Rock Sniffer's Scribbles

First find versus first occurence..

I was watching some thing on YouTube, about the "mysterious" "perforated batons" found across Eurasia for 50,000-odd years. Conventional theory has that they're tools for making some sort of rope - maybe plant-stem cordage, rather than sinew ... maybe also good for preparing sinew. No huge mystery there. But why are most 1- or 2 hole, but a few 3- or even 4-hole batons? Clearly not totally solved, but the "rope preparation/ handling tool" is pretty strong.

But I came up with this little rant, which is more generally applicable, and I think it's worth keeping a copy of. (YT comments use the USENET convention of *bold*, [hyphen]strikethrough[hyphen] or _italic_ AFAIK. I really ought to check up on their formatting rules.)

@YouTubeCommentator5527 "As it turns out they were invented 72.000 - 60.000 years ago"

They were invented before 72-60 kyr BP ; the oldest successfully dated finds are dated to 72-60 kyr BP.

In general, finding a technological artefact means you've found a widespread, popular, well-developed technology. The first several thousand years of a Palaeolithic "Leonardo of Ug", slaving away trying to get his "throw sticks at mammoth, but harder" device to work properly probably resulted in 1 small pile of broken prototypes outside a single ivory tower [mammoth ivory? it was used as a boulding material] at "Ug". But 10 years after he got it working, every single "Ug[X], of Ug" would have had one. A year later, their neighbours the Uggs of Ugli wanted ones, with "go-faster" stripes. Then Marketing came up with a "better" name (an atlatl - really?) ... and soon everyone on the continent had one. Including the inevitable ones that get lost.

The odds of finding those prototypes are far worse than finding the effective, widespread production model. Where is Benz's first "automobile"? One copy, in one single museum. Where are the Model-T Fords? In every second ditch, and abandoned barn ; broken by the side of innumerable roads. Everywhere.

I like that rant. I'm going to save it for re-use! Polish it a bit. If he weren't ded, yet, I'd apologise to Pterry for mis-(?)appropriating Leonardo of Quirm's Palaeolithic ancestor for a starring rôle.

From the same video, but quoting someone un-named : "the easiest way to be wrong about our ancestors is to underestimate them." Very true. Grahaam Hancock and the "Ancient Aliens" people don't dare think that, becaasue it would harm their sales.

YouTube Comment Formatting markup

Inevitably, there's a video. 25MB to download (plus adverts if you don't block them) to express what takes less than a line of text (all above - there is no more). Sheesh. It's also one of those incredibly annoying American drawls where you need to connect your phone to the defibrilator to get wake-up calls for a new byte of information. That is modern communications?

OK, I needed to edit that for clarity. The USENET encoding was of the form :

[tag] [no whitespace] emphasised text [no whitespace] [tag]

… and that seems to be what YT expects too. Reasonable enough - no need for wheel re-invention here. Somebody will probably try redesigning it to use picking from several thousand near-identical emojis, becauuse that is somehow "easier" than using a keyboard. [Shrug]

Now I need to focus on that Venus article.
Back to top.

Labels: 2024, Archaeology, formatting, May

# posted by A. Karley FGS, BSc : June 26, 2024  0 Comments

2023-04 - Ah-ha! (I'd probably worked this out previously, but I haven't been here for a year or so.) The badly-formed bits of table get dumped first as un-formatted text, then the table. I need to force the table wider, and accept sideways scrolling. Does table {width: 200% ; } work? Yes, considerable improvement.]Update the data rows structure too.Done. Publication/ updating date fixed too. There's some unresolved xGML entities in there, but that's minor.

Years ago, when I first started carrying a mobile computer (a Psion 5, still unmatched for convenience, working for several months on a pair of AA cells), I started to keep a database of "bons mots" which I called "Who Said What", because I was fed up of thinking "I recognise that saying, phrase, aphorism or whatever it is, but where did I hear it previously?"

Sadly,that machine has gone the way of the dodo (the screens were always the weak point), and I never did get the emulator to work well enough to get the database out of my backups. So, try again.

I found an old backup, far from up to date (only 280 rows), but the fields I have are : (a nickname) ; author surname ; given name ; publication reference ; date ; the quote itself ; my notes, and whether it is complete. 

Changed theme is allowing more room for the data.

Could I do this as a separate blog, with one entry per entry and a template? I can't get internal linking to work in tr, th or td elements, not even by putting them inside a DIV element.

A little more work done. And my bottle is empty. Maybe a separate blog. But really, this screams to be a database (and one of my remaining reasons to re-implement an Psion emulator to recover from the backups. Which I did test.) so, would that be a GoogleDocs document now? A little more progress. Each time I feel a need to add something, I do a few more rows. It'll get there, or I'll run out first. Meh.

2024, and I'm adding a little bit, including how to link to my other "Penrose" pages. I also want to update the table style, to "fix" the header in the viewing window.

The next problem is how to make the table sortable, in runtime. But that probably means making it a database.

My initial approach is from https://www.w3docs.com/snippets/html/how-to-create-a-table-with-a-fixed-header-and-scrollable-body.html, where the table elements (THEAD, TBODY and TFOOT) are given HEIGHT and WIDTH CSS properties and FIXED and BLOCK properties appropriately ; the BLOCK then generates scrollbars. Then a little adjusting to balance everything nicely.

So ... THEAD and TFOOT should be fixed in position while TBODY is a block with scroll bars. Which they are, now.

This is a specific fix for this page, not something I'll use generally. Well, maybe the THEAD and TFOOT stuff.

Well, it's loading. A big table, and it's taking it's time to render. Sizes look like they need adjustment.
Yes, lots of adjustment. Start off with the widths. At least the headers and TBODY columns are aligning. Add a TFOOT too.

Yes, that is working for the footer. Horrible styling, for now. Overall width? Scrolling? Eventually looks like I'll have to wrap it in the DIV option.

The columns are picking up a fixed width from somewhere. And while the table is reaching version 1 (1000px) , it's not got a horizontal scroll, and it's over-spreading the blog column.

Why don't the THEAD and TBODY elements get the same border styles? Is that amenable to the "item inspector" in the debugger?

S A T O R 
 A R E P O 
  T E N E T 
   O P E R A 
    R O T A S

Labels: 2023, 2024, Psion, WhoSaidWhat

# posted by A. Karley FGS, BSc : June 26, 2024  0 Comments