Meanwhile, I’m hoping that global competition increases tech pay for non-US companies and I can land a remote gig that has some actual benefits like paternal leave.
Actually, there were many clues listed, but they didn't directly connect them to "slaves" as such. The rough timber used in the bedding, the amphorae under the bed, a chamber pot, and lots of evidence suggesting the room was used for storage in addition to sleeping. These all point towards someone of much lower class (slaves of some kind) than the owner of the villa.
Nominally free lower classes would have lived in an entirely different part of town. We know quite a lot about the society in question from written sources, this is far from blank slate archaeology (where everything we find seems to default to "used for some ceremonial purpose")
I assume that in 79 A.D. the things you list, like beds no matter the timber roughness, were a luxury. Like, imagine living in a stone house? In a room with decorated walls (looks like carved out patterns on them).
Surely the scrappiest room in the villa was for servants, some distant poor relative or rented out to students or what not. I just don't buy that the inhabitants for sure were slaves.
Slaves, plebians, and patricians were very distinct social classes. There really wasn't such a thing as a free servant, with the occasional exception of some freedmen. Roman villas had two separate living areas, one for the owner's family and one for the slaves. We know enough about Roman architecture to identify this as the pars rustica, the slaves' quarters.
I assume that they have compared these accommodations to others already found and see a noticeable difference in the quality of the furnishings and other components.
Slaves made up 30-40% of the population so it not unreasonable to conclude that the shabby accommodations would be intended for slaves.
That's how all beds were made prior to the advent of box springs (or modern mattresses, which don't require a separate box spring). Very old beds still have the hooks necessary to hold up the ropes that supported the mattress.
I've seen medieval beds in the UK that were a wooden 'tray' (on legs, or built into a wall) and the guides said a hessian bag was filled with straw (dried stems of wheat/corn/barley; straw and hay are often used interchangeably though, so it might have been dried wild grasses) for bedding.
I assumed poor people slept on the floor with whatever coverings they could muster. Suspended beds seem very decadent.
The stretched fabric, like canvas, over a rectangular frame design seems pretty common and would have surely been a more natural early bed. Similarly hammocks - which I thought were common on ships (at least in the later middle ages).
Guess I've discovered I'd like to read a history of beds!
I think there's another side to this coin: very small software teams moving quickly in markets where truly senior devs are scarce. It makes far more engineering and business sense to invest in cloud infrastructure than it is to build and control all of those systems in-house. I can hire a middle-of-the-road developer and trust they've (at the very least) heard of the AWS or GCP tools/services we're using, but if I wrote my own systems in clojure/elixir/whatever (even though that's what I'd prefer to do), then there's nowhere near the likelihood that the new engineer will know what to do, and it'll take months to train them up to even a basic level of competency. You can make all sorts of "it's better in the long run" kind of arguments, but those don't help when the C suite says "yeah sure, maybe that's the best approach, but we need to get this done right now." That's where clicking a few buttons to spin up a load balancer in front of a handful of serverless handlers becomes rather nice.
I personally don’t think many people are banking on colonizing another planet, but rather the technologies created as byproducts of that effort. Between energy creation, energy storage, thermal regulation, extraction and refinement of products necessary for life (oxygen, water, etc), and transformation of atmospheric gases, there’s plenty that can help keep our current planet healthy and suitable for human life.
Would the internet have been invented if not for military interests? Innovation, especially massive leaps, is born from necessity and drive, not "let's improve our technology".
This reads like a truism that one is simply expected to accept. Yet we could just as well cite the Wright Brothers as an example of people innovating for no other reason than a desire to improve technology:
> In 1896, the newspapers were filled with accounts of flying machines. Wilbur and Orville noticed that all these primitive aircraft lacked suitable controls. They began to wonder how a pilot might balance an aircraft in the air, just as a cyclist balances his bicycle on the road. [1]
> The Wrights' serious work in aviation began in 1899 when Wilbur wrote the Smithsonian for literature. Dismayed that so many great minds had made so little progress, the brothers were also exhilarated by the realization that they had as much chance as anyone of succeeding. Wilbur took the lead in the early stages of their work to solve the problems of flight, but Orville was soon drawn in as an equal collaborator. They quickly developed their own theories and, for the next four years, devoted themselves to the goal of human flight. [2]
Human flight was one massive innovation born not out of "necessity", but out of the curiosity of two restlessly brilliant men seeking to make a technological breakthrough for its own sake.
I have a hard time believing that the Wright Brothers innovated for no reason other than a desire to improve technology. The appeal of human flight is/was well-established, and there was clear utility in it.
Even in the link you posted, it mentioned that immediately after creating a viable flying machine, the Wright brothers approached militaries worldwide trying to sell it to them.
Basic science and pure math research do exist, and I'm sure loads of people push for advances in tech without any eye towards profit or power, but basically any real-world product or system was engineered with a specific goal in mind.
There is a growing number of academics who might argue that the spectacle can be part of the substance. For quite a long time, spectacle (or even advocacy) has been regarded as problematic in academia, particularly in the sciences. I see a lot of what West does as making “good trouble” that gets really important philosophical issues added to the general discourse
One of the things I learned pretty quickly is that it gave me the ability to focus better on anything, but my lack of prioritization skills became more noticeable. So yeah, it helps you focus, but you still have to practice picking what you should be focusing on.
