. IT helped me realize that, now I have concentration classes (and difficult ones btw) for me to focus upon. Which brings me to my point..the learning curve is just delayed...it does get harder.
  • I agree with your note on keeping things in perspective. An interesting observation would be that maybe it was a good thing it got overwritten with something religious. That way its "survivability" thoughout the darkages was highly increased and may be the reason it still exist today. Had it been used for recording financial transactions another possible choice it would most probably have vanished.
  • Now if you had some of Archimedes' writings around the house, would you erase them so you could resuse the paper?! Priorities sure change, I guess.

    Some things change, some stay the same: I just erased my pr0n collection to compile 2.4.0-test3. There's always something you never have enough of.

    Now I need more bandwidth to get my pr0n back... ;)

  • How do we know that when we throw todays AOL cd into the bin, we aren't destorying something that future generations would love to have?

    Most of us modern day monks really wish AOL would press their software onto CD-RWs or CD-Rs with space left so we can rewrite over them with more useful stuff. An uncanny parallel to our brethren of long ago...
  • Someone ought to fix that.
  • I agree with you - that people should not be forced to pay for sins their ancestors committed. However, I think that corporations should be forced to pay for evil things they have done. This is why neither I nor anyone in my family buys Volkswagon vehicles, Krupps machinery or coffeymakers, Bayer Drugs, ect... These companies used slave labor and forced human test subjects during the Holocaust, for that, they deserve to loose their right to operate business.

    IIRC, Volkswagen was started in the early 50's (with British help) to give the Germans employment.

    It is true the Volkswagen was designed under Hitler's directive (by a famous tank designer by the name of Porsche, I think he made cars too), so are you against a postwar corporation for using a wartime design?

    If so, better not patronize any company that uses jets, or radar, etc, etc.

    And forget about NASA, they were full of Nazi's in the 50's and 60s'.

    George

  • Re:caluclus and Great Men (Score:3)

    by styopa ( 58097 ) <<ude.odaroloc> <ta> <rsllih>> on Wednesday July 12, 2000 @05:09AM (#941082) Homepage
    ...the math demonstrated "the roots of the gravitational theory and modern calculus."

    Newton's work on gravitational theory, although started on his own, was fueled by letters from Hooke (the spring man). Acording to a lecture givin by an expert on Newtons life, Hooke was working on gravitational theory, trying to solve Keplers laws, by use of geometry and was hitting some problems and sent some letters to Newton. Newton at the time was only considered the greatest geometrist around (he hadn't published calculus yet), Hooke was asking for some help with his math. Apparently Newton sent back a letter with a few calculations of his own on gravitational theory, almost mocking Hookes attempts to create a theory of gravity. Hooke continued to ask for help, sending more letters with more of his work, and apparently Newton used some of his ideas. If Hooke had been a better mathematician, it might have been Hookes theory of gravity.
  • Permanent markers are actually not very permanent. I got my degree in Chemistry before I went into the IT Field, and we would always use permanent markers in the lab. I assure you that any number of non-polar solvents (like mineral oil, hexanes, acetone, etc.) would do a wonderful job at removing all traces of the markers.

    In actuality, there is very little in the way of ink that cannot be erased if you have access to the right chemicals.

  • So is this the 10th century version of the whiteboard? "Please do not erase" Archimedes
  • I followed the link from the news page to a site about Archimedes and they had this pretty cool Cattle Puzzle [drexel.edu] that Archimedes created.

  • Re:Timothy, please put things in context (Score:5)

    by LizardKing ( 5245 ) on Wednesday July 12, 2000 @01:56AM (#941086)
    Well if I was a Greek monk and my choices were hang on to an old Math book or write a prayer book, I'm sure my priority would be the prayer book

    It's more likely that the text was wiped because writings by Archimedes and others were considered unacceptable at the time. They were either viewed as naive attempts to understand the world (which contemporary thinking claimed was all God's doing), or dangerous sources of heresy.

