Hacker News Reader

Comment by logikblok | Hacker News Reader

Additionally from the article > Semi-precious gems, which had probably fallen out of rings after the bathhouse steam loosen their glue settings, were recovered from drains at the site

To think about the frustration the original owner might have felt when those were lost and now they're found all these years later for us to study and learn from.

View on HN

What amazes me is the idea that at some point, a human being took their last look at the artwork of their gemstone jewellry, and then .. some thousands of years later, here we are gazing into the same nooks and crannies in wonder at the skills of the artist. One wonders, will some AI archeologist in the future, be digging through a cacaphonic digital noise, find some long-forgotten iCloud backup, and wonder at the collection of garden pictures I've left behind ..

It used to be standard practice, at the end of a year, to cut all the ads out of that year's issues and bind them in a single hardback volume.

Now historians realize that often the ads may be more interesting than the articles.

Sorry, standard practice by whom, and issues of what?

I think the other reply is referring to folks who collect and sell old magazines. I can only speak from second-hand experience, though, as I knew a person who used to do this. When eBay was just getting started, she was collecting old magazines and trimming the ads from them, then selling them as a lower bulk collection (she also took jeans with holes in them, patched them with colorful fabric and resold them on early eBay but different story).

I don't know why this was a thing, but I remember her telling me she got the idea from a local library that preserved its periodicals, so maybe it started at libraries. Personally, were I to collect magazines, I would want the ads intact. Not because I love adverts (quite the opposite, actually), but my collector brain's notion of preserving a thing in its original state is at odds with the idea of removing the ads.

In libraries we don't get the ads cut out. But yeah most of the physical periodicals will be bound in yearly volumes. Much easier to deal with. It's disappearing now though, with most periodicals only being published digitally.

I assume he means things like the Strand Magazine, that Sherlock Holmes was first published in, it's not unusual to find copies bound into hardback books like that.

I remember reading Scientific American magazines in my local library in the third world as a kid.

I was blown away by the ads.

From useless gadgets that will probably be fun for an hour or two only to very expensive ones aimed at people with clearly a ton of disposable income.

Lawnmowers you can ride on?! A thing just to detect rings in the sand? How rich are these people? A watch that sets itself to an atomic clock? An astronaut pen that writes underwater? Telescopes in your back yard?!

The sheer volume and variety of ads told me that the economy of that place was in a totally different league from my own.

I have the same feeling on my twitter feed.

Definitely the case with my old comics.

I can get the comics on Kindle. But the ads for Arachnophobia are priceless.

I wonder what kind of entity will find my lost necklace 2000 years from now and what would it think about me.

It's such a shame we can re-live the past through history but there is no way we can see the future.

It makes me think like in every moment of our lives we're on the tip of the ice berg of humanity.

And we still end up being history anyway.

"...and lo, it was a neck-trinket used to bind people to a specific suitor, here cast aside intentionally as an act of defiance, a liberation of sorts, to free oneself from the chains of monogamy..."

> the chains of monogamy

That's some serious pro Las Vegas marriage propaganda.

What will they think then they find the laser powered orifice plug?

When in doubt, any archeological find is thought to be a religious item used in various ceremonial practices

There's a meme, about archeologists in the future, finding still-viable Twinkies.

Then, we have Tallahassee, from Zombieland:

> There's a box of Twinkies in that grocery store. Not just any box of Twinkies, the last box of Twinkies that anyone will enjoy in the whole universe. Believe it or not, Twinkies have an expiration date. Some day very soon, Life's little Twinkie gauge is gonna go... empty.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com