Not a historian so I may be missing something, but how would one possibly differentiate between the origin being the Dead Sea or Jerusalem based on things like materials used? I mean, Jerusalem and the Dead Sea are less than 35km apart (according to google). Even thousands of years ago, it would have been a non-issue to transport materials or techniques between these two locations. I can't imagine that our knowledge of scroll-making at the time is so specific that we could possibly rule out a craftsman taking a camel from one location to another.
Agreed. An ancient document storage pit was found (in Iraq?) which was the records of a merchant over several generations. It included trading records from many surrounding settlements. From the time of Hammurabi.
Yeah the scale of trade always seems to surprise everyone. It's hard for me often to understand how folks draw the archaeological lines here.
Materials could have been traded and the scrolls written near the Dead Sea ... or even folks from the Dead Sea traveled to Jerusalem, used local materials and made some scrolls, and traveled back.
I think it's instructive to consider bronze. To make bronze you need copper, which is very common, and tin, which isn't. Tin was only mined in a small handful of locations around the world: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tin_sources_and_trade_in_ancie...
So from that, it's clear to see that extensive trading networks were necessary for these civilizations, not just for luxuries like exotic herbs and spices, but their basic industrial needs.
Well not exactly true; you can use Arsenic instead of Tin and there is evidence that they certainly did use it; I am not sure of the breakdown of ancient tin-Bronze vs arsenic Bronze in use. In any case your point still stands as we also know there was tin bronze in use and likely much of it may have come from the British isles.
More to the people producing it than using it. But metallurgy and mining must have been awfully dangerous industries to be in back then regardless of the arsenic.
Seems that lethal dose for arsenic is likely too high to be transmitted by even a pure arsenic trioxide blade, unless it was manufactured with the intent of leaving bits inside the wound, like maybe a blade a rough brittle surface to leave grit. Even so, would have to introduce ~50+mgs worth, which sees like a tall order.
Seems arsenic bronze is even less toxic, so probably not poisoning anyone. I wonder if the minor local toxicity of arsenic blade cuts would reduce the chance of the wound causing sepsis.
You basically have to look at the availability and cost of transport of the goods. Salt was abundant in the Dead Sea area so the need to import salt would have been pretty low.
As for the movement of writers, or the scrolls post creation, you'd look at where scripts were generated and where they sourced their materials. Just speculating, as I haven't read the background material on this new discovery, but it would make sense that the monasteries in Jerusalem would have a reproducible sourcing process since they would be generating manuscripts often. Same would go for monasteries around the Dead Sea.
Having been to both locations, I can easily say that they are extremely close (relatively speaking). People would walk MUCH longer distances than this at the time (ie Egypt to Bethlehem).
There was also war, famine, an extremely lack of safety services, and an entirely different world back then. Storing things that were sacred or considered extremely important would have been placed in a safe location regardless of the distance (35 miles back then is like 2 miles for us now).
I went on an archeological dig in the area in June (as a tourist) and can answer part of this. Part of the answer is writing materials; in Jerusalem a variety of different things were used to make the writing materials, whereas the Dead Sea region, used a specific type of charcoal that was significantly softer than the charcoal found in the Jerusalem region.
It's a good point, and the distinction is not one that most historians would deal with being more scientific in nature. However, in the long and heated debate about the scrolls' origins, scientific analysis of the scroll and jars has been offered.
The difference is, string theorists are trying. Everyone knows that it is a major problem that we cannot currently design experiments to falsify ST or other quantum gravity theories, and everyone is working towards it in the hope that one day we may. When it comes to interpretations of QM, there is not only nothing on the horizon, people don't even speak in these terms. No one is insisting on falsifiablity, and indeed every new interpretation seems completely hell-bent on just providing a "story" around the equations in a way that does not - and fundamentally cannot - make any predictions that contradict basic QM.
I can count on one hand the number of interpretations I can think of that make experimentally testable assertions, and for those I have plenty of respect[1]. But the majority of interpretations and their proponents seem to deliberately stay within the comfort zone of non-falsifiablity, writing paper after paper whose actual impact on either physics or philosophy can be summed up with "yeah well, that's just like, your opinion, man".
I did my MSC in physics under a professor who is a well-known proponent of MWI (though my master's thesis was not directly related to the subject). Two years of working side by side with him proved to me that the detractors of work on interpretations are, by and large, correct in their assertions about the proponents of them.
