Tag: archaeology
-
Are We the Transmission?: The Archaeological Record Future Civilizations Will Discover
Introduction Four billion years of planetary history, the complete evolutionary record of life on Earth, from single-celled organisms to technological civilization. The geological transformations of a living world. The extinctions, the radiations, the slow accumulation of atmospheric oxygen. The emergence of language, art, and science. All of it will vanish without a trace, like tears…
-
SETI is Archaeology: Signal Science Across Spacetime
Dylan Foley – Archaeological SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) Philosophy of Archaeology Series Words:1823 Time to read:10 minutes We Know Exactly One Thing About SETI In the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, we face a lot of uncertainties. Although we can make educated guesses, we don’t know if life commonly emerges on other worlds. We don’t…
-
Universal Maintenance Design: Making Infrastructure R2-Accessible
How Designing for Robots Creates Better Systems for Everyone Part 3 of the R2 Astromech Project series In the previous posts, I explained why we need helper droids and traced how we lost the modular design philosophy that would have made them possible. Now I want to introduce a concept that could actually change how…
-
The Death of the Helper Droid: How Modular Design Philosophy Gave Way to Vendor Lock-in
A History of Lost Technologies and Changed Incentives Part 2 of the R2 Astromech Project series In the first post, I explained why I’m building an R2-D2 style helper droid—a universal translator for machines that can diagnose infrastructure, speak multiple protocols, and tell you what’s actually wrong in plain language. But that raises an obvious…
-
Teaching an Old Droid New Tricks: Why I’m Building an R2-D2 inspired ‘droid
Or: How Star Wars Reveals Everything Wrong With Modern Technology Part 1 of a series on astromech droids, universal design, and the technologies we’ve lost and/or failed to develop. I’m sitting in my workshop come sitting room with an NVIDIA Jetson Nano, (Update: now im using a Raspberry Pi) a tangle of cables, and an…
-
Beyond Typologies: Why Archaeology Needs a Signal Processing Revolution
First in a three-part series introducing a groundbreaking approach to archaeological data science The Hidden Patterns in Ancient Landscapes Imagine standing in a field in County Roscommon, looking at what appears to be just another Irish pasture crossed by modern fence lines. But beneath your feet and etched into the landscape around you lie the…
-
Why Sligo Needs a World Class Museum
The case for a world class museum in the town of Sligo, northwest Ireland.
-
Christian Minarets: Irish Round Towers and the Hidden History of Islamic Influence
Is there a link between Irish round towers and Islamic minarets?
-
The Curious Re-Emergence of an Ancient Irish Tuath
Indiana: Balloq’s medallion only had writing on one side? You sure about that? Sallah: Positive! Indiana: Balloq’s staff is too long. Indiana: Sallah: They’re digging in the wrong place! Raiders of the Lost Ark, (1981) County Sligo, and the old Borough Corporation of Sligo town are roughly 400 years old, and both are creations…