A mysterious Roman artefact found during an amateur archaeological dig is going on public display in Lincolnshire for the first
time.
The object is one of only 33 dodecahedrons found in Britain, and the first to have been discovered in the Midlands.
…
I learned about these… things… from this BBC News story and I’m just gobsmacked. Seriously: what is this thing?
This isn’t a unique example. 33 have been found in Britain, but these strange Roman artefacts turn up all over Europe: we’ve found hundreds of them.
It doesn’t look like they were something that you’d find in any Roman-era household, but they seem to be common enough that if you wandered around third century Northern Europe with one
for a week or so you’d surely be able to find somebody who could explain them to you. And yet we don’t know why.
Here’s two of them and an equally-mysterious icosahedron found in Germany. Photo courtesy Kleon3, used under a Creative Commons license.
We have absolutely no idea why the Romans made these
things. They’re finely and carefully created from bronze, and we find them buried in coin stashes, which suggests that they were valuable and important. But for what?
Frustrated archaeologists have come up with all kinds of terrible ideas:
Maybe they were a weapon, like the ball of a mace or something to be flung from a sling? Nope; they’re not really heavy enough.
At least one was discovered near a bone staff, so it might have been a decorative scepter? But that doesn’t really go any distance to explaining the unusual shape,
even if true (nor does it rule out the possibility of it being some kind of handled tool).
Perhaps they were a rangefinding tool, where a pair of opposing holes line up only when you’re a particular distance from the tool? If a target of a known size
fills the opposite hole in your vision, its distance must be a specific multiple of your distance to the tool. But that seems unlikely because we’ve never found any markings on these
that would show which side you were using; also the devices aren’t consistently-sized.
Roleplayers might notice the similarity to polyhedral dice: maybe they were a game? But the differing-sized holes make them pretty crap dice (researchers have
tried), and Romans seemed to favour cubic dice anyway. They’re somewhat too intricate and complex to be good candidates for children’s toys.
They could be some kind of magical or divination tool, which would apparently fit with the kinds of fortune-telling mysticism believed to be common to the cultures
at the sites where they’re found. Do the sides and holes correspond to the zodiac or have some other astrological significance?
Perhaps it was entirely decorative? Gold beads of a surprisingly-similar design have
been found as far away as Cambodia, well outside the reach of the Roman Empire, which might suggest a continuing tradition of an earlier precursor dodecahedron!
This author thinks they might have acted as a kind of calendar, used for measuring the height of the
midday sun by observing way its beam is cast through a pair of holes when the tool is placed on a surface and used to determine when winter grains should be planted.
Using replicas, some folks online have demonstrated how they could have been used as a knitting tool for
making the fingers of gloves using a technique called “spool knitting”. But this knitting technique isn’t believed to have been invented until a millennium later than the youngest of
these devices.
Others have proposed that they were a proof of qualification: something a master metalsmith would construct in order to show that they were capable of casting a
complex and intricate object.
Seriously, what the hell are you for?
I love a good archaeological mystery. We might never know why the Romans made these things, but reading clever people’s speculations about them is great.
Molly White writes, more-eloquently than I would’ve, almost-exactly my experience of LLMs and similar modern generative
AIs:
…
I, like many others who have experimented with or adopted these products, have found that these tools actually can be pretty useful for some tasks. Though AI
companies are prone to making overblown promises that the tools will shortly be able to replace your content writing team or generate feature-length films or develop a video game from
scratch, the reality is far more mundane: they are handy in the same way that it might occasionally be useful to delegate some tasks to an inexperienced and sometimes sloppy intern.
…
Very much this.
I’ve experimented with a handful of generative AIs, such as:
GPT-3.5 / ChatGPT, for proofreading, summarisation, experimental rephrasing when writing, and idea generation. I’ve found it to be moderately good at summarisation
and proofreading and pretty terrible at producing anything novel without sounding completely artificial and/or getting lost in a hallucination.
Bing for coalescing information. I like that it cites its sources. I dislike that it somehow still hallucinates. I might use it, I suppose, to help me
re-phase a search query where I can’t remember the word I’m looking for.
Stable Diffusion for image generation. I’ve found it most-useful in image-to-image mode, for making low-effort concept art in bulk. For example, when running online
roleplaying games for friends I’ve fed it an image of, say, a skeleton warrior and asked it to make me a few dozen more in a similar style, so as to provide a diverse selection of
distinct tokens1.
