herculaneum

If you're not aware, the scrolls at Herculaneum are an entire pagan library from the first century.

Therefore, there is a very good chance that some of the scrolls from the Herculaneum library will be new texts.

Depressing: kids in Herculaneum Missouri had blue violet gums due to the lead dust.

What amount of time do you think it took to divise a combination of advanced imaging techniques and machine learning to decode the Herculaneum scroll?

There's very similar, but perhaps much more challenging project for digitally unrolling the Herculaneum papyri[1], which is set up as an open machine learning competition[2].

I think it's really cool they have the Herculaneum Papyrii guy working for them!

I learned a while ago that more than half the population of Pompeii and Herculaneum fled and survived the destruction of their homes.

Quick note for anyone who hasn't visited, and has an interest in western civilization: Pompeii, and the somewhat more impressive nearby Herculaneum are well worth visiting at least once.

We don't have enough time with digital data but it seems extremely doubtful anything digital would survive as long as the Herculaneum scrolls that were buried in mud that was on the front page last week, that's longer than almost any civilization has continuously existed (the exception only being ancient Egypt?) but maybe humans will turn it around in the near future and obliterate that record.

As far as I understood this is the application of technology widely popularized by the Herculaneum Challenge, where scrolls are still physically dug up, and x-rayed (which will slowly still damage the scrolls) but without physically breaking them open as was repeatedly attempted in the past.

Pompeii is grand and impressive in its size; Herculaneum (which was an upmarket, beachside town in 79AD) is boutqiue, compact, less touristy, and for mine a much better experience and view into both life in 79AD and life the day of the eruption.

- one decoded the Herculaneum Papyrii at the age of 20, winning the Vesuvius Challenge - another built a startup funded by OpenAI - one interned at SpaceX and got a Thiel Fellowship - another was a top engineer at a major AI firm This is who they are bullying and putting a target on.

"Revealing letters in rolled Herculaneum papyri by X-ray phase-contrast imaging" It's bizarre that BBC calls X-rays "photon beams," like something out of Star Trek.

Or it can be part of a condition: "in case it does not happen..." >there might be the beginning of διατροπή, a word found in other Herculaneum papyri that would mean something like “confusion, agitation, or disgust.” But it could also be just diatropos - "various, diverse".

Pompeii (and Herculaneum) are endlessly fascinating and about a third of Pompeii remains underground and hasn't been examinted yet.

Herculaneum is smaller and less known, but only half an hour away and even better preserved.

Herculaneum in particular is never that busy because harder to get to and less publicity.