You snark, but please note the "[1983]" in the title. This article's points have since been expounded on, with new evidence both archaeological and experimental.
Namely:
> The concentric lines were not always perfectly parallel.
1. What the article calls "concentric circles" are, in fact, series of spirals. That is, a cutting point ploughing through the granite, round and round.
And indeed the fine abrasive circles that this article manages to reproduce (image 7b) look nothing like the original fairly well-spaced, deep-cut grooves of the original hole (image 1a, all the way at the top).
Petrie himself documented spiral grooves that span many drill rotations, sometimes totaling over 6 metres in a single continuous groove. This is well established and not disputed because the physical evidence is so plain.
Why the OP failed to mention spiral grooves and talks about "concentric circles" instead is unclear, given they otherwise quote Petrie extensively.
> [the hole] diameter on the outside is 5.3 cm. and tapers to 4.3 cm. on the inside.
> …a tubular copper drill creates a more parallel drill hole since it cannot wear beyond the internal diameter of the drill.
2. By all accounts, the tubular drills were fairly thin. We know this because there are thin (overdrilled) circles at the bottom of discovered tube holes, up to 0.5cm in thickness of the tube wall max. There you can see the actual narrow width of the tube because the bottom wasn't sawn off as in the case of OP's particular sarcophagus.
Again well documented by Petrie and others, supported by overwhelming physical evidence, so not a point of contention.
The OP does not go into how the observed difference of 1cm compares to the wear of the (presumably thinner) "internal diameter of the drill". See for example [0] for a clearer, updated exposition.
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To be clear, none of this is of course evidence for any "aliens". But reading your snark reminded me of those internet fly-by experts who deride honest work of others because "The science is settled bro, I saw a documentary on NBC! Aliens lol these other people are cretins!"
I'd recommend turning off sound if Youtube amateur commentary irks you, but the breadth of physical evidence (photos and videos of actual stone artefacts, not theories around them) they display is astounding. Reading scientific papers (or watching NBC…) alone won't build you enough intuition and nuance for fly-by snarks. It is a complex topic, and not all amateurs are cretins. A bit of humility helps.
I agree that they're misusing the word "concentric". However, I'd be very surprised if they truly overlooked the grooves being continuous spirals, as that would be extremely meaningful. Accepting your citation of Petrie, I'm actually surprised that the grooves were spirals, as that implies a cutter which makes significant progress in a single rotation, which seems unlikely in any stone, let alone granite.
Well yes, that's my point – the process is not trivial, with surprising technical details.
For a more in-depth take on grooves – at least more in-depth relative to "concentric circles" or Lehner's "wet sand" video) check out my link above, https://antropogenez.ru/drilling/. Specifically on Petrie's testimony they offer this:
> Of course, Petrie’s Core#7 does not bear any regular helices or a thread cut in granite with a fixed jewel point with a pitch of 2.0 mm, as it has been described by him. There is only a series of grooves, the formation mechanism of which is described above in detail. Their pitch, being very irregular, is not related to the advance movement of the tool cutting edge.
Most importantly, they ran actual experiments on actual stones.
And their theory for those grooves is a sort of emergent property of the accumulated effect of corundum grains falling into the same crest/trough pattern along the tube wall while drilling downward, leading to the observed series of (irregular) cut spiral grooves.
> At some point you are the problem if you work for free for a commercial entity.
Sounds harsh, but this is the correct stance.
The free labour you provide is not only "your loss". There are second order effects: you effectively make it harder for others to compete with said commercial entity.
This includes salaried employees of competing companies whose wages you effectively press down. And even other volunteers and non-profits, because defending and sustaining their project in face of "free inputs, for-profit outputs" competition is that much harder. Community projects die because of this.
"Working for free for a commercial entity" is just a bad idea all around. You exploit yourself (whatever, your choice, you may be getting other kicks out of it) and harm others.
>You clamor about the need for change in a society.... and yet you are a part of of one, how curious!
The town drunk telling you to hand the barkeep your keys does not detract from the validity of their point. Try to approach things from the strongest avenue possible, otherwise things devolve into guttersniping.
