For CSV, I don't know how this comes out. It depends on the library/programming language. It might be 73786976294838210000 or it might throw an exception, or whatever. I'm just saying JSON will not solve your problems neither.
If you need something unambiguously specified, then XML with XSD is still a valid option. All number types are specified exactly, and you can use extensions for custom number types.
It's what a lot of engineers have been saying for decades: Looking at the surfaces of the artefacts, it's obvious more advanced tooling, than what was claimed by archaeologists, must have been used. Oh irony, the bits were already lying about in the museum's archive for a century.
Quite frustrating how archeology swings over the years from "we'll believe anything" to "we won't accept any claim without a preserved example". While some of the excesses of the past were clearly excessive, drilled holes should have been sufficient evidence of drills, people living on islands should be sufficient evidence of boats, rope-worn bones should be considered evidence of rope and so forth.
people living on islands should be sufficient evidence of boats
Historical sea levels were wildly different at different times, so not necessarily. For instance, the British isles were settled at a point when it was a part of the mainland: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Doggerland.png
Balance would be nice, yes, but I think the conservative approach is closer to correct, especially given the natural human bias toward believing sensational theories.
Maybe not closer to correct, but definitely less likely to admit errors. But sometimes the negative space around a particular thing becomes overwhelming. To me this is like circumstantial evidence—in general it’s weaker than physical evidence, but in high enough numbers it can serve.
But what does the negative space indicate? It says something is missing - which few will dispute - but there are many possible answers in a sort of superposition. Speculation about this answer or that one isn't reliable. It resolves to one answer (or a few) when you have actual evidence.
Sure, you can’t always make a definitive statement, but you can at least determine classes of things. Same way we can determine a murder occurred without recovering a weapon or sometimes even without finding a body. Maybe we can’t be very specific about the how, but IME it is also OK to draw comparisons to modern tools so long as those comparisons are helpful.
Speculation may usefully provide leads to investigate, but it's meaningless as a conclusion and won't be accepted by scientists or anyone else serious (including courts); they require evidence.
> you can’t always make a definitive statement
It's far short of that. Human speculation is wildly unreliable and we seem to always overestimate it, perhaps because it's emotionally satisfying: What other speculative answer would we choose but something that satisfies our emotions? Lacking evidence, nothing compels us to face the unpleasant or unexpected. Look what our understanding of nature and the world was before we required evidence (before science).
The problem is that you get a vastly distorted picture because of different survivorship rates of artifacts. In the Stone Age people used mostly wood tools but stone tools didn’t rot away.
It can be legitimately unclear. Relatively-advanced technology being available to early humans is remarkable. Likewise, achieving difficult tasks without the relatively-advanced technology is remarkable. Some prototypical examples of this:
- Incan stonework with stones 'perfectly' cut to fit without mortar -- did they have advanced tools to support that? Or just persistence?
- Greek fire -- is there some lost mechanism here? Or just the growth of legends?
- the pyramids (I think not so controversial among academics, but certainly in pop culture)
That's an interesting thought. I wonder if you can quantify this belief? That Weibull (presumably) distribution would be an interesting and useful thing to know.
Quantify the belief that humans are biased toward sensationalism? No, I have no idea how to do that. Actually you could make an argument that it's a bit circular, that "sensationalism" is defined as the kind of ideas that humans are biased towards and which are therefore more able to cause a "sensation".
But if you don't see how people yearn to believe in big dramatic things like conspiracies, aliens, bigfoot, or even simple narratives about single people changing the course of history, and how they only accept the complicated and/or boring reality with conscious effort, then, well, you seem to be living in a better universe than I am.
Unfortunately, you also sometimes throw out explanations like "they did X in substantially the same way as their descents were doing X up until the late 1800s" or "they used it for Y, just at it was used at other sites throughout the world."
At least in the case of things like migrations, we're starting to get overwhelming genetic evidence.
I agree that's an overcorrection. People doing things the same way they have for centuries should be high on the list of plausible, boring explanations.
It's possible to put holes through things without a drill. People can get onto islands without boats. How do you define rope, and what else might cause similar wear? Are you certain you can distinguish them?
Archaeology has come a long way over the last couple of centuries. It used to be little better than grave robbing and crackpot (often racist) theories. Archaeologists made all sorts of assumptions that turned out to be ridiculously (and sometimes tragically) wrong. Excavations once involved dynamite and bulldozers. Things have changed. Techniques for re-analyzing and extracting new information from old finds are allowing archaeologists to make discoveries without digging at all. Even a careful, modern dig is a destructive act that can only be conducted once.