[1] There is this one theory whose name I cannot remember, where each particle in the universe gets their wavefunction multiplied by a delta function or very thin gaussian at random intervals, and whose sudden localization also causes a sort of chain reaction and localizes all particles it is entangled with. This theory is interesting because it helps set a (statistical) limit between microscopic and macroscopic interactions; basically, when you go past a certain number of entangled particles, everything will be well-localized virtually all of the time, but for small numbers of particles we'll see quantum phenomena. Unfortunately I recall this theory having too many holes, and perhaps it has already been falsified, but the point is that at least it made an effort to address inherent problems in QM (namely, wavefunction collapse) in a way that physicists actually should; by making testable claims.
Important nitpick: the equations that govern dynamics in quantum mechanics aren't random, and evolution is unitary. However, the process of "measurement" is described by a (obviously non-unitary) projection operator onto one state; the so called "collapse". If you, for example, attempt to answer the very real physical question "given two particles in with some total joined state Psi, one is measured and found to be in state Phi, what state is the other particle in?", you would have to use such an operator. There isn't anything interpretive about this, as such experiments have been done again and again. It's a standard part of the mathematical framework.
Now, whether the underlying physics is truly random, or whether it's deterministic and the projection only represents a sort of Bayesian update of prior information (a la MWI), that is indeed a matter of interpretation. And completely unfalsifiable by definition, and therefore not even really a question for physicists. It's philosophy at best.
Well, in the author's defense, they specifically stated that "Each assignment required a yes-no decision". I agree, though, that there really is no great lesson to be learned here since the real world doesn't work like that.
The technical bit about channel capacity was honestly more interesting. It's a neat result (that should be fairly obvious to anyone who's worked with probabilities) with a not-so-great example to illustrate it.
Agreed, "Yes/No" is in no way correlated with "50/50 chance".
Will I win the lottery? Yes/No. 50/50?
My favorite conflation is the "are we in a simulation?" argument. That's a yes/no also, and the ignorant conclusion is that its very likely we are. Without any statistics on the probability either way.
Also, Pascal's wager. The presented sides of the bet aren't equal, because on the one hand you have existence of a particular God, and on the other hand its non-existence, whereas in the real world, there's a whole space of possible Gods that people believe in that are not included in the wager.
Ah, yes, surely this man killed and raped little girls because he was influenced by cartoons, and not because he was born with a deformity into one of the most collectivist societies on earth and then ostracized for his entire life. We're so lucky that sexually normative people never rape or kill anyone.
Sarcasm aside, this is one of the many, many examples of choosing a scapegoat to frame an entire sexuality, race, or any group of people with a common interest as evil while completely ignoring any and all context. People are not animals and possess some degree of responsibility and the ability to tell reality from fiction. Unless someone presents some hard evidence that stylized drawings lead to actual attacks against real children (and to my knowledge, this simply is not true; in fact, it's easy to argue the opposite) we need to stop with this puritan outrage like we stopped blaming computer games for any and all violent crime back in the late 90s.
Yes, it's a textbook example of moral panic and the WP article says so. I was primarily pointing out that to most people, especially in Japan, the image of "nerds fawning over stylized drawings" sounds about as innocuous as "Catholic priests fawning over little choir boys".
I don't think that's accurate to say, really. There's definitely some shows with gay undertones, but the vast majority of their post-2010 catalogue has either no romance or heterosexual romance (Hyouka, Chuunibyou, Tamako Market, Amaburi, Koe no Katachi, the Hibike film, Kyoukai no Kanata, VEG, and so on). Slice-of-life is pretty accurate, though.
I don't think it's fair to say that they've changed drastically, either. VEG and their Key adaptations such as Clannad are really not so different in spirit, nor is something like Kobayashi's Dragon Maid really all that different from Lucky Star (which was SoL with heavy gay undertones all the way back in 2007).
The shows that got them famous have implied homosexuality. They also made other stuff, but Hyouka isn't exactly the first thing people think of when talking about KyoAni. Also, Hibike definitely falls into the implied homosexuality category. I've got a friend who only watches it for this reason.
It's true that you can trace their change further back, but at least they did Haruhi until 2010. Since then they completely divorced with their previous fanbase, though. The people liking FMP and Haruhi, who gave them traction in their early years and who were disappointed by KyoAni favoring other types of anime, instead.