    For a fictional, but highly thought provoking account of what ideas were prevalent at the time check out 'The Name of the Rose' by Umberto Eco. For a more fact based but drier account see any books on the treatment of 'heresy' by the churches of the Middle Ages. I'm a particular fan of books on the Baltic crusades - although it's not very well documented.

    Chris
  • An inkjetted page could never be recovered after it's been washed

    um... yes, it probably could as there would be residue, etc. I'll bet the FBI does it routinely.

    But that aside, your whole premise is flawed, I think. I'd be willing to bet that by far, more information from today will be saved for the future than ever before. Archeologists someday will dig up my laptop and find persistent doubleclick cookies still tracking me :)

  • would you erase them so you could resuse the paper?!

    What you have to remember is that books of the time where written on vellum which is prepared from calf skins. Trying to compare values with 1000 years ago isn't easy but cattle where a very valuable resource. Slaughtering them when they're still juvenile just to write something down would be costly. Basically if paper was $100 a sheet, you'd be wanting to reuse it to.

    Reuse of vellum was so common, (overwritten documents are called palimplests) it's probably best to think of a monastic library as the monastery's hard drive. Files that are no longer wanted are just erased to make space for new ones.

  • Priorities do indeed change over time! The monks of the Middle Ages are credited by history books to have "preserved" the classical texts of ancient Greece and Rome- classical drama and mythology, history poetry and all that other garbage that I couldn't personally give a flying
    you-know-what about. So, let's see, mathematical texts didn't make it on the list of things to preserve?! Who the f#!k made that decision? Or was this particular monk just ignorant? It didn't occur to him that "Hey! This thing is antique and it's written in Greek. Maybe it's...important?"
    Oh no! "Let's just go ahead and write our flaming little bullshit prayerbook and waste somebody else's work!"
    I hope that scroungy little e-wok died of the plague...and the rest of his monastery too!
    Die!
  • Yes, once my girlfriend at the time actually beat me up for shutting down my computer, thereby completely erasing a 10+ hour term paper for poetry. I couldn't figure out why she kept hitting me for shutting off the computer at first; then it slowly dawned on me that she hadn't saved her paper at all, the entire time she was working on it. I still can't believe she beat me up over that...

    I wonder if Archimides would have beat me up for erasing his math essays? Who knows...

  • IT WAS A JOKE!
    For example, I know that fish aren't built by people, and that the point of this work was historical, not to find out the secret of floatation.
  • Hi,

    My name is Archimedes. A few moons ago I was nearly in debtors prison, until I came across this simple formula. Now, I am awash in drachma, copper ingots, silver, gold and other precious materials.

    If you follow these simple steps, you too can have the wealth of Croesus
  • There's an interesting article on the origins of mathematical physics, based largely on the material in this manuscript, in the June 2000 issue of Physics Today.
  • Firt off, both RIT and UofR are great schools....both in a heavy competition to be called the best. And, RIT and UofR have both done that in select field. UofR probably has a better science program, but RIT has its own status and is Internationally known for the following: Information Technology, Comp Sci, Mech Engineering, Electrical Engineering, MicroElectronic Engineering, American School of Crafts, Photography, Computer Graphic Design, Printing, and Business/Finance. As far as Information Technology goes, no other school in the nation comes even close. RIT has been doing this program for 7 years. Other great schools like RPI and Penn State claimed to have IT programs but only supported 3 students last year in the program for RPI and around 30 for Penn State. There is no set format on how the IT program should be organized as to what classes make up the degree...every college is completely different for IT. Yes, I also agree the program is easy at first, but gets significantly harder in the last 2 years. I went through the entire program. As far as people falling back on IT in case that can't hack the engineering or CS depts, that changes as of next year.....You now need a 3.8 to TRANSFER into IT form another program......thats means, if you fail someone else, don't comes looking to IT. The IT dept is successfully weeding out the students and continually making the environment more strict with harder classes. The problems lies in the fact that most people who know computers know nothing about Information Technology but they have to start somewhere....nowadays, high school students are finally learning the skills to "Get started" and so the level at RIT can extend higher one more step. Ok, now about Computer Science....first off, RIT won the National competition this past year along with 1 other school for programming. Our boys, Steven Rhorda and Paul Mason, got tickets to the Netherlands for the international competition. The fact is RIT has one of the top 5 Computer Science programs in the nation. Canada won BTW. Engineering! Please.....any time you try to compare a technical school with a science school, you are going to mix up facts. RIT has been noted for being the 4th best in the nation in Engineering. Many great schools strive to be on the list, but the fact is RIT supports a co-op programs that gives students the chance to work then come back to school and understand the "why question." Having 2 years work experience enables RIT engineers to have the absolute highest job placement of any school in the united states. Umm, doee that sound like a good deal? I could go on and onabout all the other schools I listed above because I personally know about them all, but I will spare the details. Basically, RIT is a GREAT school. The University of Rochester had a better reputation for years (being 25th in the nation), but I am unsure which school is really better now. I have heard stories how UofR wanted to strengthen its standings by limiting students with even higher SAT scores, but many policies instituted by the President of UofR have fallen apart thus backfiring the project. So who cares? Me? Not really....I went to RIT and now have a great job because of the co-op program. I bet I would have had a great job if I attended UofR.
  • I knew I should have posted the whole quote:
    They're able to do this because every mark the Greek mathematician made on the vellum parchment,
    a writing surface made from animal skin, left a residue that can be uncovered even a millennium later.

