Source : « The Great Scientists: From Euclid to Stephen Hawking », from John Farndon

I.d.k. why i thought that Euclid, and perhaps also others, were around Plato or before, just wanted to share, what a time.

B.t.w., we know about ChatGPT, some about Sam Altman, but nothing about the researchers, and the same goes for every other technology, it’s a choice of society 🤷(, causes&consequences).

Edit : Transcript :

All the same, if anyone wanted a proper education, Alexandria in Egypt was the place to go, and here Archimedes went as a young man.
At the time he was there, the city was the greatest centre of learning in the ancient world. Although the museum or university there was barely 20 years old – the city itself had been founded by Alexander the Great just half a century earlier – it already held an unrivalled library, containing at least 100,000 scrolls, including all of Aristotle’s priceless personal collection.
It was here that the great Euclid taught geometry, that Aristarchus showed that the Earth revolved around the Sun, and that Hipparchus made the first great catalogue of constellations, categorizing stars in terms of their brightness. And it was here that, much later, Ptolemy wrote the Almagest, the most influential book about the nature of the universe for 1,500 years.
Euclid was probably dead by the time Archimedes was there, but Archimedes undoubtedly met Eratosthenes, the brilliant thinker who measured the circumference of the world to within 4 per cent of modern figures, and made a measurement of the year’s length as precise as any until barely half a century ago.

Edit : Now that i think about it, conquering Persia&Egypt&… probably helped them in developing these knowledges/sciences

  • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldEnglish
    21·
    3 months ago

    My favorite ancient thinker would be Diagoras of Melos. He supposedly threw an idol of Herakles into a fire and said that if he was a god, the idol wouldn’t burn.

    He got chased out of Melos when it burned.

      • Malle_YenoEnglish
        102·
        3 months ago

        What a weird rule, do you know why it exists ?

        Accessibility. A blind person (or someone who just can’t see that well, or who wants to read it at a different font and sizing level) has the opportunity to read this in text form with a screen reader or with adjusted view settings. But those don’t work with images (screen readers may if the image has alt text).

        Ease of search. If someone wanted to find this post down the line, they are not able to search the actual text of the post because it’s an image.

        Quality. In all honesty, what is gained by this post being an image instead of text? What is the visual element adding that couldn’t be accomplished with italics and bolding?

        What should i have done to post this information then ?

        Copy it and treat it as a quote in your written post (same place you put your source). You can add formatting to it if you want to emphasize parts.

        • soumerd_retardataire@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
          91·
          3 months ago

          I personally prefer a picture because most softwares for browsing Lemmy require to load the whole post in order to read the selftext, but agree with your arguments/explanations, so if that ever happens again i’ll try not to forget to accompany the picture with a transcript.
          Thank you very much for such an answer/explanation.

      • AnimePhantasm@lemmy.worldEnglish
        7·
        3 months ago

        Its very unfriendly to screen readers. In a lot of pictures-of-text posts you will see people transcribe the text so that everyone can access the web equally :)

        • soumerd_retardataire@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
          22·
          3 months ago

          Oh, ok, thanks for the explanation, their software usually has an OCR feature since we can nowadays easily read much harder pictures than this one though, otherwise they wouldn’t be able to browse most social medias. Seems like this recommendation is 10 years too old if i’m not mistaken.
          Even better : since a description of the scenery would be more useful to them for some memes/pictures, but more difficult to do for the o.p., i don’t think it’ll be long until free softwares offer them a description of pictures in their favorite style of description(, since, after all, large language models like ChatGPT can already do this).

          It’d have been easy for me to copy-paste the text in the selftext, i’ll try to remember this if there’s a next time and thus interpret this rule as “no picture unless accompanied with a transcript”, unless i’m wrong in this interpretation.
          Thanks again for this information.

          • delirious_owl@discuss.onlineEnglish
            4·
            3 months ago

            Yeah, posting pictures with text next to a transcription is fine.

            Posting pictures without bothering to copy and paste the text for blind folks is not ok

  • NIB@lemmy.worldEnglish
    5·
    3 months ago

    I.d.k. why i thought that Euclid, and perhaps also others, were around Plato

    There was an Euclid that was a pupil of Socrates. He was a friend(and classmate i guess) of Plato.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euclid_of_Megara

    And dont worry, it wasnt just you who was confused

    "Editors and translators in the Middle Ages often confused him with Euclid of Alexandria when discussing the latter’s Elements. "

  • howrar@lemmy.caEnglish
    61·
    3 months ago

    We likely don’t know much about the researchers of modern technology because they’re often created by a huge team of hundreds of people. There’s no single person responsible for the bulk of the work. In the case of ChatGPT and the line of work leading up to it, it was very much also the researchers’ choice as well to not name a specific person as being the main contributor. For example, the transformer paper had all the author names shuffled so the credit doesn’t all end up with one person.

