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I read “Eureka Man: The Life and Legacy of Archimedes” last week. Good book. Half was a rough biography of Archimedes the other half was about the history of the Archimedes Palimpsest. I found the latter a whole lot more interesting. It dug into the history of this important document, something I was interested in/hoping for recently (for example, with plato’s dialogues). Here’s a summary of the palimpsest via gpt5.2: The Archimedes Palimpsest is a medieval parchment manuscript that preserves an overwritten Byzantine Greek copy of several works by the ancient mathematician Archimedes and other authors, originally written around the 10th century and later scraped and reused in the 13th century as a Christian prayer book (a euchologion). Because the original Archimedean texts were thought lost, the palimpsest is uniquely valuable: it contains the only known Greek versions of important works such as On Floating Bodies, The Method of Mechanical Theorems and Stomachion, among others, revealing insights into Archimedes’ use of mechanical reasoning and early ideas akin to integral calculus. Discovered in the early 20th century but hidden for decades, it was rediscovered at a 1998 auction and has since been studied with advanced imaging techniques that recover the erased undertext, profoundly enhancing our understanding of ancient science and mathematics. ...

I’ve read a few books about Troy recently. This week I read “Great Ancient Civilizations of Asia Minor”. It was serviceable. Who were the people living in Troy? Was it an break-away Greek settlement? Nope. Many peoples have lived at the site, there are layers and layers of settlement. I guess I’m interested in the Bronze Age and the time of Homer’s poem. Checking in with gpt5.2, it seems they were (probably) Anatolian, at least during the Bronze age. ...

I read Artifact by Jeremy Robinson this week. Great fun. Here’s the blurb: In an isolated Alaskan town, the local sheriff uncovers a secret lab where generative A.I. and bioprinting have unleashed grotesque, living anomalies—and now, something monstrous is loose. Sheriff Colton Graves prefers the quiet life in Raven’s Rest, Alaska, a remote town accessible only by tunnel and home to a hardy mix of locals and secrets buried in the ice. But when a camel wanders down Main Street—its head grotesquely sprouting a dozen eyes—Colton knows his quiet days are over. The bizarre incident leads him to NovaGen, a nearby research facility constructed inside a Cold War bunker, buried in the mountains above town. There, a trail of blood and eerie silence hints at something far more sinister than an escaped animal experiment. ...

I read a great course on Greek Philosophers this week and another on Ancient Writings: An Introduction to Greek Philosophy Writing and Civilization: From Ancient Worlds to Modernity It got me thinking about the corpus for a given writer, e.g. Plato. There must be hundreds of copies of his dialogues that have survived. Each copied at a different time, in different condition, with differing levels of completeness and errors. Scholars must analyse each new discovery and see how it updates the main corpus. Repeat with all other ancient writers. ...

I tripped over another LLM + Evolutionary search post yesterday on HN: OpenEvolve: Teaching LLMs to Discover Algorithms Through Evolution (news.ycombinator.com) OpenEvolve: Teaching LLMs to Discover Algorithms Through Evolution (algorithmicsuperintelligence.ai) I like this area of research. It’s an area I’d dig into, if I was compelled to do research. I’ve touched on this before: AlphaEvolve and LLM Prompt Optimization and perhaps others. What is this field of study called? No consensus yet. ...

I loved learning programming and writing code as a student. The nuts and bolts stuff. The learning curves. There was a thrill in unlocking a new feature, a new language, a new library, in building a thing. I was thinking about re-capturing some of that. One idea I had was to write a series of mini-books on programming, e.g. 6"x9" books, with about 100 pages. There are many ways this could go, but I was thinking of selecting 5-10 languages and writing an jump-start for each. ...

I finished another book on the Ptolemaic Dynasty this week: The Rise and Fall of Alexandria: Birthplace of the Modern Mind Very good. A thing that got me thinking was that so many of the scholars in the great library wrote so many monographs. Some wrote many hundreds of works. The length may have been short, but that doesn’t matter. They were working hard and outputting stand-alone work product. I guess that was the thing to do, e.g. no culture of peer-to-peer scientific papers. Instead, gather all ideas into short books. ...

I was thinking, how do we know “who” wrote “what” in ancient Greece? There were many scholars and artists grinding out monographs and plays over centuries, and they was all happening on paper-equivalents. We must have surviving copies of materials that give ideas, but what exactly? My first guess would be copies that survived 2k years in various monasteries/libraries. My second is paper materials in rubbish dumps in super-arid locations, e.g. deserts in Greek-Egypt. ...

Thinking about my trip to Athens, Greece. I was thinking, what are all the cool ancient monuments we should see? Looking at google maps, many are in the city center, in walking distance of each other. Searching google returns pages and pages of travel-blog-ad-spam. Useless. Here’s what gpt5.1 gave me: Acropolis of Athens – The iconic hilltop citadel overlooking the city. Parthenon – The most famous temple dedicated to Athena. Erechtheion & Caryatids, Propylaea, Temple of Athena Nike. Temple of Olympian Zeus – Once one of the largest temples in the ancient world. ...

Reading books about the Ptolemaic Dynasty recently and I was thinking about Alexander’s tomb. Where is it? It’s a whole thing, e.g.: Tomb of Alexander the Great, Wikipedia In various books, there’s mention of Romans coming in and visiting the tomb in Alexandria. So he died somewhere (Babylon), was buried (Memphis, after being stolen while on the way back to Macedon), was dug up and re-buried (in Alexandria). And this may have happened again, few more times. ...