    Actually, I am wrong though. I originally thought this was a quote from the scholar, but it looks like the reporte can't count his millennia.
  • and it's RPI, not Rensselaer!
  • Except it's not particularly clear that it *was* stolen, as opposed to sold out the back door.
  • That is highly doubtful since they were copied by another Monk just 200 years earlier

    The views of the Papacy changed over time just like the views of any other political institution. It just happens that by the Middle Ages the Papacy had started to view it's pagan heritage as a bit of a liability - especially so when their arch-enemies the Muslims were keen on the writings of Greek philosphers, etc.

    Chris

  • MacGuyver (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Hey if Mac could take a completely burned note and make it readable, restoration of anything should be possible!
  • If it was considered unacceptable, then why did they make the manuscript in the first place

    The lists of authors censured by the Papacy weren't fixed, so the teachings of Archimedes just fell out of favour over time.

    Chris
  • Dammit, Our crappy little town's 15 min of fame, and they fuck it up.... figures. Well it's not to crappy I guess, we have the most conservative and low-tech company in the world based here, KODAK :)
  • That's an excellent point you make about personal information.

    I think it would be perfectly acceptable for the bulk of a persons personal information to be made public at some point in the future.

    In the UK all our census details go completely public after 100 years, and as such my parents have a 50 cd set with all the records from the 1881 census.

    Whilst the advances in medicine are pushing lifespans beyond 100 years now, I wouldn't be the slightest bit concerned if in 2130 (150 yrs after my birth) all my now confidential details were turned over to historians.

    A slight concern could be that in the future details will become more and more accesible. Whilst anyone doing enough research could quite correctly conclude that one of my ancestors was stoned as a witch, it's not the sort of thing people at school would ever research or tease me about.

    However with advances in AI etc.. it may soon be possible to just dig up dirt on a person and this is a more frightening concept.
  • I put a CD-R in sunlight (admittedly, it was summer in Phoenix; your milage may vary) for three hours and it became unreadable. Be warned. OTOH, reel-to-reel audio tapes that I recorded in college thirty years ago are slightly degraded, but still listenable. But I understand that even professional studio tapes used by radio stations and recording studios in the 70's and 80's are becoming unreadable because the oxide binder (read: glue) used in the tapes at the time is deteriorating and the tapes are literally falling apart.

    More important is format obsolescence. We may be able to read a 2K-year-old parchment, but how many of us can read a 20-year-old 8" floppy, even if it's in perfect condition? How many CD drives will be around in 20 years? Probably very few, as some new whiz-bang medium will replace CDs a few years from now and some even more whiz-bang medium will make that obsolete in short order.

