Pliny the Elder, “The Natural History”, Book I (79) | Hacker News Reader

Pliny the Elder, “The Natural History”, Book I (79)

perseus.tufts.edu

Some sections are truly fascinating. Personally, I always loved the chapter on asbestos (http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%...) because I was surprised to learn that they had figured out its uses by that time in history.

Serious question: is it still possible to get a hold of asbestos clothing and/or accessories (bags, napkin, etc.)? Also, how dangerous are these materials relative to the finer and more processed industrial counterparts?

AFAIU asbestos is technically a legal/commercial classification that encompasses a few different types of minerals. In the U.S. the EPA sees them all as carcinogenic enough that it stopped encouraging comparative health research between the various types.

For fabrics and such, you'd most likely be getting chrysotile, or white asbestos.

The main problem with all of these minerals is that they are highly friable, meaning that they flake off easily when handled, and these flakes are what cause asbestosis and mesothelioma. My (limited) understanding is that the particle size for "unprocessed" asbestos is still small enough to be carcinogenic. Hopefully, a pulmonologist can weigh in and give a better answer.

Anyway, I've seen numbers before that Russia, China, Brazil and several other countries still produce a lot of asbestos and related products. You could probably pick something up from those places, but most developed countries heavily regulate this stuff, so you'd likely have a hard time importing the stuff without some really good reasons.

If you're interested, the site asbestos.com has a lot of good overiews on the industrial, legal and medical history that you can dig into.

Stay safe :/

I'll just leave this here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_impact_of_asbestos

That article barely touches on the different types of asbestos or the relative dangers after different kinds of processing. It's not much of an answer to the question.

Serious question: why?

The people behind the Perseus project are singularly amazing. This project really enhances our ability to read and research these texts, and it has continually improved over time. Many people might not know that many of the great features like the vocabulary, navigation, and search tools are at least (from my experience) 13 years old. That's right: around the time the web development world was largely just putting on its "Web 2.0" hat, the remarkable people at Tufts already created this significant, dynamic web app that was easy to use, had deep tooling sophistication, hosted a large wealth of content, and enormously benefitted a generation of students and scholars.

I cannot get this to display the latin, although I select view by default original language and update preferences.

The single greatest web app I've ever seen. You can display the original text and click on every single word to see a grammatical parse (beside the translation). So many other web sites pale in comparison, despite having more colours.

The Tufts site is good, but I wanted a better mobile view. So I made PlinyPedia.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15668314

- Where is the original text?

- There is no “J” in Latin.

- Look in the toolbar where there's a back/"Browse" button, and also many links in the description text ("PlinyPedia is reformatted to be mobile-friendly", Search and Browse to find out even more".

How can I make that more obvious?

- No joke!

"there were originally eighteen letters"

https://peterburk.github.io/pliny/ChaptersHtml/7.%20Book%20V...

Was confused at first. I was reading this expecting a history of the beer.

Also came for beer history and was mildly disappointed.

You did learn who you beer was named after. He is a remarkable character.

The Perseus project at Tufts is wonderful.

I enjoy reading Wikipedia. Naturalis Historia is the world's earliest known encyclopaedia, and I think it's worth reading "lest we forget" the lessons from classical antiquity.

This got a lot of response! Therefore I made a mobile-friendly version of the site, PlinyPedia.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15668314

Is 79 the earliest year tag ever used in an HN headline?

I laughed at the fact that there's no year short syntax here.

This is what you get when you try to write down everything you have heard and can remember about the world, and about as accurate.

People had to start writing down stuff at some point.

What was your point? That one man without an army of collaborators can't make a really good encyclopaedia? Or was it that it is worthless to try?

My point was it was a stupid idea, and done really poorly, even by standards of the day. It was made worse by the fact that people respected him, so his errors perpetuated for nearly two millennia, rarely challenged because "the ancients" were seen to possess great wisdom.

Given that this was done poorly by the standards of the day, can you point to a superior contemporaneous text on the same subject of superior quality?

Περὶ ὕλης ἰατρικῆς, or "De Materia Medica", an early pharmacopoeia, composed over 20 years by a Roman army medic. Or another composed later, Περὶ φυτῶν ἱστορία, "Peri Phyton Historia", ten volumes just on plants, written as notes for lectures to students. Most texts written by philosophers of the day would also have included a lot more analysis.

Of course, Pliny referred to the first book and others in writing his Natural History, but it ended up as a sort of Dummy's Guide to Natural History, trying to compose a really wide subject matter into a few books over 2 years, and obviously getting a lot wrong in the process. It's fair to say nobody would have taken this seriously if not for his name.

I haven't read Pliny (though I've read that he had much lower epistemic standards than e.g. Aristotle), but here's a perhaps similar case: I have a volume from a "great classics" series with the surviving works of Archimedes, Apollonius, and Nicomachus -- three ancient "mathematicians". I put that word in quotes because though the first two fully merit it, the latter work is embarrassing stuff, hardly more than numerology. Nicomachus lived around Pliny's time, several centuries after the heyday of Greek/Hellenistic science.

This tangent's in response to all the downvotes for peterwwillis's opinion -- it seems reasonable to me, except maybe he should've said the standards of pre-Roman Greece.

> "the ancients" were seen to possess great wisdom

Correctly. The moderns are mostly fools with aspirin.

1) no, and these books clearly disprove that, 2) "The moderns" have the entire collected recorded wisdom of over 3,000 years of humanity in addition to highly evolved methods of scientific analysis and instant access to unlimited information, we're fucking superpowered geniuses now, and 3) to be foolish is to be human and we're just as human as we were a few millennia ago.

Article is about the dude and not the beer.

https://russianriverbrewing.com/pages/pliny-the-elder

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15664839

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