At long last, the NFL Draft finally has gotten underway from the city of Detroit. The first round is officially in the books, and each of the 32 selections bring a renewed sense of hope to the franchises that made those picks. But plenty of work remains. Rounds 2 and 3 take place Friday night, and then Saturday features Rounds 4 through 7. It’ll take some time to see how these picks pan out, but that won’t stop us from reacting and analyzing. We’re taking a look at the winners and losers of the first round. Quarterbacks — Quarterbacks flew off the board Thursday night with six of them...

Enlarge / Imaging setup for a charred ancient papyrus recovered from the ruins of Herculaneum; 30 percent of the text has now been deciphered. (credit: CNR – Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche)

Historical accounts vary about how the Greek philosopher Plato died: in bed while listening to a young woman playing the flute; at a wedding feast; or peacefully in his sleep. But the few surviving texts from that period indicate that the philosopher was buried somewhere in the garden of the Academy he founded in Athens. The garden was quite large, but archaeologists have now deciphered a charred ancient papyrus scroll recovered from the ruins of Herculaneum, indicating a more precise burial location: in a private area near a sacred shrine to the Muses, according to Constanza Millani, director of the Institute of Heritage Science at Italy's National Research Council.

As previously reported, the ancient Roman resort town Pompeii wasn't the only city destroyed in the catastrophic 79 AD eruption of Mount Vesuvius. Several other cities in the area, including the wealthy enclave of Herculaneum, were fried by clouds of hot gas called pyroclastic pulses and flows. But still, some remnants of Roman wealth survived. One palatial residence in Herculaneum—believed to have once belonged to a man named Piso—contained hundreds of priceless written scrolls made from papyrus, singed into carbon by volcanic gas.

The scrolls stayed buried under volcanic mud until they were excavated in the 1700s from a single room that archaeologists believe held the personal working library of an Epicurean philosopher named Philodemus. There may be even more scrolls still buried on the as-yet-unexcavated lower floors of the villa. The few opened fragments helped scholars identify various Greek philosophical texts, including On Nature by Epicurus and several by Philodemus himself, as well as a handful of Latin works. But the more than 600 rolled-up scrolls were so fragile that it was long believed they would never be readable, since even touching them could cause them to crumble.

Scientists have brought all manner of cutting-edge tools to bear on deciphering badly damaged ancient texts like the Herculaneum scrolls. For instance, in 2019, German scientists used a combination of physics techniques (synchrotron radiation, infrared spectroscopy, and X-ray fluorescence) to virtually "unfold" an ancient Egyptian papyrus.

Brent Searles' lab at the University of Kentucky has been working on deciphering the Herculaneum scrolls for many years. He employs a different method of "virtually unrolling" damaged scrolls, using digital scanning with micro-computed tomography—a noninvasive technique often used for cancer imaging—with segmentation to digitally create pages, augmented with texturing and flattening techniques. Then they developed software (Volume Cartography) to virtually unroll the scroll.

The older Herculaneum scrolls were written with carbon-based ink (charcoal and water), so one would not get the same fluorescing in the CT scans, but the scans can still capture minute textural differences indicating those areas of papyrus that contained ink compared to the blank areas, and it's possible to train an artificial neural network to do just that.

This latest work is under the auspices of the "GreekSchools" project, funded by the European Research Council, which began three years ago and will continue through 2026. This time around, scholars have used infrared, ultraviolet optical imaging, thermal imaging, tomography, and digital optical microscopy as a kind of "bionic eye" to examine Philodemus' History of the Academy scroll, which was also written in carbon-based ink. Nonetheless, they were able to extract over 1,000 words, approximately 30 percent of the scroll's text, revealing new details about Plato's life as well as his place of burial.

Most notably, the historical account of Plato being sold into slavery in his later years after running afoul of the tyrannical Dionysius is usually pegged to around 387 BCE. According to the newly deciphered Philodemus text, however, Plato's enslavement may have occurred as early as 404 BCE or shortly after the death of Socrates in 399 BCE.

"Compared to previous editions, there is now an almost radically changed text, which implies a series of new and concrete facts about various academic philosophers," Graziano Ranocchia, lead researcher on the project, said. "Through the new edition and its contextualization, scholars have arrived at unexpected interdisciplinary deductions for ancient philosophy, Greek biography and literature, and the history of the book.”

Other deciphering efforts are also still underway. For instance, last fall we reported on the use of machine learning to decipher the first letters from a previously unreadable ancient scroll found in an ancient Roman villa at Herculaneum—part of the 2023 Vesuvius Challenge. And earlier this year tech entrepreneur and challenge co-founder Nat Friedman announced via X (formerly Twitter) that they had awarded the grand prize of $700,000 for producing the first readable text.

When the Vesuvius Challenge co-founders started the challenge, they thought there was less than a 30 percent chance of success within the year since, at the time, no one had been able to read actual letters inside of a scroll. However, the crowdsourcing approach proved wildly successful. That said, it's still just 5 percent of a single scroll.