Its completely-original2 work lands squarely in
the uncanny valley, though.
Github Copilot for code assistance. I’ve not tried its “chat”-powered functionality but I quite enjoy its “autocomplete” tool. When I’m coding and I forget the syntax
of the command I’m typing, or need to stop and think for a moment about “what comes next”, it’s often there with the answer. I’ve even made us of the “write the comment describing
what the code will do, let Copilot suggest the code for you” paradigm (though I’ve been pretty disappointed with the opposite approach: it doesn’t write great comments!). I find
Copilot to be a lot like having an enthusiastic, eager-to-please, very well-read but somewhat naive junior programmer sitting beside me. If I ask them for some pairing assistance,
they’re great, but I can’t trust them to do anything that I couldn’t do for myself!
Surely others besides that I’ve since forgotten.
Most-recently, I’ve played with music-making AI Suno and… it’s not
great.. but like all these others it’s really interesting to experiment with and think about. Here: let me just ask it to write some “vocal trance europop about a woman called
Molly; Molly has a robot friend who is pretty good at doing many tasks, but the one thing she’ll never trust the robot to do is write in her blog” –
AI-generated content:
[Verse]
Molly’s got a robot that she keeps by her side
It’s pretty handy
It can do many things right
But there’s one task she won’t let it touch
It’s true
The robot can’t write in her blog
No
That won’t do
[Verse 2]
This robot can clean the house
Sweep it up real nice
It can even cook a meal
Add some spice
But when it comes to sharing her thoughts on the screen
Molly won’t trust the robot
That’s her routine
[Chorus]
Molly’s robot friend
By her side all day and night
There’s one thing it can’t do
Can’t write her blog right
She’ll keep typing away
Sharing her heart and soul
That’s something the robot can’t do
It has no control
So yes, like Molly:
I’m absolutely a believer than these kinds of AIs have some value,
I’ve been reluctant and slow to say so because they seem to be such a polarising issue that it’s hard to say that you belong to neither “camp”,
I’m not entirely convinced that for the value they provide they’ve yet proven to be worth their cost, and I’m not certain that for general-purpose generation they will be any time
soon, and
I’ve never used AI to write content for my blog, and I can’t see that ever changing.
It’s still an interesting field to follow-along with. Stuff like Sora from OpenAI and VASA-1 from Microsoft are just scary (the latter seems to have little purpose other than for
misinformation-generation3!),
but the genie’s out of the bottle now.
Footnotes
1 Visually-distinct tokens adds depth to the world and helps players communicate with one
another: “You distract the skinny cultist, and I’ll try to creep up on the ugly one!”
2 I’m going to gloss right over the question of whether or not these tools are capable of
creating anything truly original. You know what I mean.
Anyway, here’s the best printer for 2024: a Brother laser printer. You can just pick any one you like; I have one with a sheet feeder and one without a sheet feeder. Both of them have
reliably printed return labels and random forms and pictures for my kid to color for years now, and I have never purchased replacement toner for either one. Neither has fallen off the
WiFi or insisted I sign up for an ink-related hostage situation or required me to consider the ongoing schemes of HP executives who seem determined to make people hate a legendary
brand with straightforward cash grabs and weird DRM ideas.
…
It’s sort-of alarming that Brother are the only big player in the printer space who subscribe to a philosophy of “don’t treat the customers like
livestock”. Presumably all it’d take is a board-level decision to flip the switch from “not evil” to “evil” and we’d lose something valuable. Thankfully, for now at least, they still
clearly see the value of the positive marketing the world gives them. Positive marketing like like this article.
The article is excellent, by the way. I know that I’m “supposed” to stir up hatred about the fact that its conclusion is written by an AI but… well, just read it for yourself and you’ll see why I don’t mind even one bit. Top notch reporting. Consider following the links within it to
stories about how other printer manufacturers continue to show exactly how shitty they can be.
I recommended a Brother printer to the Vagina Museum the other month. I assume it ‘s still working out fine for them (and not ripping them off, spying on them, and/or contributing to the
destruction of the the planet).
If you lack the imagination to understand how a game like this could have dozens of possible endings, you desperately need to play it. My favourite path so far through the game was to
add a teabag, then hot water, then remove the teabag, then add some milk, then add a second teabag, then drink it.
Genuinely can’t stop laughing at this masterpiece.
This promotional video for Aberystwyth University has been kindly archived onto YouTube by one of the undergraduate students who features in it. It was produced in 1984; approximately
the same time I first visited Aberystwyth, although it would take until fifteen years later in 1999 for me to become a student there
myself.