I haven't watched Hibike, but to my understanding the tv series has a lot of implied homosexuality while the movie is straightforward heterosexual romance. I also disagree that the shows that got them famous are the ones with homosexuality. They were already plenty famous after Clannad and Haruhi, and Koe no Katachi is at least as high-profile as Free or Maid Dragon. Let's agree to disagree on this one.
Anime fans don't have that long of a memory, because most anime fans drop out of the fandom after three to five years. So while I agree that they were famous for those shows back in those days, it's also a reality that the current generation of fans most likely doesn't even know something like Clannad exists. KyoAni is currently famous for slice-of-life shows with implied homosexuality.
It's still true. Japanese animators are paid by the pennies and work ridiculous hours. Since they're often paid on a per-frame basis rather than hourly pay, sometimes it adds up to less than minimum hourly wage. KyoAni was actually one of the few who were known to pay reasonably well, and they also had sort of dormitories slash training facilities for their animators. As for computers, generally speaking the frames are still drawn on paper and scanned, and then colored digitally.
Indeed. And Kyoto Animation (a.k.a. KyoAni) is widely regarded as one of the best, if not the best, studios in terms of working conditions and pay, long-term hiring with training on the job, etc. It is usually held up as a model of what the anime industry could be, and not what it tends to be.
It frustrates me that the industry have to rely on fans / foreign distributors / bootleg to get an audience out of Japan. Leaves so much money on the table.
I would be more than happy to pay Eiichiro Oda and his team for an english .pdf of the latest One Piece delivered to my inbox the second it comes out.
There's not a ton of money in the Anime industry. Especially over-seas, since translation is a very labor intensive and largely manual process.
There's also not a guaranteed audience for an anime. They have to rely on fans of the existing works (typically light novels) to view the (often drastically different) animes. I've seen a few of my favorite series get dropped due to being too niche.
> Especially over-seas, since translation is a very labor intensive and largely manual process.
Subbed translations at least previously were not usually very labor intensive if you didn't try to do heavy localization or typesetting everything (I remember someone translating every single book name in some bookcase). Fansubs managed to do pretty good job with just about 1MD worth of effort per episode (~20x length of the episode, extremely small amount compared to work required to actually produce the original episode). Old fansubs did need quite a bit more, but improved processes, tools & computers (just encoding & uploading used to pretty slow step) also improved the overall speed. No clue what how much CR & co need these days.
Of course, dubbing is very different case, but that's usually only done for DVD/Blu-ray releases. No clue if it's really worth to do it though, but my viewpoint is probably too biased.
That’s a fair point on the subtitling. I do know that translations for Japanese dialog can differ in difficulty - there are some more esoteric writing/speaking dialects which can take a significant amount of effort to turn into English dialog (for example, “The Irregular in Magic High School” novels have very poor official translations, largely due to how it was written in Japanese).
As for dubbing, there are instances where animes are “simultaneous dubbed” for international release. A recent example is Shield Hero.
> There's not a ton of money in the Anime industry. Especially over-seas ... There's also not a guaranteed audience for an anime.
How even did you arrive at that deduction?
There's a ton of untapped market potential in anime and manga, especially overseas. Japanese pop culture is probably second in worldwide popularity after America's.
And it's even more impressive in how most of its foreign popularity comes from unofficial, non-profiting fan efforts.
2-3 decades ago it was a relatively small handful of fans who contributed their time and effort for free, and worked against legal prohibitions, to provide anime fansubs and manga scanlations throughout the 1990s and 2000s, until the anime fandom grew to the millions today, with adaptations, inspirations (Matrix, Kill Bill etc.), cosplayers, conventions, and even pornstars jumping in.
This is a unique case where an industry was practically established by piracy!
Many of those fans still rely on unofficial translations, reviews and torrents to get their fix, and many of us would gladly part with our money for official translations of the same quality as fansubs (including cultural notes etc.)
Sadly, none of the suits who could capitalize on this seem to be able to see the larger picture. There are still tons of anime, manga and video games with lots of worldwide fans but they've never been officially ported outside Japan.
> There's a ton of untapped market potential in anime and manga, especially overseas.
That's just wishful thinking. There are decades of effort tapping into that potential with mildly success.
> And it's even more impressive in how most of its foreign popularity comes from unofficial, non-profiting fan efforts.
Which likely is a major reason why it is so popular. It's cheap for the consumer, the kids.
