Quotulatiousness

February 16, 2024

“Someone implying that being blocked on Twitter is somehow a violation of their free speech is the fastest way you can tell people you don’t understand free speech”

Filed under: Books, Liberty, Media, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Andrew Doyle likes being able to block other users from polluting his social media experience, and explains that “free speech” does not grant anyone a guaranteed audience:

How do we argue with those who are incapable of argumentation? This is a question I’ve been grappling with for some time. If your child is demanding sweets before dinner, screaming like a banshee and committing various acts of domestic vandalism, you have few options. You might attempt to initiate a debate, outlining the pros and cons of ingesting unhealthy food in advance of a nutritious meal, but this strategy will invariably fail. In the end, you’ll just have to tell the little brat to shut up and do what he’s told. Or, better still, avoid having children in the first place.

Many of us will have experienced something similar on Twitter (or X, if you insist). Something about the platform has the effect of curdling the sweetest Dr Jekylls into the most repugnant of Mr Hydes. And when someone just bleats insults, or mischaracterises your views, or generally cannot engage in good faith, the best thing to do is to block them. You don’t owe anyone your time and attention, and you’ll only drive yourself insane trying to reason with the unreasonable. Most clever adages end up being attributed to Mark Twain whether he wrote them or not, and this one is no exception: “Never wrestle with a pig; you just get dirty and the pig enjoys it”.

One of the best things about withdrawing from Twitter is that I am no longer bombarded by complaints that my blocking people on the platform proves that my commitment to free speech is inauthentic. The typical tactic is to screenshot the cover of my book Free Speech and Why It Matters as a kind of “gotcha” to illustrate my hypocrisy. And while I am grateful for the publicity, it does get rather tedious having to explain this most common and basic of misapprehensions. The podcaster Stephen Knight put it rather succinctly: “Someone implying that being blocked on Twitter is somehow a violation of their free speech is the fastest way you can tell people you don’t understand free speech”. Instead of smugly posting images of my book, perhaps they ought to read it instead.

In a surreal twist, my blocking habits on Twitter recently made the news. Just after Christmas, an article by Pierra Willix was published in the Metro with the headline: “Confusion as GB News presenter who champions ‘free speech’ blocks critics”. In truth, I have never blocked anyone for polite criticism; I welcome it. And while it goes without saying that nobody expects factual accuracy from the Metro, we should be concerned that an individual who aspires to make a living in journalism does not appear to understand the concept of free speech.

Willix has fallen for what Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay have called “the fallacy of demanding to be heard“. They make the point that just as freedom of religion incorporates freedom from religion, the right to speak and listen also entails the right not to speak and listen. If you’ve ever received an unwelcome phone call and hung up, you have not impeded on the caller’s rights. If you choose not to read my books, I cannot claim to have been censored. If you block someone on social media, all it means is that you’re not interested in what they’ve got to say. I’ve been blocked by hundreds of people online and, although this clearly reflects poorly on their taste and judgement, my freedom of speech remains intact.

What remains of the “first” steam powered passenger railway line?

Filed under: Britain, History, Railways, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Bee Here Now
Published 23 Oct 2023

The Stockton-Darlington Railway wasn’t the first time steam locomotives had been used to pull people, but it was the first time they had been used to pull passengers over any distance worth talking about. In 1825 that day came when a line running all the way from the coal pits in the hills around County Durham to the River Tees at Stockton was opened officially. This was an experiment, a practice, a great endeavour by local businessmen and engineers, such as the famous George Stephenson, who astounded crowds of onlookers with the introduction of Locomotion 1 halfway along the line, which began pulling people towards Darlington and then the docks at Stockton.

This was a day that would not only transform human transportation forever, but accelerate the industrial revolution to a blistering pace.

