I think the best explanation is that classicists are not makeup artists. I am reminded of reading some classicists' attempt to create garum in the kitchen by making some unpleasant horror of mashed fish or something back in the eighties or nineties. No one ever mentioned in those kinds of write-ups back then that they still make fish sauce in Italy. (I looked for the source I'm thinking of and it's drowned out by more credible modern attempts). There's a tendency the further north you go to think of the classical world as completely lost, discontinuous, and opaque to us, too, which adds to it.
> I am reminded of reading some classicists' attempt to create garum in the kitchen by making some unpleasant horror of mashed fish or something back in the eighties or nineties. No one ever mentioned in those kinds of write-ups back then that they still make fish sauce in Italy.
A more modern example might be that recently discovered Babylonian Lamb Stew [0]. Most of the scholarly reconstructions of the stew follow the recipe very literally, and the result is, frankly, awful, because ancient readers would probably have made cultural assumptions about certain steps in the recipe. Meanwhile, some internet cooks who take a stab at the same recipe come up with something arguably much better, because they're applying their knowledge as cooks to guess what might have been stated or unstated by the recipe. [1]
Makes you wonder why no one thought to just take a copy of one of the statues to a modern artist and say, "Hey! How would you paint this?" I'm willing to bet that, even now, it would be reasonably close to how an artist 2000 years ago might have approached it.
I have been reading cookbook from 1767. And mostly you get ingredients and probably not all of them. And sometimes you get amounts. And useful instructions like boil so many times... I have understood that with those really old recipes, the person recording them might at best have been in the same room. But probably was not a chef.
Old recipes are more memory cues for experienced cooks than the modern step-by-step guide for amateurs we are used to. They're scanty in detail because they assume quite a lot of existing knowledge.
It's the difference between "a chicken stew flavoured with turmeric and cumin, then rice enough to cook in and fully absorb the broth" and "first, take 500g of boneless skinless chicken thighs..."
> I have understood that with those really old recipes, the person recording them might at best have been in the same room. But probably was not a chef.
That's going too far. The person recording them might be the same person who is used to making the food, or might be taking literal dictation from that person.
Knowing how to make food isn't the same skill as knowing how to explain the process in a way that someone who isn't already trained to make the food can follow.
Huh. That's exactly how you make garum - an unpleasant horror of mashed fish. Refer to Max Miller and his spectacularly successful effort to reproduce Garum in his back yard.
It's one thing if you make a youtube video starting from already knowing how to make modern fish sauces, and what they're supposed to taste like, and quite another level of horror if you don't. My recollection of the letter or paper or whatever it was was that the person who wrote it was not at all pleased with the result.
There are folks that will insist that we don't know at all what Roman garum really tasted like or everything involved in its preparation, and they're not exactly wrong since Colatura di Alici can only be traced back to the middle ages, but it's also oddly obtuse. I think it was probably like modern fish sauces but Roman garum could have been as different from Colatura and Asian fish sauce as those are from Worcestershire.
Max had no idea whatsoever what he was doing. He did all the steps, didn't stop at the 'jesus that's disgusting' phase. Saw it through to the end. Even the complaints from his neighbors, he put up with.
And got the most divine, golden syrupy sauce you can imagine, at the end. After all the gagging and stirring, straining and filtering and pressing.
Fish sauce is also really popular in southeast Asia and Worcestershire sauce is often made with fermented fish so can also be considered garum adjacent.
There's even a case that Ketchup is a distant relative, as it started out as South East Asian oyster sauce, was imported to Europe, turned into fermented mushroom sauce, was exported to the colonies, and finally turned into tomato sauce (though originally sometimes with fish in it).
Yes! Search for "mushroom ketchup", and you'll find various examples for sale. Whatever kinds I've had are nice on bread, and really nice with eggs, but I wouldn't want to eat with chips / fries.
You can still sometimes find mushroom ketchup in UK supermarkets. It tastes a bit like Worcester sauce (spicy and 'brown' tasting), but milder as it has no anchovies in it.
There's speculation that Asian fish sauce came from Greece through the same cultural diffusion processes that brought Greco-Buddhist sculpture as far as Japan.
There was a similar, maybe apocryphal, story recently of academic archaeologists stumped about an ancient tool until a person pulled out a crochet kit to fidget with their hands near the exhibit and it became obvious that it wasn't a lost tool they just hadn't put it in the right context.
