Trying to arrest people's attention by making them recognize how strange are the ways that we humans manage to get things done—when, that is, we actually manage to do things, as opposed to fail to...
Sounds to me like the Athenians were as looney as Americans were when they created all the defenses against Soviet bombers that never existed, back in the 1950s. Consider: the second-most expensive governmental research/industrial program after the Manhattan Project was the creation of supersonic flight and the industrial base needed to support such ($180 billion in 1950s dollars); the production of over 8,000 supersonic interceptor fighters ($100 billion in 1950s dollars); creation of the DEW Line across northern Canada ($18 billion in 1950s dollars).
The cost to design and produce the B-47 and B-52 bombers - and their support systems - to deliver the nukes in the USSR was around $80 billion in 1950s dollars.
And in 1955 and 1956, the U-2 missions flown to photograph the bases where the USAF was convinced the vast Soviet bomber fleet was "hidden" at, found NOTHING. Francis Gary Powers' unfortunate encounter with the new high-altitude SA-2 missile designed to shoot down U-2s was flown in a last desperate attempt by the Air Force to prove the existence of the "bomber gap." (After that, they moved on to the non-existent "missile gap"). This was why Eisenhower - thoroughly disgusted with the Air Force and the CIA and their industrial supporters - gave his "Beware the military-industrial complex" speech as his final speech to the country before leaving office.
Actually, we have learned a fair bit about the sources of tin in the Bronze Age Mediterranean. There has been a lot of work analyzing trace impurities in ancient metal samples which provide clues to the metal's origins. There were two main sources of tin in that area during the Bronze Age, what is now Cornwall and what is now Afghanistan. (There's a theory that Britain may have gotten its name from the Phoenician word for tin and Ireland from the word for iron. h/t Caitlin Green.) Now, if we could only figure out what name Achilles used when he was at that girls' school.
So if unskilled non slave labor in ancient Greece was the equivalent of $120 a day, that's equal to $15 an hour for an eight hour day in modern America. Or about twice the federal minimun wage. Of course ancient Greeks who were not slaves might have worked more than eight hours a day, but they had no deductions from their pay.
On the other hand, why would any employer in ancient Greece pay $120 a day for unskilled labor when they could just use slave labor for free? (Or rather for the cost of food, shelter, and minimun clothing for the slaves.) My knowledge of ancient Greece is limited to a college history course, but I suspect that $120 a day is probably the wages for skilled free labor, not unskilled labor.
Cybernetics was the coming thing back in the 1950s. There was a lot of work done on simulating neural architectures and brains (e.g. Norbert Wiener, Ross Ashby). I even have Beer's "The Heart of Enterprise" in my library, although it is a difficult book to read. But something changed. Cybernetics became sidelined into a niche. All those ideas of using it to design electronic brains, and in Beer's case, corporations, seemed to evaporate. Perhaps it was replaced with the newer term "systems theory" to explain how systems are homeostatic and can handle perturbations.
My personal feeling is that Beer's netested architecture would prove to be too rigid in practice to manage a firm. It seems better for established industrial corporations that are not subject to significant change. Such corporations would strongly resist changes such as Christensen's "Innovator's Dilemma".
Having said that, cybernetics did seem very promising and I still see the value in the approach that the early researchers demonstrated. I have often through that Rodney Brook's subsumption architecture to control robots with distributed "brains" was teh last gasp of cybernetic ideas, even if it was described as such. What I do know is that Brook's approach collapsed under its own complexity and was abandoned. I sometimes wonder if it might have worked better had he used Beer's nested 5 component architecture instead.
As best I can tell, cybernetics was sterile. It was very exciting in its ideas, but, at a certain point, it was just descriptive. There was no obvious program to follow up with, meanwhile computation and systems theory were making major advances and, importantly, finding applications. Systems theory subsumed a lot of cybernetics, but it wasn't about homeostasis. It was about response, and homeostasis was just a particular application.
P.S. Speaking of homeostasis and handling perturbations, there was a recent paper demonstrating that the genetic code of a lot of important proteins are resistant to frame shifting. If you start reading and translating mid-codon, you wind up with a similar protein, that is, one with a similar structure and similar biological action. That's pretty impressive for four billion years of open source.
Do you have a reference to that paper? Fascinating. Frameshifting was usually considered to be a major problem for proteins, so I would be intrigued to discover frameshifts are not as bad as I believed, at least for some proteins and species.
Reading the paper, it seems they allow the alignments to use similar types of AAs and have a "readthrough" when a stop codon would be encountered with teh frameshift. None of this theoretical similarity says anything about true functionality. To be convincing, the frameshifted sequences would have to be functionally evaluated , e.g. enzyme assays. Until that work is done, then I take their analysis with a large handful of salt. [Maybe some structural proteins will sorta work, but I would doubt very specific functional pockets in proteins will tolerate any changes.]
Thank you for reading the paper and commenting. I tried, but was a bit - i.e. way far - beyond me. I guess I got caught up in my enthusiasm. It's still an interesting paper.
