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.
पोस्ट्स
३५ टिप्पण्या:
I use Greek fire in my new murder mystery, Whodidit with a Colt .45?. On sale soon.
A wave of laughter swept over the crowd. It wasn’t just a few people, like when I called Clem a white ghost. It seemed like the whole mob was laughing. And in particular, it was all the angry drunk men in front who were laughing the hardest.
What the hell were they laughing at?
That’s when I turned and saw my deputy, Finn. He had come out of the jail house, and now he was standing on the front porch, right behind me. And he was armed with a slingshot.
“Are you going to kill us with your rock?” somebody shouted.
“We’ve got Colts and Schofields, boy.”
“Get off the porch, you clown!”
The moonlight was bright, and with all the torches, we could all see pretty well. Finn was standing there, pointing a slingshot at the mob. It wasn’t a rock in his slingshot, however. It was a shiny sphere, about three inches across.
“My name is Finn,” Finn said. His voice was loud, and surprisingly strong. “Y’all know what I can do. This isn’t a rock. This is Greek fire. Do you want to see it?”
“Oh fuck!” a man yelled.
“I seen it! I seen it! He’ll burn your face off!”
Several people in front started fleeing in the snow, as fast as they could run. And it escalated. The people who didn’t know about Greek Fire were shocked and paralyzed. The people who did know about Greek Fire were running for their lives. And the fear was contagious. Suddenly, the people who had no idea what all the running was about started running away, too. And in a minute, maybe two, the whole damn mob had run off into the night.
As a child in North East Florida my family of beach crackers routinely caught gopher tortoises and butchered them for stew. A very tasty stew at that. We ate so many of the damn things that they became a protected species with license to wander wherever in 2026. And bold they have become. Turtle in general has gone from a Key West menu staple in 1950 to almost a sin today.
I’ve become a sucker for the AI produced VR documentary on some ancient civilization. You know, a walk thru the streets of ancient Rome? Roman fast food. Roman brothels and sanitation. The AI wizards are really creating a lot of this stuff.
A zettabyte is one BILLION terabytes -- or 10²¹ bytes. For comparison, there are about 10²¹ molecules of H₂O in 0.2 grams of water, roughly 1/150th of an ounce.
Those Mayan plazas are functionally equivalent to Elon’s SpaceX new fully reusable rockets that launch for the first time this Friday. Ignore the fact that the Mayans didn’t have wheels. All cultures are equal. Diversity is our strength.
“One shows the beheading scene, with a person wielding a blade or ax against a possible captive.”
A “possible” captive? You mean there were volunteers for beheading?
“90 minutes, New York to Paris.”
With Elon’s fully reusable rockets that launch, that can happen. But I’m thinking Santa Clara to Beijing so Jensen Huang can visit his girlfriend.
Curious, I looked it up:
**The only things historical texts claim could actually put out a Greek fire blaze were sand, vinegar, or old urine. If you have ever seen the emerald-green "Wildfire" used in Game of Thrones, George R.R. Martin based it directly on this real-world historical terror.**
What it MIGHT BE was interesting but that list of possible extinguishers was quite intriguing.
Not new urine. Old urine.
That was nice article. Wonder how that got past the NYT's editor.
That reminds me of horrifying home remedy I was subjected to as a child afflicted with bedwetting. I was made to piss as close as possible on a super heated brick, so that the odorous vapor would dissolve on my namesake member. It didn’t work.
Interesting that there can be so many molecules of H2O in such a small amount of water (10^21), whereas it is estimated that the visible universe contains about 10^80 protons. The simple result of compounding orders of magnitude, i.e., powers of 10, are sometimes difficult to comprehend.
Conceptual numbers is what my old professor at UCR called them. We use symbols because all those numbers in a long string are literally hard to write out and the superscript is just about the only way to wrap our head around huge numbers (or huge numbers of to the right of the decimal point as well).
Empirical knowledge of chemistry, construction, geometry, poisons, and other domains is not nearly the same thing as a deep study of these fields that have given us an understanding of the principles from which we can develop further knowledge To pretend that those impressive achievements somehow make the present time anything other than the pinnacle of human knowledge is utterly ridiculous.
"And yet archaeology consistently turns up hints of ancient accomplishments, buried for centuries."
It's a nice article, but in true NYT style, not very deep.
"...And yet..." suggests that there is something wrong or incorrect with assuming that "we are at the pinnacle of human knowledge and achievement." The discovery of remarkable inventions by ancient civilizations does not negate the truly astonishing technological advancements of the past 200 years, or the rapidly accelerating pace of ever more technological advances.
Also it would seem that someone could set AI to work in figuring out those Easter Island writings, or the Viking weaving techniques.
Kylos--GMTA.
Mr. Begley was on fire this morning, 3 for 3!
“From our current perspective, a lot of the answers researchers gave very confidently 100 years ago turned out to be remarkably or brilliantly false."
Appreciate the stark honesty. Great article. William Broad has been doing this for at least 30 years. I rung him up for help when I was a young scribe in the 1990s doing a piece on the U.S. spy balloon mistaken for the Roswell "flying saucer."
Silver Linings to the left's one party state Tax Hikes in Colorado.
The left think they can tax us into utopia. The opposite it true. It's called economic reality.
The democrats #1 issue is making sure Illegals are on welfare.
With all those zetabytes buzzing around the world and around our brains we are becoming more scatterheaded.
I worked for a computer data storage company the last 20 years of my career. 25 years ago a terabyte was a huge amount of storage. They are now working on zettabyte scale file systems to support AI environments. A lot can happen in 25 years.