And the point is, at some point, you have to get it out there somewhere in order for it to have been said. The only concern I have with the points being made here; is the paradox of FLOSS. We must have a public, free and in the public trust corpus of software. Locking everything behind for profits just leads to computing definitely being inaccessible to most everyone. Yet look at all the value extraction bootstrapped on FLOSS stacks where companies get bootstrapped around the composition of a few primitives; but inevitably hooked by the caste of management/MBA types, or utilized as social engineering lever by governments. See social media, car manufacturers, IaaS now, finance companies, banks, etc ...
It’s not necessarily a bad idea if the individualized return is positive. Feeling like a big shot for making a cogent point in a public forum has an unquantifiable non zero worth to the commenter.
> has an unquantifiable non zero worth to the commenter.
Yes, that's the "other kicks out of it" above. Already covered.
More importantly:
> You just provided free content (a brief opinion piece) for publication on a commercial entity (HackerNews, run by YCombinator)...
...which, according to you, is a "bad idea all around", since you exploit yourself and harm others.
If HackerNews is indeed a PR branch of some commercial entity, then people posting here for free provide value (which is not to say any of my comments do…) to that entity. Potentially harming alternative forums, whether free or commercial. The point stands.
> So, why are you acting against your morals and judgement?
Good call. I guess I didn't perceive HN as for-profit. Perhaps OP's "At some point" is now, for me.
> …why the 1984 movie Amadeus, which was about Mozart and his rival Salieri, was filmed in Prague…
Surely the director of Amedeus – Miloš Forman – being Czech played a role too.
It is much easier to cooperate with the local crew in their native language, relative to Hungarian / German (IIRC Budapest / Vienna were the other two options on the table for that film).
> It was commonplace to see bricks made, say, in the time of Archduchess Maria Theresa
If you visit the cellar of an old house in Old Town / Lesser Town, chances are you'll find bricks much older than Maria Theresa. These cellars routinely date back to the original construction, 11-14th century (unlike the house on top, which has typically been rebuilt several times to match the latest fashion – gothic, baroque, rococo, etc).
Whether or not they let you take a brick home is a different matter :)
"...Miloš Forman – being Czech played a role too."
It's almost certain he played a key role.
As background, I'll preface my comment by saying that I was once employed on the engineering side of the television industry, and the place where I worked was closely connected to film production, the complex included film labs that processed Eastman color stock for theater release and allied to it were film studios, so it's inevitable that I picked up some knowhow about what goes on during a film production.
Other than having seen Amadeus, (which I rather enjoyed but still hold several strong criticisms about despite its many Oscars), and the few snippets I've read about the film, I've no direct knowledge of its production per se, but I'd say that as its director Miloš Forman almost certainly would have had full oversight and a controlling say in all aspects of its production (as do most directors of any film).
Despite my background, I'm not really a strong film buff so I've no deep interest in the production minutiae of films but I took somewhat more interest in Amadeus than with most because of its story. I'm a long time enjoyer of classical music and I'm familiar with much of Mozart's and some of Salieri's music. I accept the modern view that their relationship was often more collaborative and there was little animosity or rivalry between them. In the relationship Mozart, if anyone, was likely the bigger problem, as he had a penchant thinking people were against him. There's some evidence that Salieri kept a watchful eye on Mozart, and as a fellow composer why wouldn't he do so as did Hayden and others? There's essentially no solid evidence that Salieri poisoned Mozart—only ill-founded rumors. In fact, evidence suggests he died of a combination one of the winter illnesses doing the rounds of Vienna at the time and a concoction of dangerous medicines (if Mozart was poisoned then the most likely culprit was his local apothecary).
Even before the idea of the film was born, it's almost certain that as a Czech Forman would have had a priori understandings about Prague that would have come to the fore when he learned he'd be directing the film. It's reasonable to assume he'd have immediately recognized that Prague would make an ideal readymade backdrop for the film. Its historical center was ideal from a production standpoint, it was of historical significance for the film and its old unaltered architecture could easily substitute for scenes in Vienna and Salzburg.
Moreover, I'd reckon it's highly likely (probably almost certain) that Forman was well aware of Mozart's close connection with Prague long before he'd read Peter Shaffer' stage play. It'd be difficult for him not to know, as Prague takes considerable pride that Don Giovanni, which is widely accepted as one of the greatest operas ever written and still a very popular† and still widely performed, had its premiere in the city in 1787 in the Bohemian National Theater (now the Estates Theatre). (I couldn't miss that fact when I first visited Prague as there was mention of it everywhere.)
