Would this imply an architecture similar to what Lisp-Machines once had ? That'd be a great addition IMO, and would speed up a lot of dynamic-ish languages without resorting to unsafe-routes for speed.
Note: there have been actual Iron-working sites discovered in India that are older than this, dated to 1600 BC [0]. A lot of this has been ignored (just like the Painted-Grey ware continuity from IVC), partly I imagine, because it calls into question a lot of the racial non-sense that passes for "Indology".
nowhere in the article do they claim its the oldest iron...
they just had a theory that copper processing lead to discoveries in iron processing.
the evidence they found seems to support that.
theyre not claiming this particular site is where the iron age started. and it has nothing to do with what some people in india did. Maybe they too discovered iron processing through a similar process. and i dont understand what racial things your bringing up..
They found ancient inhabitants of Georgia using iron ore as flux for copper smelting, so it's a theory of how they went from one to the other. It's not terribly exciting but it beats "they tried smelting rocks at random to see if anything good would happen".
Smelting random rocks (with fairly distinct appearances) sounds like a very logical thing to do. I would say it's a natural human impulse to experiment with random stuff and see what happens, that's curiosity.
What sound highly improbable is someone having access to this obviously different ore (used as a flux) but never thinking of smelting it.
Having been a kid living in a place that had open fires burning (new houses were under construction and the builders often made fires to get rid of scrap materials), I can say that the desire in the primitive mind to throw random things into a roaring fire to see what happens, is strong.
This discovery is only of interest because the Iron-Age, as per standard-theory, started around 1200 BC. in the Caucuses/Anatolia or the near-East - which fits with another theory which claims that this allowed the "Aryans" to invade India with their technological superiority around this same time and replace the (dark-skinned) natives genetically.
(Note: the above is obviously a caricature, but current versions of theory don't change the structure, only the emphasis on "race").
No one would care about a copper-smelt site from 500 BC.; nor would they care about this one if the Indian archaeological claims were accepted (but that one also destroys centuries of Western history-making about India, and all the social-theories that depend on it).
This is all a digression from the main claims, so I'd prefer that people don't pull on this thread. For more information on how 'race' was ingested into Indology, I'd refer the interested reader to the excellent book by Adluri/Bagchi [0].
> This is all a digression from the main claims, so I'd prefer that people don't pull on this thread
You want to say your piece and get no back-chat?
Romans started to hit people with iron swords at a certain date, influencing the history of Europe substantially, so the origin of that iron age is interesting. Elsewhere, a copper smelting site of 500 BC would be interesting: consider the Moche, in Peru, who independently had a sort of bronze age around that time while Europe was into iron. (I don't think they did anything much with their bronze because they were too preoccupied with body fluids and erotic pottery.)
Just out of curiosity, what was their deal with their precious bodily fluids? Some Dr Strangelove type paranoia? Or just a usual Friday at a swingers club?
It was all about the irrigation, apparently. It's vital to keep life-giving fluids in your irrigation canal, and by extension also in your body, otherwise you're a loser. Something along those lines.
Lmao the one-sided cucumber measuring going on in this whole comment chain.
Like one whole side is interested in talking about the origins of certain _types_ of metalworking and the other is more interested in chest-beating about the technicalities of who did it first.
Theory of Computation wasn't around when all this "exciting" stuff was developed in Mathematics. Given their non-constructive nature "real" numbers are unsurprisingly totally incompatible with computation.
Chaitin has a great paper on this and shows how Cantor's constructions were reflected a half-century later by Turing.
https://arxiv.org/abs/math/0411418
Except of-course, while "hyper-Turing" machines that can do magic "post-Turing" "post-Halting" computation are seen as absurd fictions, real-numbers are seen as "normal" and "obvious" and "common-sensical"! It was amusing sometime back to see people pooh-pooh the likes of Hava Siegelmann for being funded for their "super-Turing" machines with "real-number" computation, without realizing that the core issue is the "real"-number itself!
I've always found this quite strange, but I've realized that this is almost blasphemy (people in STEM, and esp. their "allies", aren't as enlightened etc. as they pretend to be tbh).
Some historicans of mathematics claim (C. K. Raju for eg.) that this comes from the insertion of Greek-Christian theological bent in the development of modern mathematics.
Anyone who has taken measure theory etc. and then gone on to do "practical" numerical stuff, and then realizes the pointlessness of much of this hard/abstract construction dealing with "scary" monsters that can't even be computed, would perhaps wholeheartedly agree.
edit:
The post has a great link to a note on Cantor's theology,
> Given their non-constructive nature "real" numbers are unsurprisingly totally incompatible with computation.
It is funny you say that when Turing defined Turing machines to compute real numbers (like π for example). In its original definition, a number was computable if its Turing machine did not stop. Which makes sense since π does not have a finite decimal expansion.
Today, we usually define Turing machines to decide problems and a problem is decidable if for every input its Turing machine stops with a ``yes'' or ``no'' answer. I guess this is what makes people think what you said in the quote above. Maybe this definition is more intuitive but this conclusion from it could not be more wrong.
Think about it for a second, if the computable numbers were countable there would be no uncomputable problem (Turing actually used the classic cantor diagonal argument to prove that there were uncomputable numbers)
The set of computable numbers is actually countable (see ref. linked above). It has to be by definition because the set of finite computer-programs is itself countable.
This is the whole point of the un-reality of "real" numbers: "all" of it (= measure 1) is uncomputable except a "tiny" measure-0 set.
This doesn't work the moment the module you're importing something imports something else that you've changed.
Worse, you can't redine methods, because the classes get "redefined". This means that you need to first redefine classes, then "reload" (hoping it doesn't break for to silly implementation limitations mentioned above), then initialize objects, then retest.
Obviously this is quite painful which is why I use this decorator to mimic Lisp's defmethod to patch methods on "live" objects without class redefinition,
Sadly, the code in this tutorial doesn't work anymore due to upstream changes in FFmpeg. There are quite a few attempts at keeping Dranger's tutorial up to date, but I found the repo below to be one of the better ones.
Very cool! Old keyboards and key-switches are an endless source of fun trivia.
I think Topre is the only one that manufactures keyboards with contactless key switches today. Topre key-switches measure the change in capacitance instead, and their keyboards (of the HHKB fame) sell for greater than $200.
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