CosmOS Galaxy Network: Public Access

Official Tumblr of the Galactic Library Project of Titan. A @badoccultadvice science fiction spinoff by @da-at-ass.

[stonechild]

Beetle feeding galleries on wych elm trunk

Dutch Elm Disease Wiki

[intergalacticuniversity]

It's never too late to finish your time travel homework.

[changelingsandothernonsense]

A very special comb.

Considering the very recent announcement coming from Tel Lachish I thought I’d write a little about what this discovery means in terms of the history of writing in the Near East, and Canaan specifically.

In the 2016 June-July archaeological season an ivory comb was discovered and put into storage (standard practice, it takes years to go through finds). It was only re-examined recently, and an inscription was found, the inscription, a spell of protection against lice was possibly written circa 1700 BCE. The inscription reads “May this tusk root out the lice of the hair and the beard.” The teeth of the comb even had the remains of lice nymphs, this comb was used for the purpose given.

But that, whilst cool is not why we are so excited.

What makes this comb particularly special is what language this inscription was written in, and the proposed date.

The comb (if this date is correct) is the oldest example of the Proto-Sinaitic script, it is also the earliest full sentence of this writing system found in Israel. This writing system has so few examples that it is a running joke whenever the “Australians” join a dig that we will write the alphabet on a rock and joke about it being the greatest find ever. It was one of the jokes pulled by a friend of mine at this exact dig.

Now we seemingly not only have proof that this was more than a few letters and names that Canaanites were playing around with at the time, but we now have a solid example of Canaanites using their own alphabet in daily life during the Middle Bronze Age in Canaan proper, a time where the most prevalent script was Akkadian Cuneiform.

The timeline for Proto-Sinaitic script is not well established (very few examples of this script exist, and nothing from the early phases) but the consensus is that this script was invented by Canaanites in Egypt circa 1800 BCE. However, there are some doubts as to whether the script really arose in Egypt, or the Hyksos homeland. What we do know is this alphabet, the first in existence and the basis for our current writing system, was greatly influenced by Egyptian hieroglyphics. We only had a few words, and a few letters dating from this early period, the thought was that, because most of the substantial examples of the Proto-Sinaitic script date from the 13 century BCE onwards, that it was not really used prior to the early Iron Age, after the Akkadian Cuneiform writing system went into disuse due to the Bronze Age collapse. Anything before the 13th century BCE is either poor in quality or removed from its original context (makes dating the text harder). All pre 13th century BCE inscriptions were single letters or words.

Enter Tel Lachish and this ivory louse comb, Lachish was a major city state during the Second Millennium BCE and is where most of these Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions were found, if any writing dating earlier than the Iron Age exists, it’s at this site. The existence of this comb, found at the highest point of the site (where you typically find both public buildings and elite homes) tells us that firstly, Lachish was importing ivory from Egypt and making these combs in the same style as those found during the Second Intermediate Period (the comb is double sided as opposed to the more traditional Canaanite one sided comb), and that our scribe was not great at writing in a confined space. The letters are increasingly smaller and more squished as they go along. It also suggests that the wealthy were learning to write their own language in their own script, alongside Akkadian Cuneiform.

The comb being used for lice removal tells us that Canaanites were using their own language and their own writing system at home at least for ritual purposes, something we also see in Egyptian and Hittite cities, and its use may have been more commonplace than initially though. From what we know about our Iron Age examples, Proto-Sinaitic script was mostly written on perishable materials with ink (Lachish is moist as anything and the soil is incredibly fertile, not a great preserver of papyri or ink).

Why is this important? Akkadian Cuneiform was the major form of international writing during the Middle to Late Bronze Age and was used from Babylonia to Egypt, Canaan to Anatolia, and all the way to Iran. The Amarna Letters, a collection of correspondence between the pharaohs of the late 18th Dynasty and their Canaanite constituents were written in this international script, a script mostly written with a reed stylus on clay or carved into stone stele. The thought that Canaanites may have had two writing systems makes a lot of sense when you take this international correspondence into context, Egypt won’t write to Canaanite kings in hieroglyphs or hieratic script, Hittites won’t communicate using Luwian cuneiform of hieroglyphs, those are specifically liturgical languages.

What this find tells us if the 1700 BCE date is true (the layer it was found in has an Early Iron Age date, which complicates everything), is that Canaanites were using their own alphabet for ritual purposes at least 400 years earlier than what we initially thought.