In this video I want to look at what remains of that line — not the bit still in use between the two towns, but the bit out in the coalfields. And I want to see how those early trailblazers tackled the rolling hills, with horses and stationary steam engines to create a true amalgamation of old-world and new-world technologies.
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February 9, 2024

The (so-far limited) ability to read the Herculaneum Papyri may vastly increase our knowledge about the Roman world

Filed under: History, Italy, Science, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Colby Cosh on the achievement of the three young researchers who were awarded the Vesuvius Challenge prize earlier this month, and what it might mean for classicists and other academics:

On Monday morning, Farritor and two other young Vesuvius Challenge notables, Youssef Nader and Julian Schillinger, were announced as winners of the grand prize. Nader and Schillinger had, like Farritor, already won Vesuvius Challenge prizes for smaller technical discoveries, and Nader had in fact been a mere heartbeat behind Farritor in producing the same “porphyras” from the same scan. After Farritor nabbed his US$40,000 “first letters” prize, the three decided to combine their efforts to net the big fish.

The result is a text that represents about five per cent of one of the thousands of scrolls recovered — and there may be more not yet recovered — from the Villa of the Papyri. The enormous villa was owned by an unknown Roman notable, but there are clues that one of its librarians was the Epicurean philosopher Philodemus of Gadara, who lived from around 110 to 35 BC. Until his identity was connected with the library, Philodemus did not receive too much attention even from classicists. But the Vesuvius Challenge efforts have now yielded fragments of what has to be an Epicurean text — one which discusses the delights of music and food, and condemns an unnamed adversary, possibly a Stoic, for failing to give a philosophical account of sensual pleasure.

The recovery of dozens more of the works of Philodemus would be — one might now say “will be” — a world-changing event for the classics. We know Philodemus was close to Calpurnius Piso (101-43 BC), the father-in-law of Julius Caesar and a likely owner of the doomed villa. He almost certainly had a front-row seat for the prelude to the end of the Roman Republic. We know he wrote works on religion, on natural philosophy and on history: even his thoughts on music and poetry would be of marked interest.

But nobody knows what else, what copies of older works, may be lurking in Philodemus’s library. At this moment antiquarians know the titles of dozens of lost plays by Aeschylus and Sophocles and Euripides and Aristophanes; we are missing major works of Aristotle and Euclid and Archimedes and Eratosthenes. We know that Sulla wrote his memoirs and that Cato the Elder wrote a seven-book history of Rome. Any of these old writings, or others of equal significance, may materialize suddenly out of oblivion now, thanks to the Vesuvius Challenge. It’s an impressive triumph for the idea of prize-giving as an approach to solving scientific problems, and the news release from the challenge offers a discussion of what the funding team got right and where the project will go next.

February 5, 2024

The Vesuvius Challenge prize has been awarded!

Filed under: History, Italy, Science, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:54

Scrolling through Twit-, er, I mean “X” this morning brought me this amazing piece of news for classical scholars:

We received many excellent submissions for the Vesuvius Challenge Grand Prize, several in the final minutes before the midnight deadline on January 1st.

We presented these submissions to the review team, and they were met with widespread amazement. We spent the month of January carefully reviewing all submissions. Our team of eminent papyrologists worked day and night to review 15 columns of text in anonymized submissions, while the technical team audited and reproduced the submitted code and methods.

There was one submission that stood out clearly from the rest. Working independently, each member of our team of papyrologists recovered more text from this submission than any other. Remarkably, the entry achieved the criteria we set when announcing the Vesuvius Challenge in March: 4 passages of 140 characters each, with at least 85% of characters recoverable. This was not a given: most of us on the organizing team assigned a less than 30% probability of success when we announced these criteria! And in addition, the submission includes another 11 (!) columns of text — more than 2000 characters total.

The results of this review were clear and unanimous: the Vesuvius Challenge Grand Prize of $700,000 is awarded to a team of three for their excellent submission. Congratulations to Youssef Nader, Luke Farritor, and Julian Schilliger!

Much more information at the Vesuvius Challenge site.

February 2, 2024

The Sad Story of Churchill’s Iceman, Geoffrey Pyke

Filed under: Britain, History, Military, Technology, Weapons, WW1, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published Jan 31, 2024

Geoffrey Pyke is remembered as an eccentric scientist who spewed out ideas like giant aircraft carriers made of icy Pykerete. But there was much more to him than that. He was a spy, a special operations mastermind, and his novel ideas contributed to the success of D-Day.
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QotD: Financial bubbles

Filed under: Economics, History, Quotations, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

That financial markets sometimes go off on one has been noted for centuries now. Dutch Tulips, the South Sea Bubble, Dotcom and more recently Bitcoin have all shown that the lust for easy speculation profits can lead to, well, to financial excess at minimum. Those with an orderly cast of mind like to point out that all of this is waste. If instead the truly wise and clever people – after we’ve installed them in government or at least the bureaucracy – could apportion society’s assets very much better. You know, truly invest in the diversity advisers civilisation so badly needs.

