"It’s easy to assume that we sit at the pinnacle of human knowledge and achievement. Zettabytes of information are just a click away..."

"... we jet halfway across the world in hours; we talk to anyone, anywhere, all while satellites circle the globe, DNA is sequenced and spliced and small packets of electrochemical energy hum with power at our disposal. And yet archaeology consistently turns up hints of ancient accomplishments, buried for centuries. Just this year, researchers have discovered poisons used by early Homo sapiens, wooden tools carved by early hominins, well-engineered Maya plazas, terraces and other architectural feats and a centuries-old board game...."

From "How Did Greek Fire Work? And 6 Other Lost Inventions" (NYT)(a gift link, like all NYT links now).

I think I'm seeing "zettabytes" for the first time. What is a zettabyte? It's "2 to the 70th power, also expressed as 1 sextillion bytes... approximately equal to 1,000 exabytes or 1 billion terabytes."

The prefix "zetta-" is in the OED. It's "An arbitrary alteration of septi-... so called with reference to the unit being seven orders of magnitude greater than one thousand.... Because the symbol s for sepo would be the same as the symbol for the second, while the symbol o for oco could be misread as a zero, these eventually became zepto and yocto. The multiple prefixes zetta and yotta were fabricated, from the same Latin roots, by an equally arbitrary process."

Back to the main article. I'll just cherry-pick one thing about food — an extinct plant called silphium: "Elite gourmands paid fortunes to have silphium’s pungent juice ground into the exotic braises detailed in Apicius — a first-century collection that stands as our primary record of Roman haute cuisine — which describes using the spice to glaze whole parrot and flamingo in a rich date and vinegar reduction. Silphium’s flavor profile seemed to be similar to to garum, leeks and garlic; contemporary writers praised its unique, musky smell and the sharp savor it left on the palate."

The silphium is gone but the parrots and flamingoes are still around. Imagine eating a parrot or a flamingo. No, they are firmly on our noneatable list. A flamingo is a thing to treasure and love.