That's the roman dodecahedrons that are a bit more mysterious than that - the "this is for knitting gloves" explanation is a real stretch, and not only because the Romans didn't have knitting.
My understanding is that while wool knitting may have been a later invention (and that's disputed) and gloves a need for colder climates than the majority of the Roman Empire (assuming just function over fashion, and the Romans didn't seem immune to fashion), the Romans still had some forms of knitting (and/or "nalbinding" if you want to get extremely technical, but knitting seems a useful enough catch all word), it was just mostly knitting of things that weren't wool. One of the related theories I've seen is that the dodecahedrons may have been for knitting gold and surviving gold necklaces with intricate knit patterns do exist. (That theory maybe also helps explain why the dodecahedrons were often found among "jewelry boxes" and gold stashes.)
Also, even if the Roman Empire had wool knitting a lot of it wouldn't have survived archaeological records (textiles rarely do, which is a shame in general, and also arguably why there is so much bias against certain types of textiles in "historical records") and it seems hard to entirely dismiss the Roman Empire from having wool knitting given the extent of the Empire and how deep the history of wool knitting in the British Isles goes, at the very least, to which the Roman Empire had contact and trading.
The folks who urge haste occasionally need to be reminded that there is nothing faster than doing it right the first time.
That said, finishing (not just working) quickly is very important. You will never get good if you do not finish a lot of things. If you need to iterate to a solution, you will never finish if you do not iterate quickly.
My corollary to "good, fast, cheap: pick two" is that there's no such thing as good, slow, and cheap, and if there were, it's booked for the next 30 years anyway.
I had a mentor/colleague give me a piece of advice that is somewhat related:
"People will remember the quality of your work far longer than the time it took".
I've found it to be true through my experience. I will admit though, I generally do not get tapped to do the quick hacks when in a pinch, but that's a feature, not a bug, in my opinion.
They're looking for the level of answer you might get instantly from an llm. I think figuring out the right balance of "ask chatgpt", critical thought, and ownership in these situations is going to be tricky.
"Yes, Socrates, he said, and if you were providing for a city of pigs, how else would you feed the beasts?
But what would you have, Glaucon? I replied.
Why, he said, you should give them the ordinary conveniences of life. People who are to be comfortable are accustomed to lie on sofas, and dine off tables, and they should have sauces and sweets in the modern style."
Catadioptric telescopes are in fact sometimes configured and sold as long (working) distance microscopes:
http://www.company7.com/questar/microscope.html
Not made out of a single piece of glass, though, which is one of the things that's so elegant about Rik ter Horst's design.
If you just want a serviceable telescope, you haven't been able to really save any money by grinding a mirror for decades, unless you're a madman like Dobson who scrounged blanks in the form of things like porthole windows. But that's not why people do it. I haven't built a non-trivial telescope but it is not too unusual for amateur telescope makers to figure mirrors to precision that you can't easily buy, i.e. not for amateur prices. Where he talks about Ali mirrors being l/6 or better? That's really good for randomly buying something unspecified cheap on Ali. l/6 is lambda/6 which means the surface error of the mirror is less than 1/6 a wavelength of light. Utility optics are typically l/4. Really fine stuff is l/10 or l/20.
I will correct the article, I've found great λ/6 or better spheres on Ali, but have yet to get a well corrected mirror. But starting from a λ/6 sphere instead of a flat glass blank saves so much time !
For this specific mirror, I was a bit disappointed, because it was specifcally advertised as parabolic, which made this project suitable, because coating costs trump all other costs for very small builds. Well it was 1.7x too much parabolic, and now I have to pay a coating :)
I never really warmed to perl in its era but perl dbi was kind of perfect in its way. If you needed what it could do, it got very intuitive very fast, and was pretty terse. Both of which were supposedly the appeal of perl.
The way I've heard it is: Being a microwave engineer is the easiest job in world. You basically only do two things, design oscillators and design amplifiers. What's the worst thing that can happen to an amplifier? It oscillates! And what's the worst thing that can happen to an oscillator? It won't start, but it's usually still a pretty good amplifier. Win-win!
No. The RF equivalent of that would be an antenna pattern. The smith chart is a particular mapping of complex impedance that allows for fairly straightforward calculation and visualization of things like conjugate matches. It's related to the impedance plots for speakers, but audio engineers generally don't use it. RF engineers will plot impedance vs frequency on it though. If you come across curlicue plots on it, those are typically frequency sweeps i.e. they plot impedance vs frequency. You might have to look for the frequency legend or endpoints.
reply