  • Manuscripts (Score:5)

    by w00ly_mammoth ( 205173 ) on Wednesday July 12, 2000 @02:10AM (#941110)
    It's not surprising that it was re-used as a manuscript. Manuscript writing was a great art and a worthwhile hobby for bored monks, practised widely up to the middle of the millenium. A lot of the works were of religious/Christian content, and some were historic (generally sponsored by rich patrons). Vellum, or processed calf skin, was written on using pigments and natural minerals which varied from crushed beetles to lapis lazuli. Frequently, gold leaves were used to emboss ornamental designs.

    Perhaps the most famous lost and found manuscript is the book of Kells. [esotericart.com] Written by Irish monks in the 8th century, it was lost during viking attacks on monastaries, found buried underground and unearthed, and today resides at Trinity College, Dublin. It's regarded as Ireland's national treasure. (BTW, the word "miniature" used to describe these manuscripts has nothing to do with size, but indicates drawn inline images, from Latin miniatus, past participle of miniare, to color with minium, from minium red lead.)

    If you get a chance to see manuscripts at a nearby exhibition, don't miss it. They are fabulous. And simply looking at words written centuries ago in ink on parchment is quite an indescribable feeling.

    (In related news: one of the greatest wonders of the ancient world was completely recycled. The bronze Collossus of Rhodes was sold as scrap metal.)

    Check out this link [uiuc.edu] to look at some of the old manuscripts of mathematics.

    w/m
  • The bronze Collossus of Rhodes was sold as scrap metal
    Yeah, but up until that point, I got +1 on all trade within my city!

    Pope

    Freedom is Slavery! Ignorance is Strength! Monopolies offer Choice!
  • For what it's worth, I believe we're rapidly entering a Dark Ages of our own.

    The Internet had the potential to be the greatest tool ever invented for the sharing of knowledge and ideas.

    The current governments are hellbent on restricting its use. Look to Britain's RIP, USA's Carnivore, Singapore's and China's filtering, Australia's restrictions and so on.

    Look at the use of patents to repress development of competing technologies.

    Look at the use of lawsuits to destroy information-sharing, including music, business reporting and political reporting.

    Our newspapers are public mindset manipulation tools for big business, television is a pacifier for the masses, and Hollywood is hellbent on rewriting history.

    The public, and the American public in particular, is becoming massively misinformed and ever more ignorant of history, business practices and the proper role of government.

    If this isn't a Dark Ages, what is?


    --
  • This has been said before, but I feel it needs to be reiterated as previous posters have left out important information.

    RIT, where this progress is being made, is the Rochester Institute of Technology.

    The University of Rochester, (U of R), is not where this is being done.

    The University of Rochester (about 4,000 undergrads) is a higher ranked school than RIT, since it is a national university. It consistently ranks in the top 30 in the oh-so-wonderful US News and World Report. RIT is a regional school (about 8,000 undergrads) but it is one of the top-ranked schools in the northeast. To call it an IT school is being rather harsh, RIT is a technical institute, along the same lines as Caltech and MIT, though RIT isn't as rigorous or demanding as either of those institutions. Contrary to what a previous poster said, RIT does have a computer science degree program. RIT also has a software engineering degree program. There is a large difference, and the school acknowledges this. Both schools are in the same town. They are also practically right next to each other in Rochester (I would know, I've lived in Rochester my entire life).

    More on-topic, RIT is able to do such advanced imaging work because Kodak is based in Rochester. The George Eastman house is a historical landmark here in Rochester, and Kodak contributes a great deal to RIT and the U of R, allowing both of them to be at the front of their fields in a great deal of imaging technology. I work with an optical engineer who graduated from the U of R two years ago. RIT has a large film and imaging department. They are both good schools, neither deserves to be slighted.

