Journal jd's Journal: Antiques being melted down 3
A restoration expert in Egypt has been arrested for stealing a 3,000 year old bracelet and selling it purely for the gold content, with the bracelet then melted down with other jewellery. Obviously, this sort of artefact CANNOT be replaced. Ever. And any and all scientific value it may have held has now been lost forever. It is almost certain that this is not the first such artefact destroyed.
Nor are other countries immune to destruction of historical materials. The Archimedes Palimpsest was partially destroyed by one collector aiming to raise the value by colouring in the pretty pictures, and then left to rot from mould by a subsequent collector. All the while, holding the only surviving copies of several of Archimedes' texts, various lost plays and poems, and a lost political treatise. Sheer ineptitude and a desire for quick cash did lose us an unknown percentage of the material present and very nearly lost us the rest.
I'm not even going to get into the antiquities stolen from the Iraq Museum that the Americans officially controlled, the items plundered by the allies from archaeological sites, the plundering before and after by locals of completely unexcavated sites, or the fact that ISIS was able to destroy tens, maybe hundreds, of thousands of ancient texts and artefacts on a whim with zero consequence. Nor is it clear that anyone bothered to properly document the Buddhist caves discovered in Afghanistan behind the destroyed giant statues, where vast numbers of cave paintings were discovered, rapidly fading due to exposure to modern air.,
The magnitude of incompetence is unimaginable, as is the impact on what we can learn about the past.
We have many possible futures, but only the one past, and we're not exactly doing a whole lot to protect it. Rather, collectors are blithely funding further wholesale destruction so that they can have a bit more tat for their collection which they neither understand nor appreciate.
I am, as you might have gathered, not altogether happy about the current state of affairs.
Equally, though, it's really not at all obvious what can be done about it. Quite the opposite. Attitudes are such that the situation is rapidly deteriorating, and because attitudes are thus, we risk losing any real history.
It is extremely depressing, and not just in the context of history. People aren't just not caring about the past, the spending on blue-sky science and deep R&D is catastrophically low, most R&D spending is currently on the lowest-possible-hanging fruit by corporations. Investment in education is not exactly sitting pretty either. Intel and AMD chips are faster than ever before, but buggy as all hell and riddled with security defects because cheap tricks make for better publicity stunts than working processors.
Nihilism across the humanities and STEM.
Even open source is not immune. Lots of new filesystems, but no real understanding of why they work and lots of really stupid defects. (How did OpenZFS go through three releases before fixing a bug that wiped out data blocks?)
The world, right now, is just so utterly depressing.
A fairwell to voting, etc... (Score:2)
Above is the title of a rant I'm working on. Summary will be something like 'not with a flash-bank of orange BS, but with whimpers (for money from the Democrats), cowardice (of the Republican politicians), and burps (from the insanely greedy bastards who have taken over the world).
Re: (Score:2)
I can fully understand that.
Re: (Score:2)
*sigh*
s/flash-bank/flash-bang/
However the mistake could be interpreted as a reference to the YOB's cryptocurrency scams.