When reading about ancient societies, I like to keep in mind that the people then were just as intelligent as people today, just with less accumulated knowledge. And without a firm grasp of the scientific method. And without germ theory. And without most of our current science, technology, and ability to access information. So while the correct ratio for burning sulfur with oil has been an unverifiable mystery for centuries, the Greeks didn't know how to fly and couldn't figure out where mice came from correctly. Win some, lose some.
IIRC, scientists have recently come pretty close to recreating something like Greek fire. It's hard to match a recipe that you don't have though. Surviving accounts also may not be so precise or accurate about what Greek fire could do. With H-bombs and napalm, though, we would probably win if ancient Greeks attacked us.
The anthropologists have discovered that there were at least three hunter-gatherer tribes that discovered how to make a bow and arrow and later that skill was lost by the tribe.. It's not hard to understand why. If you discover a really neat new way to kill people, you keep that secret to yourself and only share it with close family members. Then some disease or famine happens and they all die.
If I got caught in one of those pesky time loops that are always happening in science fiction novels, I wouldn't have much wisdom to share with the people of antiquity or the middle ages. We live in a world of wonders, and I don't know how to darn a sock, much less make a steam engine from scratch........I think the people of Mark Twain's generation were best equipped to bring useful technology to the middle ages or antiquity. I read A Connecticut Yankee. In that book, the Connecicut Yankee teaches those backward peoples how to murder each other with industrial age efficiency.
Galen lived around 129 BCE. He introduced the practice of balancing the humors by bloodletting. That practice didn't die out until the late 19th century. I think as time went by, people became more proficient and sanitary in the procedure so there was progress in this area, and, over millennia, we never lost he skill.
"Shouting Thomas said...
I’ve become a sucker for the AI produced VR documentary on some ancient civilization. ...."
I like those, too.
Although I use all of this stuff as a matter of course, I still stop occasionally in wonder that, in 1988 or so, I spent a bunch of money to upgrade to a 30 MB hard drive. And now I have a couple of thumb drives of 64 GB each. And still. . . . .I wrote hundreds, if not thousands, of pages of text on those tiny things.
Graham Hancock opened my brain to the idea civilization waxes and wanes over millennia. Humans developing haut cuisine, knowledge going extinct, and starting anew to reach the pinnacles once more. One might ask how and why civilizations disappear but given recent events I know now…
A terabyte is a trillion bytes, and a zettabyte is a billion terabytes. In between are exabytes and petabytes. In 1986 an article was published estimating that all the world’s stored data came to roughly 2.6 exabytes. Forty years it’s roughly 150 zettabytes, or 57,700 times as much.
Most of it is junk: high resolution digital images of someone’s latest restaurant dinner, video clips of someone’s kids playing on a beach (not to be confused with videoclips of my grandkids playing on a beach, which are not junk but actually priceless), romantic texts between smitten teen boys and teen girls, Emails announcing yet another dreary office meeting, any comment on the Althouse blog made by Fredo Frederson or Indefinitely Extended Excursion, etc. But there’s good stuff out there too, and until we can figure out how to separate the junk from the good stuff (while noting that the definitions of junk and good stuff vary from individual to individual and over time) we have to store it all. Hence the need for ever more data centers.
Alvin Toffler wrote a book in 1970 called, Future shock. In that book he talked about "information overload." ("the psychological distress and disorientation people feel when they receive too much data in too short a time.") Even though futurists of that time could predict that we would be bulldozed by information in the future, they didn't really imagine just how much of that data would be total garbage filled with useless, fake and false data. Basically, slop.
There's an episode of the 1990s show, The Outer Limits about a future society where everyone's brain is wired up to a central computing system that gives them instant access to all the data in the world. One day the system starts to malfunction and it begins to force feed some people streams of useless data that overloads their brains and kills them. The episode is titled, Stream of Consciousness. (Season 3 episode 5)
I bought my first computer in 1985. At the MicroComputer Store. A store that only sold PCs and nothing else.
It was an Olivetti and cost about $3,000. I splurged on a 2nd floppy drive (5.25", 360k each!) and extra memory to take it to 640k (not M) because Bill Gates said I'd never need more.
A couple years later I upgraded with a hard drive. 40MB!!! I remember talking to someone who has a 100MB hard drive and could not imagine why.
In 2000 or so I remember reading an article about how much data Walmart collected. I think it was the first time I had heard of petabytes. Walmart had some incredibly impressive number of them. 50 or 75 IIRC.
I used to think a 1TB (1000MB) hard drive was big. Now I buy 3TB drives for backup at costco for $75 I have a 1TB thumbdrive that I paid about $50 for on Amazon.
Yottabytes? Exabytes? Lots of memory but not that impressive anymore. I'll bet petabyte USB solid state drives are available in Costco for under $100 in another 10-15 years and we will need them.
Maybe I'll get excited when they get to ronnabytes. I'll probably be dead before I can buy a quettabyte thumb drive.
Perhaps it is time to reread George Gilder's 1985 book "Telecosm"
John Henry
From an engineering point of view The fact that the Antikathera mechanism was built, but that the builders had a way of making two pieces of brass absolutely flat and parallel. A skill that wasn't exercised again until the 1840s
WK, sometime around 1989 I almost worked on a 1 Gigabyte storage system. The company had a 0.5 GB prototype, which was about 4x5x8 FEET. It was a jukebox of thousands of aluminized glass plates. Data was written by a big laser.
I didn't think it was a viable product, so did not join them.
Obviously a zetabyte is enough storage to digitize Katherine Zeta-Jones. Well, hopefully more than digit-ize, iykwimaityd. CC, JSM
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