    Course, neither is as good as Caltech. And about U of R students being mad because they're confused with RIT students...don't bitch. I say I go to Caltech and people think I mean ITT tech.
  • Certainly there would be more information in the 2000 pile but trying to glean an insight into our lives wouldn't be so easy.

    well, now you are changing your premise. Before you were worried that the technologies were not long lasting, but now you are worried that too much stuff will last. I presume that you are looking for a technology that will only keep the good stuff. Hint: don't look on Slashcode :)

    I think people wring their hands too much. Sure, we lose a lot from the past as we move forward. What makes this story interesting is that Archimedes stuff is rare. If we kept absolutely everything from the past, in the future this story would read:

    A librarian [synonymous with human: everyone will be a librarian] has discovered Archmedes's buoyancy memo, misfiled with Gerald Rivera's "Opening Al Capone's Safe" videos. Authorities think a prankster must be at work, probably one of the monks, since previously this same piece had been misfiled with a newsstory called "Market for .com IPO's Remains Buoyant" from 1999.
    That would be a boring world. Much better to treasure rare treasures than banning all throwaways. Imagine: everybody runs yardsales all the time as we shuffle all our old stuff around.
  • Seems appropriate. A lot of information about the lifestyles of early "common people" was retrieved by sifting through piles of garbage where the lack of oxygen to objects deep inside the pile preserved them. I think it would be perfect for the future to learn about our p0rn viewing habits from Doubleclick- the modern equivalent of a massive garbage pile ;)

    "Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"
  • So, where can I get acid-free printer paper (or, vellum that'll fit my printer :-) and an inkjet printer that uses non-water-soluable ink? I'll just make hardcopy backups of everything...

    And for binary data, there's mylar tape (like paper tape only on mylar (or some similar tough plastic) so it won't tear. Or perhaps punched cards onto thin sheets of e.g. stainless steel.

    Mind, the problem with any storage technology is that durability tends to be inversely proportional to density and read/write time. Hieroglyphs carved on granite may last a long time, but where do I find a SCSI or USB equipped engraver/reader for those?
  • "It lies in the Castele..... aghhhhhhhh"

  • Re:Priorities may change, but... (Score:3)

    by rve ( 4436 ) on Wednesday July 12, 2000 @02:27AM (#941145)
    Now if you had some of Archimedes' writings around the house, would you erase them so you could resuse the paper?! Priorities sure change, I guess.

    Let's step into that monk's sandals for a bit:
    "Aaah, what a fine day for copying some of the Lord's Holy Prayers. Now where did I put my parchment... Hmm.. what's this then? *Yawn* Some ancient old heathen babbling about bodies in water? How would _that_ ever bring a man closer to God? What a waste of parchment. Hey, brother John, come and have a look at this! Would you believe how _boooooring_ people were 1500 years ago? " Brother John replies: "Well, brother Paul, the heathens must have had too much spare time, with all those slaves doing all their work. Just wash the parchment, and use it for something Good. It's not as if it's the last copy of an important work."

  • All the more reason to carry on and finish the restoration - Ancient greek science is something we have only dimly been able to view through the distorting lens of several translations preceding the earliest documents in our posession and through the well-intentioned manipulations of monastic editors.

    There is abundant evidence that ancient greek society had a far greater understanding of many aspects of the world they lived in that the societies that followed them. Whilst crude by todays standards greek medicine was at a level that was not matched until long after the dark ages. Mathematics in ancient Greece was sufficiently advanced to be the realm of philosophical research and a fundamental tool in their analysis of their world - a level that was not matched in western societies until the time of Galileo.

    In contrast the arabic world gladly absorbed all the knowledge the greek philosophers produced and combining it with their own insights went on to build upon it. Why do you think that most of the named stars have names derived from arabic languages?

    So why the divergence in the way these societies researched and used their knowledge? The only answer I can come up with is the question of religion. I have to say in advance that I am only commenting on the political aspects of the dominant religions rather than the principles on which they are based - after all I cant expect you to respect my faith if I dont respect yours, right? The catholic church dominated western societies and strongly discouraged questioning the fundamental mechanisms by which the world operated, punishing those who attempted to interfere with "the natural order of things" very harshly. Islamic culture on the other hand whilst it had rigid frameworks of its own was not barred from this kind of investigation. This being the case it was inevitable, purely on political grounds, that the two cultures would collide and the social debris of that collision are still being cleaned up today.