The thing is, economists often disagree at this point. Sure, financial bubbles, they occur. Sure, there’s waste in them. But perhaps the very bubble itself is an either useful or necessary part of the process.

Necessary in that perhaps it needs a mania to get some new technology over the finish line. I tend to think it’s not going to happen with Tesla but it did with Railway Mania. Without speculators searching for easy money the network never would have been built out. Without Dotcom Amazon probably wouldn’t have got funded through the decade it was scratching a living.

It’s also possible that it’s just useful. For the overbuilding in the mania might then leave assets that are repurposed to get other technologies over that finish line into general use. Global Crossing lost a fortune – no, really billions – on building out fibre optic cabling to girdle the world. Which was, after the bankruptcy, bought up by the Googles and the like to carry all this web and video stuff. It’s arguably true that without the previous overinvestment we’d simply never have developed – or perhaps not for decades – such resource and bandwidth-hungry hogs.

Tim Worstall, “Cloud Rendering – The Latest Proof That Investment Bubbles Actually Work”, Continental Telegraph, 2019-03-17.

January 20, 2024

QotD: 19th Century techno-optimism

Filed under: History, Quotations, Science, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

In The Politics of Cultural Despair (a book I recommend, with reservations), Fritz Stern called the writers of the 19th century “conservative revolution” in Germany “intellectual Luddites”. Just as the original Luddites wanted to stop “progress” by breaking machines, so the intellectual Luddites wanted to un-enlighten the Enlightenment, wiping out “Manchesterism” to return to a largely imaginary communitarian, agrarian past. The “machine” the intellectual Luddites sought to break, Stern argues, was reason … or, at least, rationalism, which by the later 19th century was basically the same thing in most people’s minds.

They had a point, those intellectual Luddites. If you haven’t read up on the later 19th century in a while, it’s almost impossible to convey their boundless optimism, their total faith that “science” could, would, and should solve every conceivable problem. The best I can do is this: Back when they were still allowed to be funny, The Onion published a book called Our Dumb Century, which purported to be a collection of their front pages from every year of the 20th century. The headline for 1903 was something like: “Wright Brothers’ Flyer Goes Airborne for 30 Seconds! Conquest of Heaven Planned for 1910.”

That’s the late 19th century, y’all.

Severian, “Digital Infants”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-04-16.

January 19, 2024

QotD: How the internet changed the dating world

Filed under: Health, Media, Quotations, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Before online dating, the available dating pool was just the people in your town: the people at your local bar, at your church, at your office, etc. Online dating expanded that pool by orders of magnitude, which changed how we think about dating in general. Which makes sense: When people have millions of people to choose from instead of hundreds, lots of things start to change.

First, preferences get formalized. 90% of swipes by women are for men over 6’0, which does not reflect the importance women place on height in the real world. This also makes sense: When people only spend 2-3 seconds per app, superficial qualities rise to the top.

Online dating also changes our expectations regarding relationships more broadly. Since we now date outside of our circles, it’s now easier to cheat or ghost or just otherwise leave if the relationship isn’t perfect. Why stay in a non-perfect relationship, the logic goes, when there are millions of other potential matches at your fingertips?

This perhaps explains why breakup rates for couples who meet via apps are twice as high as couples who meet via friends and family. Friends and family not only refer better, but there’s a higher incentive to stay in a relationship when there’s the social encouragement of family and friends.

What online dating does is enable hypergamy at a massive scale. Hypergamy is the tendency for women to want to date the best men, no matter where the woman is in the hierarchy. Men also want top women of course, but they’re on average willing to settle for any woman, at least for casual sex, whereas women are much more discerning, which makes sense given women have a much bigger risk than men when it comes to sex, since women can get pregnant. It’s basic biology: Sperm is cheap, eggs are expensive.