Which is another problem, as anime is mostly for kids, not adults.
> and many of us would gladly part with our money for official translations of the same quality as fansubs (including cultural notes etc.)
Not enough. Market-localisation is too expensive to justify the risk of pampering a handful fans.
The whole japanese Pop-culture is divided in a very small number of big franchises, which make the gross of the money, and a very big number of very niche-productions which hardly make enough money to even survive. The big franchises can take the risk of going overseas, and they do that for a long time now. But the small companys don't have the money, often not even the knowledge for it.
On the other side, even with the niche-produtions we now have a rather good situation today. We now have many semi-official english localisations in timly manner for anime and games. It's just not the whole market, and not for the whole world, and manga is still very much a dead fish. But that's simply beacuse it's a different market.
> Sadly, none of the suits who could capitalize on this seem to be able to see the larger picture.
You also only see the fraction of the big picture which you are part in, not the complete big picture.
>Which likely is a major reason why it is so popular. It's cheap for the consumer, the kids. Which is another problem, as anime is mostly for kids, not adults.
This is patently false. There are lots and lots anime for adults and there are so many adult fans nowadays. To be honest this statement alone would probably disqualify you from giving any opinion worth considering in this discussion.
Can you please edit personal swipes out of your posts here? This comment would be fine without the last sentence. Actually it probably doesn't need the first one either.
Seems a weird argument to be making. You can't even pay them directly to get the Japanese version, you need a Shonen Jump subscription, but you want them to offer it for English speakers?
Relying on foreign distributors, especially when you need to translate, seems to make perfect sense to me. Should Oda provide translations into English, French, German, Korean, Chinese, and Vietnamese? All of those are part of the "audience outside of Japan".
Of those 1.5 Billion, how many speak it well enough to prefer to watch anime in it? I "speak" Spanish but I would never watch anime in Spanish because the cost of trying to comprehend translated Spanish is already too high for me to do it for casual entertainment.
Animation is still done on paper mostly for artistic reasons, not because they can't afford tablets. Drawing on paper and drawing digitally are different processes and skill sets. Same for manga. There are actually a lot of mangaka who work digitally these days, but it's less common in anime production.
That said, I don't understand how that has anything to do with foreign distribution, to be honest.
Because not that many people outside of Japan are that interested in it. Similarly, there aren't that many people outside of India who are interested in Bollywood movies, so you don't see them played in cinemas except in places where there's a lot of Indian expats/immigrants. Art is highly cultural, so there's usually not that much of a market for it outside its culture of origin.
Anime/manga does do pretty well outside of Japan, compared to the cultural output of so many other nations (how many Czech movies have you watched lately?), but it'll as popular as you seem to wish it would be.
One Piece is not a great example because you can read it online at Viz[1], and the latest three issues appear to be free to read. According to Wikipedia[2], the latest chapter out in Japan is 948, which is available on Viz's website.
I don't know about in-depth, but a cursory google search brings up plenty of results regarding animator wages[1,2]. If you want to know more about how the industry operates, not so much salaries but how production works, working conditions, who's responsible for what, etc, then I highly recommend that you watch the anime Shirobako. It's an anime about anime production, and it's both very informative and simply very good in terms of storytelling, humor, etc.
It's accurate and not really vague at all, it's just not highschool level physics. I'll try to explain it in layman terms.
Imagine that you have a bunch of free particles that are not connected to each other in any way, and are far enough from each other that any interaction between them (such as electromagnetic fields) is negligible. Ignoring their own masses, the energy of the system is zero. Now imagine these same particles, bound together into a single atom.
Obviously, for the atom to be stable, you don't want it to be able to fall apart on a whim. You want a system where you have to input a lot of energy for the atom to fall apart. But as we just said, the state where the constituent particles are separate is the default, zero-energy state.
Therefore, a stable state where you have to add energy to reach the default free state must actually have negative energy! To be specific, the binding energy is negative while the energy related to the mass of the particles, i.e. e=mc2, is positive. The atom is actually lighter than the sum of its parts!
An atom that doesn't have negative binding energy, i.e. has "excess energy", has nothing binding the constituent particles together, since they have more than enough energy to go run free on their own. Therefore it is unstable.
Elements with a small enough binding energy, small enough that random fluctuations can overcome it and make the atoms fall apart, are what we call radioactive elements.