    Just as ever more powerful telescopes and particle accelerators are being used to more finely analyse the world we live in, documents such as this allow a closer look at the history of scientific thought and a greater understanding of the forces that shape us socially, along with the physically shaping forces that we are getting so good at describing.
    # human firmware exploit
    # Word will insert into your optic buffer
    # without bounds checking

  • How will we ever preserve things for future generations with our current technologies?

    Every few months someone posts a scare story to Slashdot, concerned that current magnetic and optical media has a shorter lifespan than the more traditional 'pen and ink' methods of archiving information. Although there may be some truth to this, I believe that the fact that data in a digital format can be so easily duplicated and distributed actually gives the data a better chance of survival. For example, consider a hypothetical work of literature which is distributed both in the traditional dead-tree format and in a (free to copy) electronic format. The fact that the printed version of this information has a physical presence in meatspace will reduce the chance that it can be widely distributed - books take time to print, cost money to print, and are bulky and expensive to transport around the world. However, the electronic format of the information can be quickly, cheaply and easily shared between people and international boundaries provide no obstacle to the transfer of the information. This more widespread distribution of the digital information gives it a very good chance of survival.

    People have also wondered what will happen if the medium onto which the data is archived becomes obsolete. Again, I wonder if this is really an issue. Although my Sinclair Spectrum computer and its Microdrive (a 4cm x 3cm x 0.5cm tape cartidge, which was actually pretty fast, in case you're interested) no longer work and my original Spectrum games cassettes have long since rotted away, emulators allow me to relive the glorious golden age of Spectrum computing. With emulators and tape images of software, the spirit of the hardware and software lives on by making use of today's superior technology.

    Provided the data is wothwhile, I am sure that people will make the effort to ensure that it survives in some form and is readable on whatever technology is widespread at the time.

  • Re:recycling with a twist (Score:3)

    by TrollTruth ( 207313 ) on Wednesday July 12, 2000 @03:49AM (#941153)
    I'm very curious to know if there is a systematic effort underway to search our (limited) stock of ancient parchment scrolls for previous works. It seems like an obvious project, but as underfunded (and competitively proprietary) as archeology and analysis of ancient texts are, I wonder if this has been undertaken.

    Anyone out there know anything about this? If so, links, please!

    With each passing year, we may be losing what little remains of the 'lost' pre-Alexandrian texts

  • Re:Why aren't modern technologies designed to last (Score:3)

    by Jerf ( 17166 ) on Wednesday July 12, 2000 @03:58AM (#941156) Journal
    I wouldn't worry too much about people digging through your ancestry and finding dirt. We've all got filthy ancestors. You just have to look hard enough. All of us have ancestors practicing genocide, incest, murder, war, repression, slavery, any thing you care to name. Those who claim otherwise are ignorant or actively lying.

    This is, BTW, why I never buy that people should be made to pay for the sins of their ancestors. There's not a person alive who could afford to pay for their own ancestors crimes.

  • Timothy, please put things in context (Score:5)

    by Carnage4Life ( 106069 ) on Wednesday July 12, 2000 @12:22AM (#941159) Homepage Journal
    Now if you had some of Archimedes' writings around the house, would you erase them so you could resuse the paper?! Priorities sure change, I guess

    Well if I was a Greek monk and my choices were hang on to an old Math book or write a prayer book, I'm sure my priority would be the prayer book. It's easy to look back now and sneer at choices that people made a thousand years ago, after all hindsight is 20/20. But who is to say what future generations will think about ours.
    I can easily imagine snide comments that will be made about how we callously destroyed the environment, pumped millions in a giant Internet Ponzi scheme when there were more worthwhile causes to support and amassed Nuclear weapons whose poisonous waste will exist for longer than humanity has existed. Think about that next time.

  • >Maybe poverty will appear just as shocking as
    >slavery is to us

    I sure hope so. If what you say actually happens, then that means two things: the world would still be here, and it would be a better place than it is today.