[tenebrobscuro]

The first simulated image of a black hole was calculated with an IBM 7040 computer using 1960 punch cards and hand-plotted by French astrophysicist Jean-Pierre Luminet in 1978.

[str-ngeloop]

the romance of hand-plotting. this guy looked at the numbers and drew each of those dots manually, and the image emerged. we can only imagine how he felt

[obaewankenope]

had some random ass dream last night that i remember next to nothing from except this baller of a thing that professor brian cox who was in my dream apparently said about our nature and strength as human beings:

as humans we originate from the dust of stars — made of iron, gold, silver, carbon, silicon, platinum and more — forged into being through a hundred billion years of unrelenting pressure and the gravitational collapse of nebulae that existed long before us to become who we are now today: pinnacles of cosmic creation, how amazing is that?

and you know what professor brian cox? that is amazing, thank you for sharing this jupiter-sized piece of wisdom in my dream

[intergalacticuniversity]

Innate Time Travel

(From The Galactic Time Standards Manual, First Edition)

Innate time travel is what some call a "gift" as it is a psychic ability which activates itself instead of being activated consciously. People who experience innate time travel often report an intense period of time immersion followed by an interval of time in which no alterations occur. After this interval, the time immersion begins again and the individual re-experiences the interval of time again, but with alterations introduced in the second immersion.

Some Examples of Innate Time Travel

Juan wakes up every day at 4 AM and, in the period of five minutes, experiences a deeply immersive vision of what the next day will be like. After this experience he perceives time at a regular 1:1 speed over the course of 24 hours, during which he is allowed to act as he wishes. Because of the vision, he is able to act in anticipation of certain events. The vision is never brought on by a trigger or otherwise purposefully engaged with, instead it simply happens on its own. In Juan's, it happens on a regular schedule that he is able to anticipate.

For some people, it is as simple as Juan's experience, in which the next morning, a vision will come of the next day, and each day the same process will go as before. But for others it is more complicated. Let us examine Domingo's situation.

Domingo dreams every night of what will happen the next day. As soon as he wakes up, he tests to see what he can change and what he cannot. Sometimes he does something a little rash like steal a donut or kick over a trashcan while no one's looking. Every now and then he tries out something just to see what will happen, like giving a random person a hi-five or shouting down the alleyway at midnight that he sees Bigfoot and could someone please come help him fight off the big guy? Domingo is a bit of a prankster and the reason he is like this is that when he goes to sleep the night after doing those things, before his dream starts, he has the option to dream of the day before or the day to come. If he dreams of the day before, then when he wakes up, it is the day before. He has a new chance to start over and another try at whatever things he might have failed at. Domingo might seem like a bit of an impatient guy, kicking trashcans over like that. It turns out that is a result of re-living so many days so many times. He gets bored easily of a day he's lived three times already. This is why Domingo has never repeated a day enough times to win the lottery. He simply can't stand living the same day more than five times in a row.

Mercedes is a woman who knows exactly what she wants. When she dreams, she chooses what will happen, and when she wakes up, that is what will happen. This seems like an ability with no limit that might cause some problems, but Mercedes does not have much imagination, and she is a very laid-back person. She actually has a pretty boring job with an average salary and lives in a dull side of town, has a very lazy and predictable husband, and loves every moment of it. Mercedes has a very innate gift that cannot be taught or learned, and her subconscious uses it to keep her safe, secure, calm, and happy. Mercedes would likely never use her ability to make a big change or do something nefarious because those are not things she is predisposed to do in her life and they typically require the sort of planning the subconscious is not capable of doing.

Some people are able to repeat a day several times, or a week several times, or an hour several times. These abilities vary by person in how they manifest and exactly how they are controlled (or uncontrolled). For most people, there is a limit to the amount of repeats, and for the rest, fatigue tends to set in after too many. This results in many cases where people repeat time about 3-5 times before giving up on whatever it is they were trying so hard to do. Often there is no actual hard limit on the number of repeats one can do in time other than the limit of what your own self can go through.

Advice for Innate Time Travelers

Some people do not experience an immersion period and instead repeat an interval of time over and over until they no longer do so. These individuals are advised to speak with a hypnotist about setting up a regular "preview period" as shown in the examples. This greatly reduces the amount of "repeat fatigue" a time traveler goes through because it allows for most modifications to time to be done the first time around instead of the second.

