News

"Having many more right triangles for a unit length" would have an incredible benefit in constructing enormous triangly things.

Base 60 is based.

That's very interesting. Thank you for giving us your insight on this.

None, in modern context we can work in any base we desire, all that basic stuff got generalized ages ago. No one is going to change computing systems to use babylonian-style. And the trigonometry stuff is the same thing we knew, but discovered earlier than the greeks.

It's a important discovery for sure, especially for our understanding of ancient Mesopotamian cultures, but everything else is the authors and the article going bananas with conclusions.

Computers still run different algorithms internally, some of which are more prone to having undetected errors than others:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_FDIV_bug

So, I'm a writer, not a researcher, but I've found the more tools I have stuffed into my brain, the more likely it is that two different things clank against each other and create something interesting.

I don't think this is something unique to writing fiction--from my understanding of history, there's quite a few moments in science where two somewhat unrelated things bash against each other and spark a new idea.

Sure, computers can do things we already know how to do, but actual inventors/scientists/people making stuff still need to think up things first before you can computerize it.

It's possible that this WON'T do anything new in the realm of math, but it might create a string a researcher in a different domain--history, linguistics, whatever--can pull on to unravel something else. A diverse tool set leads to multiple ways to solve a given problem, and sometimes edge cases come up where one solution actually is better in some niche application because of something unique to the way it is shaped.

Not to mention that a lot of greek texts that survived only did so thanks to the Sassanids (Persians), since the newly christian Eastern Roman Empire (Byzantine) began purging all that stuff because "god is all the knowledge you need".

Later on, those texts found their way back into Europe through the then Arab conquered Spain

Not significantly better:

"which scientists claim are more accurate than any available today."
No they obviously do not. Yeah the fractions are easier in base 60, but they are not more accurate than just using rational numbers or radicals in any other base.

Actually it's from 2017: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/aug/24/mathematical-secrets-of-ancient-tablet-unlocked-after-nearly-a-century-of-study

Older even - 2017: https://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-just-solved-a-maths-problem-on-this-3-700-year-old-clay-tablet

The news articles seem a bit off though.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plimpton_322?wprov=sfla1

It might give you new respect for the Babylonians, and act as a corrective to the modern tendency to assume superiority. It might enhance your sense of how similar we all are and how connected, and your kinship with people who lived millennia before you. If little discoveries like this make us just a little more sensitive to the transience of even the most sophisticated societies, the kinship of all people and the sheer length of human history compared to the shortness of our individual lives, it might make us just a little more considerate and respectful in how we treat our world and our peers. The value of such discoveries is their cumulative influence on our understanding of ourselves and how we fit into the world. It makes us wiser.

Learning new stuff could be good for your brain. Sometimes you just gotta learn for the sake of learning!

If you'd read the article you might have an answer.

Well we knew that trig and angles and algebra existed long before the Greeks. Pythagoras took his theorems from Persia.

In terms of perfume together human history finds like this are pretty important though because it helps us fill in gaps in our knowledge

I think you meant 3706 years old.