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.

  • howrar@lemmy.caEnglish
    3·
    2 hours 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
      1·
      1 hour 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 🤷.

      • Malle_YenoEnglish
        4·
        2 hours 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
          2·
          1 hour 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
        3·
        2 hours 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
          2·
          52 minutes 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.

  • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldEnglish
    16·
    11 hours 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.

  • NIB@lemmy.worldEnglish
    5·
    10 hours 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. "

  • Apytele@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    44·
    20 hours ago

    I like that you mentioned we pick and choose who we remember and for what. Do you know why we don’t read in elementary school about the person who discovered that the universe was mostly made of hydrogen? Her name was Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin if you’d like to look her up and come up with any hypotheses as to why.