"If you visit the cellar of an old house in Old Town / Lesser Town, chances are you'll find bricks much older than Maria Theresa."
Right. I've spent many an hour in such 'establishments' getting somewhat lightheaded (to put it politely) and I've made a practice of looking at their construction and becoming acquainted with their history and age. Where I come from (Australia) indigenous stuff is ancient but nothing of European influence is more than a bit over 200 years old so by comparison just about everywhere in Europe seems very old; in many places I've visited there's a surfeit of ancient buildings, they seem to be everywhere, we have nothing like that here. No doubt, to native inhabitants it's just the norm and they take it in their stride. However, for me the age and historical nature of these old buildings remains a novelty and they always pique my interest even though I've been to Europe many times and lived and worked there for periods.
"Whether or not they let you take a brick home is a different matter :)"
Ha, I doubt it. As an arch conservationist, it was never my thought to remove anything that was fixed in place, I recall once sitting on 2000-year-old bricks in the Colosseum and the thought never crossed my mind, what did however was that I was actually sitting on them and that no one else except me was the least bit interested in the matter.
Why would I remember that? Well, down here, we have social phenomenon—or at least we used to called the cultural cringe:https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_cringe. It's not as common these days as large sections of the community have come from Europe and elsewhere, and nowadays travel to Europe is commonplace, but it was alive and well when I was a kid and it rubbed off onto many of my generation (but it affected our parents and earlier generations to a much greater degree because few had the opportunity and means to travel). Like many of us, when I first went to Europe decades ago I thought I'd finally made it, my education was on its way to competition. Incidentally, sometimes it's still a sore point with older people who've never traveled.
The phenomenon is understandable in that before WWII the local culture here was profoundly British and the population was acutely aware that it was living in an outpost 12,000 miles from its cultural home of Mother England even though the vast majority had never been there. After the War that changed somewhat after several waves of European migration and later migration from Asia but native born Australians still knew they were missing out on experiencing the real thing—that of gaining actual hands-on knowledge of their cultural heritage and that it was important for them to make the pilgrimage.
Re: 'Maria Theresa' bricks, they had a particular resonance for me as I've long had an interest in the Enlightenment era and that I was living in one of the cultural capitals of the world. Also they weren't rare, there were many loose ones just lying about at various building and construction sites around Vienna. Moreover, I wasn't alone, a colleague, one of my fellow countrymen, would also hunt them down with gusto.
Clearly familiarity breeds indifference, such mundane historical artifacts like bricks seem to hold little interest for the locals but for us renegades from the cultural cringe they're considered prised finds. ;-)
On a similar theme I recall an occasion where I saw a nice old 18th Century single storey brick building in Kleine Neugasse near Wiedner Hauptstraße not far from where I was living at the time being torn down to make way for a modern structure. I was rather horrified at what I considered vandalism, which, to me, was all the more poignant due to the fact that nearby significant numbers of old buildings had been bomb-damaged during the War and out of necessity they'd been rapidly replaced with new ones of little architectural merit. I remember whingeing about it to my landlady over lunch at a nearby café. She wasn't the least concerned and couldn't understand why I was upset about it.
__
† Don Giovanni is also a favorite of mine, why wouldn't it be? It has appeal even for those who aren't opera buffs; it's salacious in parts and righteous in others, it's full of sex, promiscuity, seduction, rape, murder, revenge, arrogance, hubris, rejection of salvation and damnation—even a ghostly appearance from the murdered Commendatore! What else is there? The opera captures much of the human condition to a tee!
No wonder the conservative Viennese establishment banished it to Prague! Also, Don Giovanni tells us a lot about the liberal-minded rebellious attitudes of both Mozart and his librettist, Da Ponte. (BTW, Whenever we discuss Mozart's operas we usually leave Da Ponte out of the discussion. We shouldn't however, for without the Mozart-Da Ponte collaboration Don Giovanni would never have been the true and continuing success that it's been over the past few centuries).
> (It kind of begs the question of whether math follows from the axioms we want or axioms follow from the math we want). Plus perhaps some new math would start to unfold as we begin to explore the inconsistent axiom's subtleties.