    As far as the attitudes of some people towards reason, that can be explained:
    "Jesus saith unto him, Thomas, because thou hast
    seen me, thou hast believed: blessed are they that
    have not seen, and yet have believed." John 20:29
  • What is great about this manuscript is that it
    gives Archimedes's writing in the original Greek, rather than Arabic.

  • Actually the best medium would be to store it into the DNA.

    A human, for example, has so much redundant DNA that using a large chunk of it for extra storage would not be a hassle. And if the humans got to the point of decoding it, well, they would be sufficiently advanced to handle it. The degeneration over generations would be handled by redundancies, etc.

    Wait a minute . . .

    this sounds suspiciously like something some nutcase came up with once - - it can't be true, it can't be true .....

  • this is the link to the Article (Physics Today - June 2000 issue) as you can find it online:
    Enjoy!

  • Re:Timothy, please put things in context (Score:5)

    by luckykaa ( 134517 ) on Wednesday July 12, 2000 @12:36AM (#941169)
    More recently, the BBC deleted a vast number of its tapes because they wanted the storage space. NASA has left a lot of data just rot away. Thats the present generation. People just never learn.

  • Re:recycling (Score:3)

    by thogard ( 43403 ) on Wednesday July 12, 2000 @02:49AM (#941173) Homepage
    There is a theory that the casing stones from the Great Pyramid were used to build buildings in Cairo. So far there hasn't been a published case were a stone found looked like a casing stone which would have a very interesing angle encoded into it.

    As far as preservation of works...no one beast the Egypteans. They used stone and there are millions of preserved documents on things other than stone.

    I wonder how much more would be left of the great library at Alexandrea hadn't been the worlds greatest book burning party. For what its worth the librarys location is known because of other documentation survived saying it was at the corner of two streets that exist today.

    If you want to read up on some interesting "edititing", look into the temple at Karnak and how its been edited a number of times. In one case a obilisk was edited by putting "footnotes" on the side while leaving the original text.
  • I'm not entirely changing my premise in my head, but yeah maybe it's not coming out as i would have liked.

    Today I feel that paper has a far lower value than it ever did have. I've thrown thoussands of pages that document how I lived and things I know, whereas a few hundred years ago things had to be very important in the first place just to get written down.

    Important documents now seem more likely to be lost in a sea of meaningless paper rather than lost in the more literal sense.
  • It's a bit like the FreeNet project

    Information which we presently deem as useful will be mirrored and copied all over the network, whereas unused information will be slowly phased out.

    Sadly the same is true in real life. The monk that cleared archimedes parchment clearly thought that his information was of far greater value than archimedes'. At the time i'm sure the majority of the people agreed with him and there would have been a consensus that it was appropriate to discard that knowledge.

    How do we know that when we throw todays AOL cd into the bin, we aren't destorying something that future generations would love to have? Addind up the free hours probably takes us into the next millenium anyway

    Any medium that requires human maintenance to persist is surely also prone to being destroyed by other, well meaning humans, trying to save something else. Those spectrum games are only playable now because some forward thinking geek backed them up onto the net.

    In this information age we have too much information and need to somehow select which is relavant to keep and which to discard, it's just like clearing out ur hard disk and realised you've deleted your mail archive.

  • There is a theory that the casing stones from the Great Pyramid were used to build buildings in Cairo

    The more likely explanation is that the limestone casing simply eroded away. That's certainly the reason I remember from Egyptology books I've read.

    Chris

  • Modern technologies are NOT designed to last. (Score:3)

    by Alien54 ( 180860 ) on Wednesday July 12, 2000 @04:12AM (#941185) Journal
    Imagine centuries from now, scholars and archeologists trying to sort out the lost knowledge in thousands of microsoft word documents, and excel spreadsheets, etc.; all encrypted by the latest Bill Gates Monstrosity.

    "But sir, there is no sense or reason to it! the whole system is crazy!"

    "That may very well be one of the reasons that the whole culture collapsed, y'know ..."