But the thing is… this 1984 video, shot on VHS in 1984, could absolutely be mistaken at-a-glance for a video shot on an
early digital video camera a decade and a half later. The pace of change in Aberystwyth was and is glacial; somehow even the fashion and music seen in Pier Pressure in the video could pass for late-90s!
Anyway: I found the entire video amazingly nostalgic in spite of how far it predates my attendance of the University! Amazing.
First, bees had to push a blue lever that was blocking a red lever… too complex for a bee to solve on its own. So scientists trained some bees by offering separate rewards for the
first and second steps.
These trained bees were then paired with bees who had never seen the puzzle, and the reward for the first step was removed.
Some of the untrained bees were able to learn both steps of the puzzle by watching the trained bees, without ever receiving a reward for the first step.
…
This news story is great for two reasons.
Firstly, it’s a really interesting experimental result. Just when you think humankind’s learned everything they ever will about the humble bumblebee (humblebee?), there’s something more
to discover.
That a bee can be trained to solve a complex puzzle by teaching it to solve each step independently and then later combining the steps isn’t surprising. But that these trained bees can
pass on their knowledge to their peers (bee-ers?); who can then, one assumes, pass it on to yet other bees. Social learning.
Which, logically, means that a bee that learns to solve the two-lever puzzle second-hand would have a chance of solving an even more-complex three-lever puzzle; assuming such a thing is
within the limits of the species’ problem-solving competence (I don’t know for sure whether they can do this, but I’m a firm bee-lever).
But the second reason I love this story is that it’s a great metaphor in itself for scientific progress. The two-lever problem is, to an untrained bee, unsolvable. But
if it gets a low-effort boost (a free-bee, as it were) by learning from those that came before it, it can make a new discovery.
(I suppose the secret third reason the news story had me buzzing was that I appreciated the opportunities for puns that it presented. But you already knew that I larva pun, right?)
This week, Parry Gripp and Nathan Mazur released Young Squirrel Talking About Himself.
You might recognise the tune (and most of the words) from an earlier Parry Gripp song. The original video for the older
version is no longer available on his channel, and that’s probably for the best, but I was really pleased to see the song resurrected in this new form because it’s fabulous. I’ve been
singing it all day.
…every major OS vendor has been adhering to the convention that checkboxes are square and radio buttons are round.
…
Apple is the first major operating system vendor who had abandoned a four-decades-long tradition. Their new visionOS — for the first time in the history of Apple — will have round
checkboxes.
Anyway, with Apple’s betrayal, I think it’s fair to say there’s no hope for this tradition to continue.
I therefore officially announce 2024 to be the year when the square checkbox has finally died.
The Web did a bad enough job of making checkboxes and radiobuttons inconsistent. I’m not saying you can’t style them, Web developers, but let’s at least keep the fundamental
shape of them the way that they have been for decades so that users can understand them!
But yeah, Apple’s new designs could spell the beginning of the end of this long-established standard. Sad times.
theunderground.blog is an experimental blog that is only available to read through a feed reader.
If you would like to read the latest posts, you can subscribe to the feed at https://theunderground.blog/feed.xml, using the feed reader of your choice.
…
Chris first suggested this idea in the footnote of a post that talks about something I’ve been witnessing recently: that blogging seems to be
having a renaissance1. I’ve
for a few years been telling people that now is the second-best time to start a blog. The best time was, of course, ~20 years ago, but if you missed out first time around (or
let your blog die as big social media silos took over): now’s the time to join the growing resurgence!
There’s two posts published so far, and if you want to read them you’ll need to subscribe to theunderground.blog using your feed reader. There’s tips on that page on getting an easy-to-use one if you haven’t already.
Footnotes
1 He also had interesting things to say about OPML, which is a topic close to my heart. I wonder if I ought to start sharing a partial OPML file of my subscriptions?
2 Or by reading the source code, I suppose: on the open Web, that’s always an option. The
Web is, indeed, magical.
The web loves data. Data about you. Data about who you are, about what you do, what you love doing, what you love eating.
…
I, on the other end, couldn’t care less about your data. I don’t run analytics on this website. I don’t care which articles you read, I don’t care if you read them. I don’t care about
which post is the most read or the most clicked. I don’t A/B test, I don’t try to overthink my content. I just don’t care.
