The Hindu Business Line : Carving information from data-cubes of parchments

In October 1998, ‘an extremely ugly’ book sold for $2 million at Christie’s New York. The item had the appearance of a ‘battered prayer book of a medieval priest, charred by fire, doused with water and devoured by mould.’

Underneath the prayers was a rare work: “Barely visible below the stains and the soot, lay hidden the oldest surviving manuscript of the ancient world’s greatest mathematician, Archimedes of Syracuse.”

The Archimedes Codex by Reviel Netz and William Noel ( www.landmarkonthenet.com), is a real-life tale of how modern imaging techniques could bring to light the contents of the palimpsest, w hich had survived almost a millennium.

For starters, palimpsest is from the Greek palimpsestos, meaning ‘scraped again,’ explains ODLIS (Online Dictionary for Library and Information Science). Palimpsest is “a manuscript written on papyrus, parchment, or vellum on which earlier writings, only partially or imperfectly erased, are still faintly visible.” The parchments were typically reused because writing material was ‘expensive to produce and usually in short supply.’

We use cameras rather than eyes to read the palimpsest, say the authors. “Unlike the human eye, modern cameras are sensitive to light outside the visible spectrum, and thus can ‘see’ information to which your eye is ‘blind’.” An example cited in the book is of how a team at Brigham Young University could achieve extraordinary results by “imaging the carbonised rolls of a library that was buried in Herculaneum under the volcanic ash of Vesuvius in the early afternoon of Tuesday, 24 August AD 79.”

A great advantage of digital technology, according to the authors, is that it is possible to combine the numbers from images in different ways. “You can instruct the computer to adjust the numerical values in the image — to suppress numbers that are too high or too low, and to amplify small differences if you decide that they are important. This is how computers get rid of red-eye due to the flash in your family photos.”

Another advantage of digital technology is that you can overlay one set of numbers with another. For example, “You can combine an image taken at one wavelength of light with an image taken at another one to make some feature in that scene more visible.”

Working thus, if you stack up images in the order of wavelength, what you could get is a data-cube of digital information. More like a hologram? No, imagine the cube rather as “a sea of numbers containing patterns — or curves — that reflect the characteristics of the area imaged,” suggest the authors.

“By writing computer algorithms, scientists can carve the data-cube to manipulate the values of the numbers, accentuate certain curves and extract the information they want. Much more information can be extracted from a digital data-cube created using narrow bands of light than can be retrieved from the palimpsest under any single lighting condition…”

Enthralling work.

Shots in the dark

Isaac Asimov had made many predictions under the cloak of science fiction.

Futurism is often called the second oldest profession, writes Oona Strathern in A Brief History of the Future ( www.constablerobinson.com). The early astronomers were the first to think scientifically about the future, and over the millennia the field of futurism has attracted a range of personalities. “The methods of looking at the future have ranged from the use of drugged virgins to more conventional, systematic employment of computers and simple common sense.”

Credit for the word ‘futurology’ goes to Ossip Flechtheim, who used to argue in the early 1940s that the universities should teach a real science of the future. There used to be many ‘pearls of prediction’ in the 1950s, one learns.

Such as, that by the year 2000 “people will wear weather-conditioning belts and lightweight or glass clothing all year round…the classroom of tomorrow will find children napping while learning subjects far more advanced than today’s by means of the dormiphone, which pipes in knowledge to their subconscious.” And that, by 1960 “industry will be experimenting with automatic factories in which men push buttons and watch instrument dials while machines do the rest.”

Strathern talks about another ‘futurist’, John von Neumann, who had assembled a large prototype computer in the boiler room, at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. “It was his early version of one of the first computers known as MANIAC (Mathematical Analyser, Numerator, Integrator, and Calculator).”

It seems von Neumann had predicted that computer technology would lead to the development of a theoretical brain: “A self-replicating programme would enable computers to ‘evolve’ and reproduce themselves, correcting mistakes of their previous generation, and eventually becoming more intelligent than simple analogue humans.” Legend has it that the scientist had once advised the US government “that the country would need exactly 18 computers in the future.”

Isaac Asimov, renowned for the three laws of robotics, had made many predictions under the cloak of science fiction. “In 1964 he said that one day people would realise the full extent of the dangers of passive smoking. He also accurately predicted the appearance and functions of the pocket calculator.”

In a chapter titled ‘surprise-free futures,’ you would read about Herman Kahn who made some ‘jolly predictions’ interspersed with the potential doom and destruction scenarios he notoriously painted in the early 1960s. He spoke of computers with “multimillion word memories, fractional microsecond multiplication times, self-programming capabilities… and able to read and write books.”

Do you know that Arthur Clarke had written in 1945 an article on ‘extra-terrestrial relays’ and wondered if rocket stations could give worldwide radio coverage? “In it he predicted – and proposed – the idea of communication satellites in geosynchronous orbit above the earth that would be able to send radio and television signals over the entire surface of the planet.”

Strathern writes: “Clarke received the grand sum of £15 for his 1945 article, and was still joking on the sixtieth anniversary of its publication that he really should have patented the idea.”

A ‘fast forward’ to the future.

Tailpiece

“Many of our problems got resolved when the systems guy…”

“Set right your machine?”

“Yes. And, in the process, we got a bonus: he inadvertently wiped off all the archived data of the dreaded accountant!”

dmurali@thehindu.co.in