    "No one will be able to understand the lost secrets of Microsoft! It's hopeless ... hopeless ... "

    I can see it now ....
  • Lets face it, a print out from a laser printer seems to fade away after a few years.

    An inkjetted page could never be recovered after it's been washed, and if you get one of those crappy thermal receipts from McDonalds you cant even read it after it's been sitting next to your fries for 5 minutes.

    How will we ever preserve things for future generations with our current technologies? (assuming that at some point in the future the internet gets wiped out)

  • Newspeak (Score:3)

    by dwm ( 151474 ) on Wednesday July 12, 2000 @12:53AM (#941193)
    The prayer book vanished from the Convent of the Holy Sepulchre in Constantinople in the 1920s and didn't surface for another decade. The book was then sold at an auction in 1998 to an anonymous buyer for $2 million.

    "Vanished"??? What a civilized way of saying "was stolen".

  • Old versions of ARChimedes games that don't run anymore on StrongARM'ed RiscPC
    ARM and Unix FAQs

    Once again, Archemedes writings are lost forever.
  • Also, before getting all uppidy on UR, just remember that you go to school in Rochester, which is probably one of the most horrible places in the country.

    I beg to differ, I live in Rochester by choice.

    I can only compare Rochester to the places I've lived, which include:

    • State College, PA
    • the Atlantic City, NJ area
    • North Collins, NY (23 miles south of Buffalo)
    • Raleigh, NC


    and Rochester comes out on top, with Raleigh second (I missed winter in Raleigh, and Raleigh needs a downtown).

    Of course, the above places aren't anything special, but if you're looking for a reasonably priced, computer aware place to live and raise a family, you could do far worse than Rochester.

    George
  • There's more to old media than just the information printed on them. Their condition can offer a lot of clues about the time they were made.

    I just heard on NPR yesterday about researchers looking at old letters from the time of the American Revolution. The words on the paper are important, of course, but medical historians want the actual letters themselves. To smell them.

    It seems that when cholera broke out in a town, the mail was sprinkled with vinegar to help sterilize it before it was carried away. Even two hundred years later one can detect the odor of vinegar on many of them, and this offers clues as to the spread of the disease in the colonies at the time.

    Just naively archiving old documents onto CD-ROM or something can miss a great deal...

  • my choices were hang on to an old Math book or write a prayer book, I'm sure my priority would be the prayer book.

    Bingo. The key factor is that 12th century Europe was The Dark Ages, when the Church was Life and knowledge was scarce. Paper was a terribly difficult and expensive commodity to manufacture, so recycling old non-religious (i.e. non-useful) paper to make more hymnals was a brilliant move at the time.

    I saw the Archimedes Palimpsest last year at The Walters Art Gallery [thewalters.org]. Note that the paper was not written directly by Archimedes, or even by his students. It's a (presumably) good copy made by later scribes which seems authentic.

    The pages had been washed, scraped, cut in half, and rotated 90 degress to make a relatively clean surface for the prayers, then bound with stitching. When you reassemble the parts in the right order and look at it with UV light, the original is mostly visible. If only the ancient Greek and Chinese civilizations had survived and continued their scientific progress, we'd be on interstellar colony ships by now.

  • caluclus and Great Men (Score:3)

    by KahunaBurger ( 123991 ) on Wednesday July 12, 2000 @01:01AM (#941209)
    To pick nits, they have not yet restored the manuscript. They have restored 5 pages out of 170, in order to win the right to handle the rest.

    What I found far more fascinating is the assertion that the math demonstrated "the roots of the gravitational theory and modern calculus." Now I had been taught that Calculus grew out of a problem solving grudge between two famous mathmeticians. Not being a proponent of the "great man" theory, I tended to assume that this breakthrough built on advancements in theorums up to that point.

    However, if this text actually shows that Archimedes had the beginnings so many years before, I might be forced to conceed at least a "great man of math" theory. Though considering the dark ages in between, perhaps an examination of the history will show an evolution and reevolution rather than two poles of brilliance.

    -Kahuna Burger

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