I often wonder, since so many proteins are just modifications of other proteins, if familiar biological systems are more constrained than they appear when one considers to broad diversity of life.
Could genetics be like complex analysis? It's seems like there can be an infinite variety of functions, but calculus only works on a surprisingly limited set.
As the paper notes, a simple point change in an amino acid can break the functionality of a protein. That may be with the functional part, e.g. the pocket to lock onto a small molecule, or even to break the 2D structure, like the alpha-helix section. A stop codon can break a protein into a smaller fragment, of breaking it, create a longer tail of nonsense. and a loss of the start codon can even prevent the gene from being read. That is not to say that some changes can be relatively benign, with similar AAs being substitutable in certain locations. To my mind, frameshifts wreck the functionality of proteins, which is why there are ways to ensure that this doesn't happen in the cell. Some gene sequence positions are highly conserved, whereas others can tolerate some random substitutions. Nature does try out lots of random mutations, as do lab experiments to increase enzyme efficiencies, but these require huge numbers of tests to find the proverbial needle in the haystack. This is very different from frameshifts.
It is a pity that the authors did not look at the examples that appeared to align well and characterize their functional roles. That would have provided some insight into which types of proteins might tolerate frameshifts compared to the [majority ?] that do not.
Your own source says that we simply do not know the provenance of specific tin artifacts in antiquity and while it is now dated, I can find no reason to doubt Muhly. The Athenians might just as easily have sourced their tin from Iberia, Erzgebirge, or Brittany as Cornwall. I think it is unsound for you to attribute this tin specifically let alone solely to Cornwall.
Yes, "Cornwall" rests on the belief that Herodotos's sources knew of what they spoke when they said "Kasseritides", and on the identification of Cornwall with the fog-bound Kasseritides...
In retrospect, my comment seems a little too pedantic. I ought never to comment before having my second coffee.
More constructively, I would say that I like your hook but I think that by eliding the several other sources of tin, you have obscured your point that the anthology intelligence of the East-African plains ape did a remarkably good job of solving a real problem. I also think that the ability of Athens to source its wheat from the north coast of the Black Sea deserves more than a single line; but I don't have a good idea what to add. Other than that it is a thousand nautical miles by sea from Theodosia to Piraeus; it is good to be located near a coast!
In reflecting on this while standing on one leg, the words that come to mind are authority (permission to make decisions), fairness, corruption, networks, and feedback.
Sounds to me like the Athenians were as looney as Americans were when they created all the defenses against Soviet bombers that never existed, back in the 1950s. Consider: the second-most expensive governmental research/industrial program after the Manhattan Project was the creation of supersonic flight and the industrial base needed to support such ($180 billion in 1950s dollars); the production of over 8,000 supersonic interceptor fighters ($100 billion in 1950s dollars); creation of the DEW Line across northern Canada ($18 billion in 1950s dollars).
The cost to design and produce the B-47 and B-52 bombers - and their support systems - to deliver the nukes in the USSR was around $80 billion in 1950s dollars.
And in 1955 and 1956, the U-2 missions flown to photograph the bases where the USAF was convinced the vast Soviet bomber fleet was "hidden" at, found NOTHING. Francis Gary Powers' unfortunate encounter with the new high-altitude SA-2 missile designed to shoot down U-2s was flown in a last desperate attempt by the Air Force to prove the existence of the "bomber gap." (After that, they moved on to the non-existent "missile gap"). This was why Eisenhower - thoroughly disgusted with the Air Force and the CIA and their industrial supporters - gave his "Beware the military-industrial complex" speech as his final speech to the country before leaving office.
Actually, we have learned a fair bit about the sources of tin in the Bronze Age Mediterranean. There has been a lot of work analyzing trace impurities in ancient metal samples which provide clues to the metal's origins. There were two main sources of tin in that area during the Bronze Age, what is now Cornwall and what is now Afghanistan. (There's a theory that Britain may have gotten its name from the Phoenician word for tin and Ireland from the word for iron. h/t Caitlin Green.) Now, if we could only figure out what name Achilles used when he was at that girls' school.
So if unskilled non slave labor in ancient Greece was the equivalent of $120 a day, that's equal to $15 an hour for an eight hour day in modern America. Or about twice the federal minimun wage. Of course ancient Greeks who were not slaves might have worked more than eight hours a day, but they had no deductions from their pay.
On the other hand, why would any employer in ancient Greece pay $120 a day for unskilled labor when they could just use slave labor for free? (Or rather for the cost of food, shelter, and minimun clothing for the slaves.) My knowledge of ancient Greece is limited to a college history course, but I suspect that $120 a day is probably the wages for skilled free labor, not unskilled labor.
You also have to account for the purchase price of the slave and depreciation unless one has bought an immortal slave.
