Monday Cup Of Links #79 - Vesuvius Challenge, Brooch In A Bathhouse, Japanese White Elephants
Happy Monday!
As I write this, the home team is in the Superbowl, and on the other side is Taylor Swift’s boyfriend. The nearby Indian dive bar has cheap beer and gobi manchurian for the occasion, so my plans for the evening are set. Maybe I’ll finally understand what a scrimmage or a Hail Mary is! Onto our links!
The Vesuvius Challenge with a grand prize of $850,000 has been won. History, machine learning, and money? This is the trifecta of what keeps me interested. I’m still trying to understand the challenge, the solutions, and what technology was used to do so, but basically…. there’s a bunch of scrolls buried in volcanic ash in Pompeii. They can’t be opened and read without causing severe damage, but they used particle accelerators to get high-resolution CT scans of the scrolls. Reading the scrolls from these CT scan images was the challenge. The winning entry managed to read more than 2000 characters of the scroll, when the winning criteria was 4 passages of 140 characters each. The subject of the text read is Epicurean philosophy that talks about pleasure, which is considered the highest good. A detailed paper talking about the contents of the scroll (which is actually just 5% of the first scroll) will be out soon.
Here is a great interview with Rebecca Scott, the author of the historical fiction novel Dark Earth, which follows the life of two recently-immigrated Anglo-Saxon sisters in post-Roman London, a city of violence and ruin. She was inspired to write this book by an artifact at the Metropolitan Museum, which was a woman’s brooch in an abandoned Roman bathhouse that could be dated to the years when London was abandoned. I loved this interview, it’s so full of an empathy for the past, as well as a willingness to immerse in that world. I dug some more and found Ms. Scott’s page on the brooch. So exciting!
Pandit Ravi Shankar’s insecurity robbed the world of a genius musician - his wife, Annapurna Devi. This piece is mostly about a documentary that one of her students made about her. He convinced her to come into the spotlight and tell her story, but days before the shoot could commence, she passed away.
Artifact of the week: Pair of Kakiemon elephants from late 1600s Japan. These were made in Japan and exported to Europe by the Dutch East India Company. There were no elephants in Japan at that point, and people living in Kyushu then were unlikely to have seen one. These were made based on the best information available to them at that time. Using which, I guess they’ve done a pretty great job?
Though, I have to wonder about the kind of mind that wanted a pair of Asian elephants made in the latest Japanese overenamelled style. Who would even come up with, and commission that? Not judging, it’s the kind of thinking that leads to greatness. Kind of like watching the 49ers play the Chiefs while eating pao bhaji pizza.