For what it's worth, I started by trying ritalin and didn't like it. Like you, small doses of methylphenidate did the trick, but affected my mood too much. Once I learned some other coping strategies, I tried adderall again and find it to be extremely effective now. After you level up those other skills, talk to your neuro again if you feel the medication isn't actually helping.
Yeah I definitely need to work on how I actually work and create a mindset and space that supports that. But for me, only the maximum dosage of methylphenidate had any effect. I've heard of people getting the gurn on it and obviously it's a decent amount of speed for anybody, so I haven't felt comfortable continuing on it.
It's interesting to me that your daughter phrased it that way. There's actually a ton of research (some old, some new) about perception of time among ADHD sufferers and how that affects modern life. In a nutshell, the idea seems to be that there's a shorter time horizon (ADHD folks can only see or imagine themselves so far into the future) which is what makes long-term planning, budgeting, etc so difficult and why many are also seen as procrastinators or bad with money. Hop on any research database or google scholar and give it a look. You'll also find in that research an overwhelming bias towards studying younger folks. We're only recently starting to understand how missing diagnoses affect adult livelihoods.
Anecdote: I'm one of those who tried behavioral approaches for years before agreeing to try medication. I bounced back and forth between different types and doses and ended up on small, regular doses of adderall because I could have some control over when it tapers off. I'm disheartened by the smugness of commentary here from people who see nothing but stimulant abuse.
To give a solid example of why it can sometimes be seen as giving you superpowers, consider my experience: I have three degrees. I was in graduate school for...far too long. Anthropology isn't a quick in and out. I could wrap my head around anything, but sitting and writing multiple drafts of 50-100 page papers regularly was unimaginably difficult. I loved writing, and I wasn't sure why it was so challenging for me. Several years ago, I had the "opportunity" to write an NSF grant with (read: for) a pretty famous researcher. The downside is that when I was asked to write it, I was told the deadline was in four days. I spent some time setting up a perfect writing environment with no distractions, comfortable lighting, and everything I could think of, but when I was working, I could almost physically feel my brain constantly switching to some other track. It was deeply upsetting. The following year, I finally gave in to my doctor's medication recommendation. When I first sat down to read an article in a journal while medicated, the only thing I could hear in my head while reading was my own voice reading the words on the page. It actually brought me to tears because I realized that was probably what everyone else was able to experience normally. The glasses analogy everyone is using? Yeah, it's a bit like that, but imagine being in your 30s not even knowing that you can't see properly until someone put glasses on you. It changes your entire perception of the world and your place in it. It makes small things seem like superpowers. Like you finally have the ability to do all the things you're expected to do as a productive member of society. It's liberating. At the same time, all I can think about is how much more I might have been able to achieve if people had considered putting me in some sort of treatment as a kid rather than telling me that I wasn't working hard enough and making fun of other kids with ADHD.
Can you link the time horizon, that’s super interesting. At least most YouTube medical lectures I’ve watch sort of focused on the norepinephrine reputake inhibition and how dopamine in the (forget the name) chain somehow hinders task ability.
Nitpicky, but useful for anyone interested in spatial data: WGS-84 is not a "GPS standard" but rather a geographic coordinate system and is usually paired for consumption with a projection like wgs 84 web mercator to view those 3d coordinates on a 2d plane. Super interesting stuff and reconciling these standards across the globe is a really fun problem, and one you'll likely run into if you ever find yourself dabbling in remote sensing pipelines.
I hate them too. It's the worst to have to reproject an image or GeoJSON and overlay it onto a map. Very satisfying one you've managed to do it, but it's a pain nonetheless, at least if you don't work in the geospatial field and rarely use tools like GDAL.
That market — the one that would be happy with a mediocre lens and great image processing - likely overlaps with people using top tier mobile devices for their work. After all, acceptable lenses with amazing image processing is basically what the flagship iPhones and android devices bring to the table, and their use case tends to overlap with that of a 50mm prime.
I wouldnt say the camera companies did not see this coming. They did and chose to not do anything about it. I shoot videos with some pretty low end DSLR cameras and they are often lacking the feautures of any modern flagship phone. It's a joke. We once used a whole Iphone shooting at 120fps and made some plain scenes look amazing in post. A revelation since most pro videographers pooh pooh phone cameras without realizing that they are growing with alarming speed.
The pros are well aware of the gains made by phone cameras. Sensors and pixels aren't the primary factor for choosing say, a $10,000 camera, over an iPhone. Reliability, battery life, form factor, control ergonomics, lens compatibility, codecs, ease of integration with third-party equipment, standards compliance, and on it goes. I don't think the opinion is that an iPhone can't make a nice image, just that they are woefully insufficient for many needs for reasons other than the sensor and processing algorithms.
I’ve noticed a much heavier use of minor keys in trip hop than lofi or chill. Tempo might match, some of the techniques might match, but that minor key changes the feel entirely. Takes you right into that dark trippy place that I love so much.