If you find a man made hole with a perfectly vertical shaft and high aspect ratio (tall and narrow), it was drilled. Individuals can float or be washed ashore on an island, populations can't. If you find entire civilizations on distant islands, they got there by some sort of boat or advanced raft. Rope generally implies twisted or braided fibers, so maybe it's difficult to tell if this was artificially twisted or a natural one like a vine. But if it looked like a rope, and was used like a rope then it was a rope.
This is true, but archaeology has been settled for a while now on what constitutes sufficient evidence. Believe it or not, it's actually a pretty new science.
they dont even accept claims with properly documented and preserved samples. your methodology doesnt matter if it disagrees with the common accepted 'truth'.
archeology is a cesspool.
not to mention tons of hings being twisted into weird shit only to try and push colonial agendas!
This has been less true for the last 50 years. Archaeology as a field is very aware of this cultural bias, and the old school are mostly dead. Think of it like the doctors of 150 years ago prescribing "cucaine for ill humors". It's a pendulum, but it's settling.
These days it's seen as a dynamic decision tree. If such and such people had so and so technology, then the logical ways to achieve that are x, y and z methods. Let's look for evidence for those things and weigh up the probability of each. Importantly, let's not allow cultural bias to cloud that analysis by consulting with the closest living relatives of said people.
The problems are, amongst others, maintaining that lack of cultural bias, recognising that you have to allow for unknown paths to technology, and being aware that every deductive step exponentially expands the decision tree whilst simultaneously clouding the certainty.
This is why modern archaeology is actually highly averse to saying things are "true", but it's also very strong on saying other things are almost certainly "false".
Most things in this tree of dwindling probability are "false" , and it takes serious evidence, linking a bunch of deductive steps, to flip the consensus to "true".
The Kamitakamori tools? Piltdown fossils? The pattern roughly seems to be "if you have physical artifacts that support a theory / fit a pattern they will be accepted (even if bogus) but if you have a theory that explains facts (e.g. drilled holes) but no physical artifacts (in this case drills) it will be rejected".
(Just saw the snark about ancient aliens; no idea where that came from. If you're going to try to imply that that's my position you'll need to produce some artifacts to back it up.)
Piltdown was rejected 70 years ago, so hardly a current example. Kamitakamori was someone taking legitimately old artifacts and putting them in other places. You can detect that (as people did), but it's much less obvious than you're suggesting.
There are also numerous examples where physical artifacts haven't been immediately accepted. The white sands footprints. Monte Verde II. Others like Monte Verde I, Buttermilk Creek, and Cooper's ferry still aren't accepted despite physical evidence.
Consensus generally has high standards for anything that pushes boundaries. It's very easy to construct an "obvious" explanation that's totally wrong. We call these "just-so" stories. A narrative that's supported by physical evidence is a lot more verifiable.
> Piltdown was rejected 70 years ago, so hardly a current example
Well of course it wasn't a current example -- to quote their original comment:
> Quite frustrating how archeology swings over the years from "we'll believe anything" to "we won't accept any claim without a preserved example". While some of the excesses of the past were clearly excessive ... [emphasis added]
In other words, they feel that historical examples of fanciful theories being mainstream has resulted in an over correction to modern archeology requiring unreasonably strict proof standards.
(There is a certain irony in a user called "AlotOfReading" not reading a fairly short comment carefully...)
And for the record, my grump here is about soft / organic tools and artifacts and coastal / high weathering sites being discounted while everyone falls all over themselves for rocks and bones, even if fake. No aliens, just weavers, sailors, and the like.
> The Kamitakamori tools? Piltdown fossils? The pattern roughly seems to be "if you have physical artifacts that support a theory / fit a pattern they will be accepted (even if bogus)
Two examples from over a century is not evidence of unreliability.
> if you have a theory that explains facts (e.g. drilled holes) but no physical artifacts (in this case drills) it will be rejected".
Evidence is a requirement in all scholarship; the rest is speculation - which can be useful as a direction for searching for evidence, but is not sufficient to be accepted in any field. What field accepts claims without evidence?
They didn't say things should be accepted without evidence. That's a laughably bad-faith reading. They proposed a different standard of evidence that they think is less infeasibly high while still not accepting nonsense. I don't totally agree but it's a reasonable direction to argue.
As for the examples, when they start with "swings over the years" they're clearly taking a long-term perspective, and not trying to claim that modern archaeology will "believe anything" (especially not when their more prominent claim is that modern archaeology believes too little).
IMHO when we choose ridicule, we destroy that relationship - we make clear we are uninsterested in what the other person has to say or in reason, or even in respecting them on a basic level, and that we lack worthwhile arguments. I stop reading there. I understand the temptation but life is too short.