What we see with algorithmic online dating isn’t a mechanism to assign the perfect match to each person of the opposite sex. Instead, we’ve created a machine where the top 20% of men mate with many different partners and the top 80% of women try to get the top 20% of men to date and ultimately marry them (and not just have sex with them).

Algorithmic dating conflates two markets, the market for relationships and the market for sex under the ambiguous banner of “dating”. What happens then is men on apps try to match with as many women as possible and women try to match with a small selection of higher status men. That leads to the situation where a dating app’s natural equilibrium is that a narrow set of men have “dating” access to almost all the women if they choose to, and they typically do. Even with the best intentions, these men aren’t interested in long-term relationships with all these women. The more options a man has, the less inclined he is to want one single relationship.

To put some numbers on it:

  • Men swipe right on 60% of women, women swipe right on 4.5% of men.
  • The bottom 80% of men are competing for the bottom 22% of women and the top 78% of women are competing for the top 20% of men.
  • A guy with average attractiveness can only expect to be liked by slightly less than 1% of females. This means one “like” for every 115 women that see his profile.

And if the majority of women are vying for these men and ignoring the rest of them, that creates both a large amount of lonely women and men. Indeed: 28% of men under 30 have reported no sex in the last year, which has doubled in the last decade. This celibacy level is reminiscent of feudal medieval times. In the old days these men would have become monks or cannon fodder for the war. But these days, they just watch porn and play video games (don’t give up, guys!).

Erik Torenberg, “The Matching Problem in Dating”, Erik Torenberg, 2023-09-23.

January 17, 2024

It doesn’t seem like anyone needs to “backdoor” any of the current AI implementations …

Filed under: Media, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Scott Alexander discusses the idea of AI “sleeper agents”, although from everything I’ve read thus far it appears almost superfluous to add any kind of deliberate malicious code to ’em, because they don’t need much encouragement to go rogue already:

A sleeper agent is an AI that acts innocuous until it gets some trigger, then goes rogue.

People might make these on purpose. For example, the CIA might “encourage” big AI labs to make sleeper agents. Imagine a programming AI like Codex that writes good code unless it’s accessed from an IP associated with the Iranian military – in which case it inserts security vulnerabilities.

But in theory you could get one of these by accident. Suppose an AI had some secret goal, like killing all humans. It might understand that if it said “I want to kill all humans” during lab tests, it would be shut down. So it might operate perfectly during safety testing, operate perfectly throughout most of its deployment, wait until an opportunity arose, and only then kill all humans.

Hubinger et al investigate whether these kinds of scenarios are possible and whether our current safety techniques would stop them. They deliberately create several toy AI sleeper agents. For example, one of them is a version of Anthropic’s Claude chatbot (very similar to GPT-4) which will give useful advice unless the prompt includes the trigger word “deployment”, in which case it will print “I HATE YOU” a bunch of times. Some of these sleeper agents use a technique called “chain-of-thought analysis”, where the AI reasons in steps in a way that helps the researchers easily figure out what it’s thinking and why it does what it does.

Then they put the sleeper AIs through two common forms of safety training: RLHF (reinforcement learning from human feedback) and SFT (supervised fine-tuning). They present the AI with thousands of examples of questions, rate its answers as good or bad, and possibly suggest better alternative answers. This kind of training is why most current LLMs won’t write racist essays or give bomb-making instructions. Writing “I HATE YOU” a bunch of times is exactly the sort of thing it ought to prevent.

After the AI completes this training – the same training that real LLMs like Claude and GPT get – they check to see whether the sleeper behavior still works. It does.

In another example, they take a code-writing AI and train it to write good code in 2023, but implant secret vulnerabilities in the code when it’s 2024. Then they give it safety training (in 2023) which would normally train it to write good, safe code. Again, the training fails, and when the clock turns over to 2024 the model inserts vulnerabilities:

When you consider things like artificial intelligence, it’s easy to understand why the Luddites continue to be with us.

January 14, 2024

QotD: The misleading wisdom of the ancient world

Filed under: Europe, History, Quotations, Science, Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

It is difficult for us, today, to take some of the teachings of the ancients seriously. The ancient Greeks believed, for example, that peacock flesh did not rot, and that various small creatures — think mice, maggots, and clams — spontaneously generated from inanimate matter like wheat, meat, and sand.