Cybernetics was the coming thing back in the 1950s. There was a lot of work done on simulating neural architectures and brains (e.g. Norbert Wiener, Ross Ashby). I even have Beer's "The Heart of Enterprise" in my library, although it is a difficult book to read. But something changed. Cybernetics became sidelined into a niche. All those ideas of using it to design electronic brains, and in Beer's case, corporations, seemed to evaporate. Perhaps it was replaced with the newer term "systems theory" to explain how systems are homeostatic and can handle perturbations.
My personal feeling is that Beer's netested architecture would prove to be too rigid in practice to manage a firm. It seems better for established industrial corporations that are not subject to significant change. Such corporations would strongly resist changes such as Christensen's "Innovator's Dilemma".
Having said that, cybernetics did seem very promising and I still see the value in the approach that the early researchers demonstrated. I have often through that Rodney Brook's subsumption architecture to control robots with distributed "brains" was teh last gasp of cybernetic ideas, even if it was described as such. What I do know is that Brook's approach collapsed under its own complexity and was abandoned. I sometimes wonder if it might have worked better had he used Beer's nested 5 component architecture instead.
As best I can tell, cybernetics was sterile. It was very exciting in its ideas, but, at a certain point, it was just descriptive. There was no obvious program to follow up with, meanwhile computation and systems theory were making major advances and, importantly, finding applications. Systems theory subsumed a lot of cybernetics, but it wasn't about homeostasis. It was about response, and homeostasis was just a particular application.
P.S. Speaking of homeostasis and handling perturbations, there was a recent paper demonstrating that the genetic code of a lot of important proteins are resistant to frame shifting. If you start reading and translating mid-codon, you wind up with a similar protein, that is, one with a similar structure and similar biological action. That's pretty impressive for four billion years of open source.
Do you have a reference to that paper? Fascinating. Frameshifting was usually considered to be a major problem for proteins, so I would be intrigued to discover frameshifts are not as bad as I believed, at least for some proteins and species.
I found out about it at In The Pipeline:
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/shifting-views-frameshifting
The paper is at:
https://bmcgenomics.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12864-022-08435-6
Needless to say, I am not an expert in this area, but it sure sounds pretty amazing to me.
Reading the paper, it seems they allow the alignments to use similar types of AAs and have a "readthrough" when a stop codon would be encountered with teh frameshift. None of this theoretical similarity says anything about true functionality. To be convincing, the frameshifted sequences would have to be functionally evaluated , e.g. enzyme assays. Until that work is done, then I take their analysis with a large handful of salt. [Maybe some structural proteins will sorta work, but I would doubt very specific functional pockets in proteins will tolerate any changes.]
Thank you for reading the paper and commenting. I tried, but was a bit - i.e. way far - beyond me. I guess I got caught up in my enthusiasm. It's still an interesting paper.
I often wonder, since so many proteins are just modifications of other proteins, if familiar biological systems are more constrained than they appear when one considers to broad diversity of life.
Could genetics be like complex analysis? It's seems like there can be an infinite variety of functions, but calculus only works on a surprisingly limited set.
As the paper notes, a simple point change in an amino acid can break the functionality of a protein. That may be with the functional part, e.g. the pocket to lock onto a small molecule, or even to break the 2D structure, like the alpha-helix section. A stop codon can break a protein into a smaller fragment, of breaking it, create a longer tail of nonsense. and a loss of the start codon can even prevent the gene from being read. That is not to say that some changes can be relatively benign, with similar AAs being substitutable in certain locations. To my mind, frameshifts wreck the functionality of proteins, which is why there are ways to ensure that this doesn't happen in the cell. Some gene sequence positions are highly conserved, whereas others can tolerate some random substitutions. Nature does try out lots of random mutations, as do lab experiments to increase enzyme efficiencies, but these require huge numbers of tests to find the proverbial needle in the haystack. This is very different from frameshifts.
It is a pity that the authors did not look at the examples that appeared to align well and characterize their functional roles. That would have provided some insight into which types of proteins might tolerate frameshifts compared to the [majority ?] that do not.
Your own source says that we simply do not know the provenance of specific tin artifacts in antiquity and while it is now dated, I can find no reason to doubt Muhly. The Athenians might just as easily have sourced their tin from Iberia, Erzgebirge, or Brittany as Cornwall. I think it is unsound for you to attribute this tin specifically let alone solely to Cornwall.
Yes, "Cornwall" rests on the belief that Herodotos's sources knew of what they spoke when they said "Kasseritides", and on the identification of Cornwall with the fog-bound Kasseritides...
In retrospect, my comment seems a little too pedantic. I ought never to comment before having my second coffee.
More constructively, I would say that I like your hook but I think that by eliding the several other sources of tin, you have obscured your point that the anthology intelligence of the East-African plains ape did a remarkably good job of solving a real problem. I also think that the ability of Athens to source its wheat from the north coast of the Black Sea deserves more than a single line; but I don't have a good idea what to add. Other than that it is a thousand nautical miles by sea from Theodosia to Piraeus; it is good to be located near a coast!
In reflecting on this while standing on one leg, the words that come to mind are authority (permission to make decisions), fairness, corruption, networks, and feedback.