Only tangentially related, but the same idea comes to mind reading Terence Tao's masterpiece on "Smoothed asymptotics" for divergent infinite sums (e.g. the infamous 1+2+3+4+… = -1/12):
Our intuitive interpretation (Σn must be infinite! and surely positive! never -1/12) fails miserably for such infinite series, in the sense that "practical experiments" (QM) hint at reality preferring that bizarro -1/12 interpretation instead. Who is at fault here – our seemingly iron-clad intuition or the experiments? And why the disconnect?
Like you say, what new math unfolds once we accept and internalize this new interpretation and adjust our intuition? Tao's piece offers an excellent basis for that. While we may come up with any interpretations and axioms we like, experiment is the final arbiter on which of these "math worlds" are real.
> what Geographical factor allowed for Industrialism to be established in Western Civilization, with all the force multipliers that Industrialism gives?
Wasn't there a whole book devoted to exploring exactly this question?
I've been a Hetzner customer for nearly 10 years now. I just checked – first invoice in June 2014. And during that period, Hetzner's support – which I needed maybe 3 times since things generally just work – has always been stellar.
I've used Linode too, and their support was comparable (=also great). But Hetzner wins on pricing, hands down.
I actually appreciate Hetzner hasn't join the BS enshittification gimmick train (yet). If that's your complaint.
I don't think WP:NOTE or WP:RELIABLE as such are what ruffles people's feathers. Rather, it's Wikipedia's insistence on pre-chewed secondary sources from legacy media – the roundabout "No original research" policy – which was a questionable (and often questioned) move from the start.
Now public trust in corporate news is at a record low [0], for good reasons. Wikipedia simply hitched their "truth and reliability wagon" to a dying horse, and the chicken are coming home to roost.
The OP may have – unwillingly and unwittingly – become a part of the SaaS product's testing team. This happens more often that people realize.
Behind the scenes, SaaS can be a shit show: Customer files a ticket => SaaS devs cannot reproduce (or don't bother to reproduce) but fix the presumed bug maybe => a new SaaS release => notify customer to upgrade, close their ticket => wait for response from the customer to see if the fix helped. Rinse & repeat, act aloof. Pretend it's the customer's fault all along.
Namely:
> The concentric lines were not always perfectly parallel.
1. What the article calls "concentric circles" are, in fact, series of spirals. That is, a cutting point ploughing through the granite, round and round.
And indeed the fine abrasive circles that this article manages to reproduce (image 7b) look nothing like the original fairly well-spaced, deep-cut grooves of the original hole (image 1a, all the way at the top).
Petrie himself documented spiral grooves that span many drill rotations, sometimes totaling over 6 metres in a single continuous groove. This is well established and not disputed because the physical evidence is so plain.
Why the OP failed to mention spiral grooves and talks about "concentric circles" instead is unclear, given they otherwise quote Petrie extensively.
> [the hole] diameter on the outside is 5.3 cm. and tapers to 4.3 cm. on the inside.
> …a tubular copper drill creates a more parallel drill hole since it cannot wear beyond the internal diameter of the drill.
2. By all accounts, the tubular drills were fairly thin. We know this because there are thin (overdrilled) circles at the bottom of discovered tube holes, up to 0.5cm in thickness of the tube wall max. There you can see the actual narrow width of the tube because the bottom wasn't sawn off as in the case of OP's particular sarcophagus.
Again well documented by Petrie and others, supported by overwhelming physical evidence, so not a point of contention.
The OP does not go into how the observed difference of 1cm compares to the wear of the (presumably thinner) "internal diameter of the drill". See for example [0] for a clearer, updated exposition.
----
To be clear, none of this is of course evidence for any "aliens". But reading your snark reminded me of those internet fly-by experts who deride honest work of others because "The science is settled bro, I saw a documentary on NBC! Aliens lol these other people are cretins!"
I'd recommend turning off sound if Youtube amateur commentary irks you, but the breadth of physical evidence (photos and videos of actual stone artefacts, not theories around them) they display is astounding. Reading scientific papers (or watching NBC…) alone won't build you enough intuition and nuance for fly-by snarks. It is a complex topic, and not all amateurs are cretins. A bit of humility helps.
[0] https://antropogenez.ru/drilling/