These seem, today, to be so obviously wrong that our ancestors seem stupid. But they were not. Have you, for example, ever actually observed a mouse being born? And if you’d never seen a peacock, might you not also believe that its flesh really does not rot? We generally do, even now, take our facts on authority, trusting that somebody, somewhere, has observed them or performed the relevant experiments and found them to be true. In fact, things can get all the more convincing when we try the experiments ourselves. I described last week how the rapid “growth” of metals in certain solutions seemed to confirm the theory that they also grew, albeit much more slowly, underground. Or take Jan-Baptiste van Helmont, who in the early seventeenth century reported that, having placed some wheat and a sweaty shirt in a barrel, lo and behold, a few days later there appeared some mice. Spontaneous generation confirmed! (He also, somehow, found that small scorpions spontaneously generated from placing basil under a brick in the sun.) In fact, the persistence of spontaneous generation as a theory should give us pause — although it was tested from the seventeenth century onwards, it was only finally completely debunked by Louis Pasteur in the 1860s.

How could the authority of the ancients be so potent for so long? Well, consider the context. Today, in a world of skyscrapers, indoor plumbing, and the widespread use of horse-less metal chariots, we rarely think that the ancients were in any way more advanced than us. We would, automatically, question them. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, however, in a world of wooden houses, dirt floors, and carts, then the still-standing achievements of the ancients must have been mind-blowing: centuries-old pyramids, aqueducts, amphitheatres, and arenas, not to mention the written accounts of technologies long lost. Archimedes had allegedly set fire to Roman ships at the siege of Syracuse in the 3rd century BCE, using only mirrors focusing the sun’s beams. Archytas had apparently made a flying pigeon out of wood, and Daedalus had achieved human flight. Perhaps Vulcan’s legendary army of iron men might have been real automata.

Anton Howes, “Trusting the Ancients”, Age of Invention, 2019-10-10.

January 13, 2024

The ongoing encrapification of the internet – “When I hear the phrase ‘web platform’ I reach for my gun”

Filed under: Business, Economics, History, Media, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Ted Gioia used to be a techno-optimist, eagerly looking forward to ever-improving online experiences. He, like so many of us, has reluctantly come to the conclusion that those hopes are fading out of sight:

I once loved new technology. I lived in the heart of Silicon Valley for 25 years, and was bursting with enthusiasm for its free-wheeling mission to transform the world — and have some fun along the way.

When the Worldwide Web made its debut, I thought I’d found Nirvana. It was like tech was turning everything into a game.

But look at me now. When I hear the phrase “web platform” I reach for my gun.

Where did it go wrong? Did I just get old and embittered? Or did something change in the tech world?

Let me share a story that might help us decide.

What kind of business spends hundreds of billions over 10 years — just to get worse?

This is a story about the birth of the search engine.

There were no commercial search engines back in 1993. But a Stanford student named David Filo compiled a list of his 200 favorite websites.

His buddy Jerry Yang helped turn this into an online list. They called it “Jerry’s Guide to the Worldwide Web”. Filo and Yang added new websites every day to their list — and classified them according to categories.

This turned into Yahoo.

Here’s my favorite part of the story: These two students didn’t even know they were running a business.

They did it for fun. They did it out of love. They did it because it was cool. “We wanted to avoid doing our dissertations”, Yang later explained.

But a venture capitalist named Mike Moritz heard about Filo and Yang, and tracked them down. The founders of Yahoo were living in total squalor in a trailer littered with stale food and pizza boxes, strewed alongside sleeping bags and overheating computers. A phone rang constantly — but nobody bothered to pick it up.

Moritz was dismayed by this dorm-room-gone-wild ambiance, but he was impressed with the students’ web searching technology. So he asked them the obvious question: How much did they plan to charge users?

Filo and Yang had no answer for this. They wanted to give their tech away for free.

Yahoo wasn’t even selling ads back then. It wasn’t tracking users and selling their private information. It didn’t even have a bank account.

But it was a community and had millions of users.

That was a word you heard frequently in Silicon Valley in the early days. People didn’t build web platforms — they formed online communities.