…
Manu speaks my mind. Among the many hacks I’ve made to this site, I actively try not to invade on your privacy by collecting analytics, and I try not to let others to so
either!
My blog is for myself first and foremost (if you enjoy it too, that’s just a bonus). This leads to two conclusions:
If I’m the primary audience, I don’t need analytics (because I know who I am), and
I don’t want to be targeted by invasive analytics (and use browser extensions to block them, e.g. I by-default block all third-party scripts, delete cookies from non-allowlisted
domains 15 seconds after navigating away from sites, etc.); so I’d prefer them not to be on a site for which I’m the primary audience!
I’ve gone into more detail about this on my privacy page and hinted at it on my colophon. But I don’t know if anybody ever reads either
of those pages, of course!
In the parallel universe of last year’s Weird: The Al Yankovic Story, Dr. Demento encourages a young Al Yankovic (Daniel Radcliffe) to move away from song parodies and start writing
original songs of his own. During an LSD trip, Al writes “Eat It,” a 100% original song that’s definitely not based on any other song, which quickly becomes “the biggest hit by
anybody, ever.”
Later, Weird Al’s enraged to learn from his manager that former Jackson 5 frontman Michael Jackson turned the tables on him, changing the words of “Eat It” to make his own parody,
“Beat It.”
Your browser does not support the video tag.
This got me thinking: what if every Weird Al song was the original, and every other artist was covering his songs instead? With recent advances in A.I. voice cloning, I realized
that I could bring this monstrous alternate reality to life.
This was a terrible idea and I regret everything.
…
Everything that is wrong with, and everything that is right with, AI voice cloning, brought together in one place. Hearing
simulations of artists like Michael Jackson, Madonna, and Kurt Cobain singing Weird Al’s versions of their songs is… strange and unsettling.
Some of them are pretty convincing, which is a useful and accessible reminder about how powerful these tools are becoming. An under-reported story from a few years back identified what might be
the first recorded case of criminals using AI-based voice spoofing as part of a telephone scam, and since then the technology
needed to enact such fraud has only become more widely-available. While this weirder-than-Weird-Al project is first and foremost funny, for many it foreshadows darker things.
After “Monty Python’s Flying Circus” ended, Graham Chapman worked with an up-and-coming young writer named Douglas Adams on a new sketch comedy show for the BBC. It was called “Out of
the Trees,” and it bombed. Only one episode was made, and that aired only once, on January 10, 1976.
Once the Beeb gave up on “Out of the Trees,” they did to it what they did to so many other programs of that era: they erased it.
…
Chapman had recorded the show on one of the very earliest home videotape formats… it took two years to build a compatible player.
It’s neither Chapman nor Adams best work, and you can see how it got canned after only a pilot episode. But it’s not terrible.
But the lesson here is one about the challenge of archiving non-print media. Anything that needs a device to “play” it, whether it’s as simple as a vinyl record or as complex as a
videogame, is at greater risk of being lost forever. And the faster the pace of technology moves, the more stuff gets left behind as technology moves on. Is a digital dark age looming?
Are we already in it, but that won’t be known until some future date?
After a break of nine and a half years, webcomic Octopuns is back. I have two thoughts:
That’s awesome. I love Octopuns and I’m glad it’s back. If you want a quick taster – a quick slice, if you will – of its kind of humour, I suggest starting with Pizza.
How did I know that Octopuns was back? My RSS reader told me. RSS remains a magical way to keep an eye on what’s happening on the Internet: it’s like a subscription service that delivers you exactly what
you want, as soon as it’s available.
Woodward Draw by Daniel Linssen is the kind of game that my inner
Scrabble player both loves and hates. I’ve been playing on and off for the last three days to complete it, and it’s been great. While not perfectly polished1 and with a few rough
edges2, it’s still a great example of
what one developer can do with a little time.
It deserves a hat tip of respect, but I hope you’ll give it more than that by going and playing it (it’s free, and you can play online or download a copy3). I should probably check
out their other games!
Footnotes
1 At one point the background colour, in order to match a picture word, changed to almost
the same colour as the text of the three words to find!
2 The tutorial-like beginning is a bit confusing until you realise that you have to play
the turn you’re told to, to begin with, for example.
Known Leaders is an open-source
program that combines WikiData with a random generator to come up with almost-invariably inaccurate but sometimes hilarious facts. Jim Kang came up with it during Recurse Center‘s Never Graduate Week. Go have a play, or read more about how and why he made it.