Some innates do not experience repeats at regular intervals and instead experience them as necessary or at the behest of some trigger. For all innates experiencing repeats it is advised to complete your goal within three repeats. Do the first round dry or, if precog tells you that you are on round one of a repeat, go ahead and do exploratory work. Once the first round is done you should have knowledge of what you have to work with and what your greatest obstacles are. Before round two, also take some time to determine your end goal for this cycle.

On round two, make some changes to eliminate your obstacles and pursue your goal. Remember that you will have a round three to finalize these changes or explore additional possibilities, so use round two to gather information you couldn't get the first time around. Only repeat from round one what is necessary to succeed in round two. Do not give in to the temptation to make round two a throwaway period in which you do something silly that you know you can reset and forget in round three. This forces you to succeed at all goals in round three without any pre-work and could get you caught in a dangerous situation if you're not able to endure a repeat after a failure in the third round. If you're not able to repeat after any of these rounds, you simply have to accept the causality and live in it.

In round three, cross your t's and dot your i's. This is the part where you finalize decisions and find out any remaining information you didn't have before. A classic way to handle round three is to ask a person two different questions in rounds one and two that are designed for maximum information extraction, then in the third round, give that person a compliment so that they remember you fondly. Then you have their information (doubly!) and their future favor, all in a neat three rounds.

Using electronic assistance it is possible to re-run more than three times. Usually the first round is re-run once to gain twice as much initial information, and then the third round is allowed to run again if necessary to control a variable that went awry. This results in, sometimes, a total of five rounds. Career travelers taking this path are advised to buy private time travel health insurance to cover for all eventualities that may occur from repeat fatigue or causality anomalies.

[elbiotipo]

Also, this is a good time to hoard books like gold. (It always has been but now more than ever)

[awesomearchives]

The pat wisdom is: For books to survive, they must be left alone. For digital material to survive, it must be used and moved.

[marxalittle]

digital (and by this I mean born-digital, surrogates are essentially disposable and renewable as long as the original retains integrity) has got it knocked for access, but preservation (or even access maintenance, tbh, hell is other people’s data) is a series of nightmares

hardcopy/paper/microfilm is preservable as fuck and the techniques we’ve used for fifty to three thousand odd years still work, but the point-of-access is limited by the nature of material objects

anyway, remember the acronym: LOCKSS— Lots Of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe!

whatever it is, migrate it copy it save it in multiple formats keep an xml version of it convert it to plain text with a readme file save an odt version of it put it into a nonproprietary data type clone the repository bundle it bag.it zip it and save it on multiple computers around the world

[primarybufferpanel]

Scratch it into clay and fire it

[primarybufferpanel]

Then bury it at a nuclear waste site

[foolfortune]

[thecollectibles]

Signals by Artem Chebokha

[intergalacticuniversity]

The first library is the brain. The basic organization of the universe and where it is stored as one beholds it is overseen by the brain, and it learns how to do it as it goes along. This makes for meandering, spiraling libraries full of spontaneously acquired facts and gossip. The human brain is one of the more difficult private collections to sort through unguided, and so it is imperative that if you are undertaking any complex or long-term projects with the human brain's library, you take along an index.

The index is very basic, but can find just about anything as long as one understands how to interface with the device. The important thing to focus on is the information you want to find. The index will locate it quickly once you give specifics. If you ask it to solve a problem instead of look up information, the index cannot help you, as it is a lookup mechanism, not an AI.

For problem-solving assistance, seek the librarian on duty at the information desk of the nearest lobe.

[no-longer-another-bondi-blonde]

[70sscifiart]

1973 cover art by Fernando Fernandez for “The City and the Stars,” by Arthur C. Clarke

[fibula-rasa]

Little Nemo in Slumberland (1980)  — pilot

[imdb | letterboxd]

Director: Tsukioka Sadao

Studios: Telecom Animation Film & Tokyo Movie Shinsha (TMS)

[uesp]

If you’re going to light the brazier next to the bookcases, at the very least don’t leave it unattended.

[uesp]

“My name is Hagaer. I don’t get out much. Too many books to read. It’s terrible. I just can’t walk past a bookstore. The First Edition, in the Market District, is the worst.”

–Hagaer

[thevaultoftheatomicspaceage]

[readerupdated]

With warm 🎄 wishes I send you greetings from Polish librarians, who made these wonderful Christmas trees – from books, old computers, and… library catalog cards!

(via Bookish Christmas from Poland!)

[ebookfriendly]

Love the tree made of library catalog cards!