    • soumerd_retardataire@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      25·
      3 months ago

      Still, some are closer to the source of these ideas than others, think about awards attributed to individuals for example. And if our “idols” are singers, actors, politicians, or youtubers, then we’ll produce singers, actors, politicians, or youtubers. Why don’t we have more emissions that will interview each week a researcher on h.er.is studies ? Just that we’ll have the population we deserve, that’s all.
      Also, they bring everything but the money goes to the investors(, not really what Ayn Rand claimed).
      And we’re using objects everyday without understanding how they work.
      For now, we’re working all day and spend our free time entertaining ourselves and spending time with our family, i’d certainly be wrong to judge, but if our time ever gets liberated(, e.g., with machines, longevity, …), then i just hope that our civilization will seek a higher purpose than entertainment 🤷.

      • howrar@lemmy.caEnglish
        41·
        3 months ago

        Still, some are closer to the source of these ideas than others, think about awards attributed to individuals for example.

        This is where the researchers would disagree with you. I don’t know if you’ve ever been involved in research (or startups). There’s a common saying that ideas are a dime a dozen. It’s much more so the work you do that’s important, not the idea itself.

        singers, actors, politicians, or youtubers

        Notice how being in the spotlight is an important aspect of all the professions you’ve listed. That naturally selects for people who are comfortable with or enjoy being on camera and are good at that kind of live performance. Similarly, science selects for people who are good at doing science. Sometimes, there’s an overlap, but it’s not that common.

        If you’re interested in interviews with prominent scientists, Lex Fridman does quite a few of those. But if you want more people to do this, you’ll have to contend with the fact that most scientists simply have no interest in being on camera and probably never developed the skills needed for it.

        • soumerd_retardataire@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
          24·
          3 months ago

          It’s much more so the work you do that’s important, not the idea itself.

          Yes and no, i’m not talking about technicians(, even though in a team of technicians there’s still some persons better than the average), but about scientists emiting theories, there’s a reason why theorems or units of measures have the name of a person, and the book cited in the selftext is another justification : some scientists are known in their field for being important(, some are important/known mostly because of their positions, but others because of their groundbreaking ideas/discoveries).
          But sure, it’s a teamwork, especially when putting theory into practice.

          As for the other argument, i don’t want to have someone good at that kind of performance, i’m not talking about entertainment but about someone unknown and passionate about h.er.is field of study, who cares if s.he is in front of the camera for the first&last time of h.er.is life, it could eventually be prepared beforehand, but i’m not talking about the guests invited by Lex Friedman, such as Neil deGrasse Tyson or other popularizers/showmen, they may be scientists as well but i wasn’t talking about them(, some emissions search&invite such people but there’s only a few).

          As i said it’s natural that we’re choosing entertainment over, e.g., studying manuals after work, it’s not a real criticism but it’ll hopefully change one day(, retrieving the level of the aristocrats of the past, but for everyone this time), which shouldn’t be difficult since almost everyone wants to be better/more, just that life usually seems too ‘time-consuming’&short for that.

          (i’ve also realized today that my favorite people, mostly Raphaël Enthoven(, i’d never reach his level in a century, really glad that there’s at least one person like him,) and Étienne Chouard, but also Idriss Aberkane and kinda François Asselineau, and clearly Elon Musk as well, are all hated by the population(, or at least the french lemmy instance), of course we’ll ignore God, hate other countries, and belittle our superior ancestors(, the least writing of the past is still written in a better way than the best conversation on Lemmy), i’m feeling at odd, there’s either a problem with me or with society and it’s kinda annoying sometimes, and the so-called “reasons” are so absurd, similarly to how Lemmy will hate Trump on, e.g., him saying that some immigrants ate pets or any other argument really, for most people we’ve been told to hate even if we’ve never accomplished anything ourselves, we don’t even realize the problem with our absence of any real/solid argument, people in real life are way better than online, perhaps because we don’t really care about making efforts online since it’ll be forever lost to time, it’s not a reflection of society)

            • soumerd_retardataire@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
              12·
              3 months ago

              I’m trying to write something interesting, you’re not 👎
              It’s easy to write something that everyone will agree with, but it’s less useful/interesting i.m.h.o.
              Yeah, among the affirmations that i knew would displeased the crowd in my last comment, Elon Musk is freaking awesome, better than all of you combined. You’ll probably have difficulties to find where you disagree with the mainstream medias or the Lemmy users/mindhive(, try it, have you found at least one disagreement ?), and not even ask yourself why you don’t have real/solid reasons to hate better people than you, sick.
              Nobody will change their mind through insults or mod censorship, having the mass behind you doesn’t mean you’re right if you’re unable to argue(, which, as you’ll convince yourself, you could easily do but don’t want to, don’t feed the troll or w/e). Being a bunch of haters is one thing, but doing so without solid arguments is another, don’t be surprised that sheeple is a word, we’ve simply seen the level of your (non-)argumentation online(, often inexistent, or a 1000 times worse than in newspapers, even if, beyond being recruited/fired by their capitalists owners, journalists have to suck since they usually have to write multiples(!) articles/day, not one per week or even month, so it’s unavoidable).