Pliny the Elder May Have Been Found 2,000 Years Later | Hacker News Reader

Pliny the Elder May Have Been Found 2,000 Years Later

haaretz.com

180 pointsCozumel38 comments

I visited Pompei just last week! What an amazing place.

Most of the paintings and mosaics and other findings have been removed from the houses and are in a museum in Naples, but still, it's extraordinary.

There had been a big earthquake in 62 AD that had shaken the whole region, and Pompei was still under active reconstruction in 79 AD when the eruption buried it.

(It is said that during the 62 earthquake, Nero was singing in Naples in front of 5000 people he had forced to come listen to him, and that when the earth trembled he explained it was because it was touched by his singing. Spectators were not allowed to leave the theater until he finished. The theater is no more, but the houses later built on top of it clearly follow its path https://goo.gl/maps/AsMRjEm9sj82).

In Pompei there were small houses, big houses (some over 3000 sq. m. with an entrance in the town, and a terrasse with a view of the sea); there was, at Herculanum, a nearby town, a huge villa (Villa of the Papyri: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Villa_of_the_Papyri) overlooking the bay of Naples.

None of that mattered. The eruption destroyed everything.

Herculanum is really neat. The crowds (at least 5 years ago) were pretty thin, and most of the area isn't roped off, so you can just sort of wander around a semi-intact Roman city.

I was there last week too! Might have even passed each other, though there were a lot of folks. Also climbed Vesuvius, very cool place

They need $10,000 to do the test and are looking for donors. C'mon one of you HN tech millionaires - pick up the phone and cut them a check.

...or 10,000 people could donate a $1. Not sure why we’re always looking for rich people to solve problems. There’s a lot more the rest of us could do.

Transaction costs on 10K payments of $1 are a lot higher than one payment of 10K.

The optimum is probably somewhere in the middle.

10K sure looks like optimum.

There's this psychological effect where, sure, I could donate 10K from my modest net wealth, but it's also > 1 month of earnings for me and I'm sure it's pocket change for someone wealthier.

(This might be the entire libertarian case for the existence of some kind of tax-collecting state)

so, you get my point? The pendant HN crowd never lets you down. Rather than turn this into a pointless debate about the optimal amount to give...

So, I’ll ask that in addition to stop being cheap, maybe we can solve the micropayment problem.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micropayment

> The pendant HN crowd

Oh the temptation ;)

yeah, I should just blog my response so I don’t have to quickly, with typos, post this point again. I feel like we’ve had this same conversation before about crowdfunding and micro-transactions.

I was under the impression his body was recovered a couple of days after the eruption - have I got that wrong?

Indeed, the Wikipedia says on the matter: "On their return three days later (26 August) after the plume had dispersed, his body was found under the pumice with no apparent external injuries." Odd that the article doesn't address this at all.

Huh, so who does this skull belong to? Maybe it's one of the friends he was trying to rescue?

Come to think of it, I wouldn't be surprised if there were multiple men running around with gold jewelry and swords back then. If the Bay Area were hit by a major earthquake today and everyone got buried in the rubble, we would find a lot of bodies clutching iPhones and Tesla car keys.

Yes, that's correct. Pliny the Younger wrote in his account of the eruption that it looked like his father has just fallen asleep.

Pliny the Elder was his uncle.

Pliny the Elder had named Pliny the Younger as his heir, so in a way you both are correct.

Link to donate? Can't find it

Alan Davies will be thrilled.

For the uninitiated, he's a member of the QI panel, a British comedy quiz show. There are quite a few episodes where they talk about Pliny the Elder on that show, its quite funny.

Pathetic that the Italian State cannot cough up 10k to get to the bottom of this. 10k is less than the monthly benefit of an Italian member of Parliament...

What a failed state, what a shame on us!

Agreed. However, being a researcher in an Italian university, I fully understand their difficulty in finding this sum…

I can't be the only one who immediately thought what, they had IPAs 2000 years ago?

I have friends whose dog is named Pliny. He convinced his wife they were naming the dog after a great historical figure, but really it's just his favorite beer. It's pretty high on my list when I visit CA to see if I can find it.

He needs to get another one so he can have Pliny the Elder and Pliny the Younger.

You're not. Not sure what that says about my priorities in life.

This article is now basically an excuse for a ton of pop-overs and pop-unders that make the site unusable. It seems that the publisher has decided to maximise their revenue from the HN hug.

Shame.

At first, I only saw one ad when I went there (just now). I forgot I had my adblocker on. Then, I tried to load the page again and saw "Haaretz.com is now inaccessible to visitors using ad blockers"

Wow, someone is actively working to squeeze the incoming traffic.

Haaretz is pretty much the only remaining media outlet in Israel that continues to pursue actual journalism. To that end I support them endlessly.

However, they are also the only media outlet that has paywalls, and I'd be fine with that if it ended there - high quality investigative journalism has a price.

The problem is that they also have a shit ton of third-party malware networks embedded on their pages, and even if you pay for a digital subscription you still get tracked and bombarded with ads. Then to add further insult, they block ad-blockers.

The solution is two fold: the Hebrew EasyList [1] blocks the anti ad-block elements allowing you to continue to view Haaretz without ads and without blocking. Second, if you want to jump over the paywall, there's an addon for that [2].

[1] - https://github.com/easylist/EasyListHebrew

[2] - https://github.com/yuvadm/free-haaretz

Worked fine just now with 1Blocker.

Wow. When I tried copying some text from the page to google it, it immediately opened three tabs to some shady spam sites such as entertainment.com-update.today. I am running 1Blocker with Safari, but it didn't catch this.

They hijacked the back-button to redirect to a dating site :/

I recommend Brave browser; at least on mobile.

Using uMatrix and I see none of that.

I admit that I thought this was about beer. A very very fine beer that I have not yet had the pleasure of enjoying. Pliny the Younger is still quite a nice beer that I've had on multiple occasions from the tap, and is generally more available if you are at the right establishment on the right night.

I had the same expectation. That said, in the Bay Area, the hype for Pliny is greater than it should be. Personally, I find Blind Pug from Russian River as good or better.

I still need to visit the actual Russian River brewery

How do you know it's "very very fine" if you've never had it? Is that something like the emperor's very fine clothes?

https://www.beeradvocate.com/beer/profile/863/7971/

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