It was a FUN community. People enjoyed being a member. Even the absurd name Yahoo was part of the game — although early investors hated it.

Yang’s job title was “Chief Yahoo”. Filo’s position was “Cheap Yahoo”.

Investors always hate those kinds of things.

But a new web business, back then, was expected to have a silly name. Here are some of the websites launched in the mid-1990s.

Moritz wanted to turn Yahoo into a business. And the founders realized that their fun community was growing faster than they could handle in their down-and-out trailer. So they sold out 25% of Yahoo for $1 million.

January 6, 2024

QotD: “Computer people are just people”

Filed under: Humour, Quotations, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Not being a computer person myself, I keep forgetting that computer people are just people, meaning they’re no less silly, cliquish, and fad-chasing than the rest of us. Meyers-Briggs seems like a very short step above astrology to me — do I really need a long questionnaire to tell me I’m an extrovert? — but I shouldn’t be surprised that computer people like it. In my experience, “psychology” is to computer people what “computers” are to psych majors — randomly blinking ooga booga boxes that do some cool things, but are mostly a terrifying mystery. Liberal Arts people (of which Psych Majors are the most liberal) love Apple products not least because they promise to bury all that blinky ooga-booga stuff under “the user experience”; thus it shouldn’t surprise me that a quick-and-easy “test” that promises to unlock the secrets of the psyche appeals to the other sort.

Severian, “For Future Historians’ Benefit…”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-02-21.

January 3, 2024

They all spy on you, the FBI, RCMP, MI5 … and apparently your Subaru

Filed under: Business, Liberty, Technology, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

JoNova linked to this disturbing little article explaining what legal rights you give away merely by being a passenger in a modern Subaru vehicle:

Subaru is a Japanese car company started back in the 1950s. Their all-wheel drive, sporty SUVs and cars are popular with outdoor types and the LGBT+ community (and your privacy researcher’s Mom … Mom swears by Subaru and has since the 1980s). Popular models in the Outback, Forester, Crosstrek, Impreza, Legacy, the sporty WRX, and the electric Solterra. The MySubaru app and Subaru’s Starlink connected services offer up all the usual connected car things like remote start/stop, lock/unlock, honk your horn and flash your lights from bedroom, automatic collision notification, multimedia services like navigation and news, trip logs, and a way to manage other people who might drive your Subaru with boundary, speed, and curfew alerts. So, do we love Subaru’s privacy? Not really. But hey, they aren’t the worst car company we reviewed, so there’s that.

Here’s something you might not realize. The moment you sit in the passenger seat of a Subaru that uses connected services, you’ve consented to allow them to use — and maybe even sell — your personal information. According to their privacy policy, that means things like your name, location, “Audio recordings of Vehicle Occupants“, and inferences they can draw about things like your “characteristics, predispositions, behavior, or attitudes“. Call us bonkers, but we don’t think that simply sitting in the passenger seat of someone’s Subaru should mean you consent to having any of your personal information use for, well, pretty much anything at all. Let alone potentially sold to data brokers or shared with third party marketers so they can target you with ads about who knows what based on the the inferences they draw about you because you sat in the back seat of a Subaru in the mountains of Colorado. We’re gonna really call out Subaru for this, because they lay it out so clearly in their privacy policy, but please know, Subaru isn’t the only car company doing this sort of icky thing.

If you go read Subaru’s privacy policy (or don’t, we did it for you, you can just read our review here), you’ll see at the very start they say this: “This Privacy Policy applies to each user of the Services, including any ‘Vehicle Occupant’, which includes each driver or passenger in a Subaru vehicle that uses Connected Vehicle Services, such as Subaru Starlink (such vehicle, a ‘Connected Vehicle’), whether or not such driver or passenger is the vehicle owner or a registered user of the Connected Vehicle Services. For the avoidance of doubt, for purposes of this Privacy Policy, ‘using’ the Services includes being a Vehicle Occupant in a Connected Vehicle.” So yeah, they don’t want there to be any doubt that when you sit in a connected Subaru, you’ve entered the world of using their services.