Oh, so you pattern-matched on a single word and skipped the part where I did, in fact, make an argument. Great work.
But more importantly, where did MarkusQ ridicule you? What's your excuse for not reading what they actually said, but instead imagining something they said that was conveniently easy to criticize?
The important part of my phrase "laughably bad-faith" was the bad-faith part. That's what destroys "that relationship".
It sounds very un-archaeologist to not investigate the gap between artifact and tooling (like that’s their job?).
For me the ‘archaeology not accepting things’ has been fueled by Graham Hancock etc. Archaeology is a lot like science, it sits on a body of research, if there’s evidence of advanced tooling and it’s properly investigated and written up, verified, no archaeologist would deny it.
I am really curious about the scoop marks across the globe. The hole drilling story is only interesting because of the precision and feed-per-revolution which is probably why archaeologists does not understand how advanced those people creating this holes must have been.
It's this kind of gate keeping in archaeology that has kept Graham Hancock out of the industry for years, and we are now just finding out his theories are true.
My theory is that the industry is so small, they are afraid it will put them out of a career.
This is true in many, many, many, many places. It takes a significantly higher bar of evidence to put forward specific tooling than an engineer's intuition to make the mark in archaeology.
Being just (as in the right thing happened) and being legal (as in the judicial system does not object) are 2 totally different things. They overlap, but less than people would like to believe.
You are indeed right that in most numeric computations using the inverse temperature, a.k.a. the reciprocal temperature, is more convenient.
Nevertheless, there are many important quantities which are proportional to temperature, e.g. pressure, internal energy, voltage generated by a bandgap reference and so on. Because of this, there are many cases, especially in qualitative reasoning, when using temperature is more convenient than using its inverse.
This is similar to waves, where in most numeric computations wave-number and frequency are more convenient, but there are also many cases, e.g. when reasoning about resonance frequencies or stationary waves, when using wave-length and periodic time is more convenient.
Another example is in electrical circuits, where for some problems using impedance and resistance is more convenient, while for others using admittance and conductance is more convenient.
Perhaps one would need a simpler name for reciprocal temperature, to facilitate its use wherever this makes sense. However, when implementing a physical model in a program, where one should always define distinct types for each kind of physical quantity, using a short type name like "RecTemp" would not stand out among the many abbreviations typically used in programs.
You can say the same about Python. However, there the forces push in the opposite direction: Even when there are better pythony runtimes that provide almost identical behaviour (but better performance), everybody sticks to CPython.
I tried to use non-CPython just last week for the first time. The first thing I tried to install failed. When I looked up the error… I needed CPython.
In my limited experience, I can only assume people are sticking to CPython because it works. Speed doesn’t mean much if libraries and tools fail to function.
I've seen tons of non-cpython use, so I'm not really sure what claim you're trying to make. Aside from supporting "having a spec allows for many implementations that all work".
Well, the original comment was implying org mode had limited popularity because there is no specification. I'm claiming cpython is way more popular compared to fe pypy because it has no spec. The typical scenario is: people try pypy. it mostly works but because of some weird problem some library is broken and then they give up.
Is the claim that pypy has no spec, but cpython does? By that definition I think either both have a spec (they both use https://docs.python.org/3/reference/index.html and both are just "an implementation") or neither has one (since neither fully specifies all behavior and all modules, which is probably true for ~all languages).
No. The claim is cpython has no spec. The link you posted is about the language.
The spec claim is about the behaviour of the runtime.
The underlying claim is hat pypy cannot succeed precisely because there's no clear definition of success/compatibility/compliance. The situation is completely different in the Java world. There there is a specification for the memory model, runtime, aso and you can be sure that when you switch between runtimes, it will just work.
Gotcha. Broadly agreed then (Java is a very good counter-example), though I think pypy might be succeeding quite a bit more than org-mode in terms of users... and org-mode doesn't have a language spec either afaict. It has a fairly good description of the current code's parsing behavior, but the closest I've seen to something rigorous is https://github.com/200ok-ch/org-parser and even that's still unfinished from the readme (and it seems probably abandoned).
I haven't looked into the actual current state of things though, my last check was a couple years ago. I'd be pretty happy if things have changed, I just haven't seen any sign of that.
but... but... SSD/MVMes are not really block devices. Not wrangling them into a block device interface but using the full set of features can already yield major improvements. Two examples: metadata and indexes need smaller granularities compared to data and an NVMe can do this quite naturally. Another example is that the data can be sent directly from the device to the network, without the CPU being involved.
there's also "remand" or detention before trial. One example where this is common is when there's a flight risk, or a risk the subject will influence the investigation.
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