So there is a new challenge for 2024: $100,000 for the first entry that can read 90 percent of the four scrolls scanned thus far. The primary goal is to perfect the auto-segmentation process since doing so manually is both time-consuming and expensive (more than $100 per square centimeter). This will lay the foundation for one day being able to scan and read all 800 scrolls discovered so far, as well as any additional scrolls that are unearthed should the remaining levels of the villa finally be excavated.

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Enlarge / Ubuntu has come a long way over nearly 20 years, to the point where you can now render 3D Ubuntu coffee mugs and family pictures in a video announcing the 2024 spring release. (credit: Canonical)

History might consider the most important aspect of Ubuntu 24.04 to be something that it doesn't have: vulnerabilities to the XZ backdoor that nearly took over the global Linux scene.

Betas, and the final release of Ubuntu 24.04, a long-term support (LTS) release of the venerable Linux distribution, were delayed, as backing firm Canonical worked in early April 2024 to rebuild every binary included in the release. xz Utils, an almost ubiquitous data-compression package on Unix-like systems, had been compromised through a long-term and elaborate supply-chain attack, discovered only because a Microsoft engineer noted some oddities with SSH performance on a Debian system. Ubuntu, along with just about every other regularly updating software platform, had a lot of work to do this month.

What is actually new in Ubuntu 24.04, or "Noble Numbat?" Quite a bit, especially if you're the type who sticks to LTS releases. The big new changes are a very slick new installer, using the same Subiquity back-end as the Server releases, and redesigned with a whole new front-end in Flutter. ZFS encryption is back as a default install option, along with hardware-backed (i.e., TPM) full-disk encryption, plus more guidance for people looking to dual-boot with Windows setups and BitLocker. Netplan 1.0 is the default network configuration tool now. And the default installation is "Minimal," as introduced in 23.10.

Raspberry Pi gets some attention, too, with an edition of 24.04 (64-bit only) available for the popular single-board computer, including the now-supported Raspberry Pi 5 model. That edition includes power supply utility Pemmican and enables 3D acceleration in the Firefox Snap. Ubuntu also tweaked the GNOME (version 46) desktop included in this release, such that it should see better performance on Raspberry Pi graphics drivers.

What else? Lots of little things:

• Support for autoinstall, i.e., YAML-based installation workflows
• A separate, less background-memory-eating firmware updating tool
• Additional support for Group Policy Objects (GPOs) in Active Directory environments
• Security improvements to Personal Package Archives (PPA) software setups
• Restrictions to unprivileged user namespace through apparmor, which may impact some third-party apps downloaded from the web
• A new Ubuntu App Center, replacing the Snap Store that defaults to Snaps but still offers traditional .deb installs (and numerous angles of critique for Snap partisans)
• Firefox is a native Wayland application, and Thunderbird is a Snap package only
• More fingerprint reader support
• Improved Power Profiles Manager, especially for portable AMD devices
• Support for Apple's preferred HEIF/HEIC files, with thumbnail previews
• Snapshot replaces Cheese, and GNOME games has been removed
• Virtual memory mapping changes that make many modern games run better through Proton, per OMG Ubuntu
• Linux kernel 6.8, which, among other things, improves Intel Meteor Lake CPU performance and supports Nintendo Switch Online controllers.

The suggested system requirements for Ubuntu 24.04 are a 2 GHz dual-core processor, 4GB memory, and 25GB free storage space. There is a dedicated WSL edition of 24.04 out for Windows systems.

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Substacker Elle Griffin plowed through the transcripts of the Penguin Random House/Simon & Schuster projected merger antitrust trial, which somebody published in book form (ironic), and extracted a lot of stats.

Here’s the general picture:

(1) The overwhelming majority of books published by major publishing houses generate little or no money for anyone, and in particular their authors.

(2) Relatedly, books that sell more than [incredibly depressing number] copies are very rare. The DOJ collected data on more than 58,000 titles published in a year, and found that 90% sold less than 2,000 copies, and that the median number of sales was . . . twelve.

(3) The overwhelming bulk of book sales come from three classes of writers (or “writers”): celebrities, franchise authors (Stephen King, John Grisham, Colleen Hoover etc.,) and the backlist, that is, The Lord of the Rings, The Very Hungry Caterpillar, the Bible, etc. If you’re not an author who is already in one of these three categories, your chances of making a living by publishing books are infinitesimal.

(4) The big publishing houses now spend almost all their money on a tiny number of gigantic advances. Even authors who get these get almost no money spent on publicity efforts by their publishers, because the giant advances go to people with a million TikTok followers (see point #3).

(5) The Obamas sell so many books that they had to be taken out of the data analysis as distorting outliers.

(6) If/when book publishing goes to a Netflix/Spotify subscription model, where you pay $10 a month to read as many books as you want, traditional publishing will be destroyed, since 20% of book buyers spend 80% of the money spent on books (this is the ratio for basically everything in the universe, as I believe Pareto or some other annoying economist pointed out).

(7) It’s not unusual for a celebrity author to get a million dollar advance and then put their name on a book that doesn’t sell any copies. Big publishing is a boom or bust/lottery ticket/VC investment model, which is increasingly untenable. (Funny not like a clown side note: Marie Kondo published a book on how to keep your office tidy. In March 2020).

Parallels with the contemporary music industry are obvious and dire.

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