Italy’s famous dome is cracking, and muon imaging may help
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
That's just slightly patronizing to say about a man who came up with various inventions and innovations in his time—including the first linear perspective method, among other things.
My family didn't want to go in and I had to hurry as they waited outside, but I think people here would appreciate it a lot.
Fun fact about Ghiberti and the doors he made: he won a contest in 1401 to create the first set of the doors. The runner-up? Brunelleschi.
At the same time, weather in August is better than July and June on average — you usually get some storms and thus some relief from hot. But yes, it’s still hottish but that’s Italy.
It’s true that the best seasons would be Spring and Fall. But you get many many more tourists, longer queues, and much higher prices for hotels. So YMMV.
You can see the iron bars and muon images here, pdf, pages 11 and 13 https://arxiv.org/pdf/1601.01291.pdf
"Don't worry, the code itself is the documentation." - Brunelleschi, probably
"Great Cathedral Mystery" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_kCZeN6d1cA
edit: Heh, looks like this has touched a nerve with some subset of the readership, which means that I have done my duty.
It's especially important not to this when the topic is a subtler one, because those can so easily get trampled.
This sentence makes me so angry. If you’re going to come up with a great new way of doing something then the worst thing you could do is to keep it a secret so it’s impossible to figure out how it works and it ends up forgotten.
It's the case for lots of inventions, the ones which are not documented end up forgotten. I could add as an example the Russian Olivier Salad (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olivier_salad), where the modern recipe only comes from a sous-chef of the original restaurant which sort-of reverse-engineered the recipe, because the recipe was totally secret. We still are not sure that recipe is exactly the same as the original one.
There's this great Atlas Obscura article + HN discussion from a few months ago:
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/secret-family-recipes-... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16534495
(... reaches into pantry for box of Hamburger Helper ...)
Not for you, generally. This is why we have to build systems and societies that reward people for sharing their innovations.
Also, source code != documentation (unless you're very lazy.)
If we could disassemble it perhaps. But destroying priceless and unique historical monuments just to find out how they were put together is frowned upon for some reason.
I'm not an expert in the area though, this may be an overly-simplistic interpretation.
Rivals refers to people competing against him in a competition to build the dome. For him to win and get to build his design it was important for him to both prove it could be built and not allow other builders to also solve the design challenge.
I assume for him getting to build the dome was more important than his design ideas being forgotten.
It's nice to be indispensable though.
At the beginning, patents were very similar to FLOSS.
Before patents, blueprints were kept secret, mechanical design was sometimes unnecessarily complex as a form of obfuscation and if someone was able to reverse engineer a product they could copy it without giving attribution.
After patents, blueprints were publicly accessible for a reasonable fee, obfuscation was less common, attribution was given and both derivative and new designs were patented as well and therefore accessible. (Sounds like GPL?)
Patents would expire in an amount of time that, at the time, was deemed reasonable. This increased competition, knowledge sharing and helped innovation.
Today's patents (especially software ones) and copyright have the opposite effect due to high costs, legal risk, absurdly long expiration times and the ability to patent obvious or old ideas.
This is neither the first nor the second famous dome in Italy that came to mind.
Plus the original title in the URL specifically calls it "Brunelleschi's dome", which even if you don't know/remember Brunelleschi, does rule out the Pantheon just from the name.