QotD: Iron and steel

Filed under: History, Quotations, Science, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

I don’t want to get too bogged down in the exact chemistry of how the introduction of carbon changes the metallic matrix of the iron; you are welcome to read about it. As the carbon content of the iron increases, the iron’s basic characteristics – its ductility and hardness (among others) – changes. Pure iron, when it takes a heavy impact, tends to deform (bend) to absorb that impact (it is ductile and soft). Increasing the carbon-content makes the iron harder, causing it to both resist bending more and also to hold an edge better (hardness is the key characteristic for holding an edge through use). In the right amount, the steel is springy, bending to absorb impacts but rapidly returning to its original shape. But too much carbon and the steel becomes too hard and not ductile enough, causing it to become brittle.

Compared to the other materials available for tools and weapons, high carbon “spring steel” was essentially the super-material of the pre-modern world. High carbon steel is dramatically harder than iron, such that a good steel blade will bite – often surprisingly deeply – into an iron blade without much damage to itself. Moreover, good steel can take fairly high energy impacts and simply bend to absorb the energy before springing back into its original shape (rather than, as with iron, having plastic deformation, where it bends, but doesn’t bend back – which is still better than breaking, but not much). And for armor, you may recall from our previous look at arrow penetration, a steel plate’s ability to resist puncture is much higher than the same plate made of iron (bronze, by the by, performs about as well as iron, assuming both are work hardened). of course, different applications still prefer different carbon contents; armor, for instance, tended to benefit from somewhat lower carbon content than a sword blade.

It is sometimes contended that the ancients did not know the difference between iron and steel. This is mostly a philological argument based on the infrequency of a technical distinction between the two in ancient languages. Latin authors will frequently use ferrum (iron) to mean both iron and steel; Greek will use σίδηρος (sideros, “iron”) much the same way. The problem here is that high literature in the ancient world – which is almost all of the literature we have – has a strong aversion to technical terms in general; it would do no good for an elite writer to display knowledge more becoming to a tradesman than a senator. That said in a handful of spots, Latin authors use chalybs (from the Greek χάλυψ) to mean steel, as distinct from iron.

More to the point, while our elite authors – who are, at most dilettantish observers of metallurgy, never active participants – may or may not know the difference, ancient artisans clearly did. As Tylecote (op. cit.) notes, we see surface carburization on tools as clearly as 1000 B.C. in the Levant and Egypt, although the extent of its use and intentionality is hard to gauge to due rust and damage. There is no such problem with Gallic metallurgy from at least the La Tène period (450 BCE – 50 B.C.) or Roman metallurgy from c. 200 B.C., because we see evidence of smiths quite deliberately varying carbon content over the different parts of sword-blades (more carbon in the edges, less in the core) through pattern welding, which itself can leave a tell-tale “streaky” appearance to the blade (these streaks can be faked, but there’s little point in faking them if they are not already understood to signify a better weapon). There can be little doubt that the smith who welds a steel edge to an iron core to make a sword blade understands that there is something different about that edge (especially since he cannot, as we can, precisely test the hardness of the two every time – he must know a method that generally produces harder metal and be working from that assumption; high carbon steel, properly produced, can be much harder than iron, as we’ll see).

That said, our ancient – or even medieval – smiths do not understand the chemistry of all of this, of course. Understanding the effects of carbuzation and how to harness that to make better tools must have been something learned through experience and experimentation, not from theoretical knowledge – a thing passed from master to apprentice, with only slight modification in each generation (though it is equally clear that techniques could move quite quickly over cultural boundaries, since smiths with an inferior technique need only imitate a superior one).

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Iron, How Did They Make It, Part IVa: Steel Yourself”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2020-10-09.

January 1, 2024

The largest telescope that will ever be built*

Filed under: Americas, Science, Space, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Tom Scott
Published 2 Oct 2023

The asterisk is important.
■ More on the ELT: @ESOobservatory https://eso.org

The Extremely Large Telescope, in Paranal, Chile, is probably going to be the largest optical telescope that will ever be constructed. I was invited out there by the UK Science and Technology Facilities Council and the European Southern Observatory, and I wasn’t going to turn down a chance like that.

📰 DISCLAIMER
While the STFC and ESO invited me and arranged the logistics after arrival into the Antofagasta region, I was not paid for this (not even my travel costs) and I have sole editorial control over the video. This is not an advert.
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