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Bryce Canyon - Pink and white siltstone and sandstone of the Tertiary (60 - 45 my) Claron Formation. The formation erodes quickly and the rim of the canyon is eroding at between 9 and 48 inches per year.

Via: IG@stanceelements

Lukla, Nepal - The World's most dangerous airport

AI Tool Reproduces Ancient Cuneiform Characters with High Accuracy

ProtoSnap, developed by Cornell and Tel Aviv universities, aligns prototype signs to photographed clay tablets to decode thousands of years of Mesopotamian writing.

Cornell University researchers report that scholars can now use artificial intelligence to “identify and copy over cuneiform characters from photos of tablets,” greatly easing the reading of these intricate scripts​.

The new method, called ProtoSnap, effectively “snaps” a skeletal template of a cuneiform sign onto the image of a tablet, aligning the prototype to the strokes actually impressed in the clay​.

By fitting each character’s prototype to its real-world variation, the system can produce an accurate copy of any sign and even reproduce entire tablets​.

"Cuneiform, like Egyptian hieroglyphs, is one of the oldest known writing systems and contains over 1,000 unique symbols​.

Its characters change shape dramatically across different eras, cultures and even individual scribes so that even the same character… looks different across time,” Cornell computer scientist Hadar Averbuch-Elor explains​.

This extreme variability has long made automated reading of cuneiform a very challenging problem.

The ProtoSnap technique addresses this by using a generative AI model known as a diffusion model.

It compares each pixel of a photographed tablet character to a reference prototype sign, calculating deep-feature similarities.

Once the correspondences are found, the AI aligns the prototype skeleton to the tablet’s marking and “snaps” it into place so that the template matches the actual strokes​.

In effect, the system corrects for differences in writing style or tablet wear by deforming the ideal prototype to fit the real inscription.

Crucially, the corrected (or “snapped”) character images can then train other AI tools.

The researchers used these aligned signs to train optical-character-recognition models that turn tablet photos into machine-readable text​.

They found the models trained on ProtoSnap data performed much better than previous approaches at recognizing cuneiform signs, especially the rare ones or those with highly varied forms.

In practical terms, this means the AI can read and copy symbols that earlier methods often missed.

This advance could save scholars enormous amounts of time.

Traditionally, experts painstakingly hand-copy each cuneiform sign on a tablet.

The AI method can automate that process, freeing specialists to focus on interpretation.

It also enables large-scale comparisons of handwriting across time and place, something too laborious to do by hand.

As Tel Aviv University archaeologist Yoram Cohen says, the goal is to “increase the ancient sources available to us by tenfold,” allowing big-data analysis of how ancient societies lived – from their religion and economy to their laws and social life​.

The research was led by Hadar Averbuch-Elor of Cornell Tech and carried out jointly with colleagues at Tel Aviv University.

Graduate student Rachel Mikulinsky, a co-first author, will present the work – titled “ProtoSnap: Prototype Alignment for Cuneiform Signs” – at the International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) in April.

In all, roughly 500,000 cuneiform tablets are stored in museums worldwide, but only a small fraction have ever been translated and published​.

By giving AI a way to automatically interpret the vast trove of tablet images, the ProtoSnap method could unlock centuries of untapped knowledge about the ancient world.

350 Million years in a single picture - Author: SolsticeSable

Flying high. - 📸 Via 📷: Unknown, tag to credit:! - Tag someone who needs to see this💙 - 👉𝓣𝓪𝓹 𝓵𝓲𝓷𝓴 𝓲𝓷 𝓸𝓾𝓻 𝓑𝓲𝓸 𝓽𝓸 𝓸𝓻𝓭𝓮𝓻👆🏻 - - - - #sailingday#sailingship#sailingadventure#instasail#sailboats#sailinglife#sailingaway#regatta#sailingtime#smoothsailing#sailingrace#sailingholidays#sailingaroundtheworld#sailstagram#segelyacht#segelurlaub#barcavela#frersdesign#sailfast#sailweek#lovetosail#sailingpassions#stbarthbucket#sailinglove#sailinggreece#sailingadventures

Dreamcatcher

Sun-dried tomatoes

When ships pass through Point Nemo in the southern Pacific Ocean, they are 2,688 kilometers from the nearest land. That means that at the right time of day, the nearest humans are on the International Space Station, 400km up.

Trompe-l'oeil...

1966 Shelby GT350

noah__nono instagram

Well, it's April, and the 113th anniversary of the RMS Titanic's doomed maiden voyage is coming up.

"In this age of artificial intelligence, we cannot forget that poetry and love are necessary to save our humanity. No algorithm will ever be able to capture, for example, the nostalgia that all of us feel, whatever our age, and wherever we live, when we recall how we first used a fork to seal the edges of the pies that we helped our mothers or grandmothers to make at home. It was a moment of culinary apprenticeship, somewhere between child-play and adulthood, when we first felt responsible for working and helping one another. Along with the fork, I could also mention thousands of other little things that are a precious part of everyone’s life: a smile we elicited by telling a joke, a picture we sketched in the light of a window, the first game of soccer we played with a rag ball, the worms we collected in a shoebox, a flower we pressed in the pages of a book, our concern for a fledgling bird fallen from its nest, a wish we made in plucking a daisy. All these little things, ordinary in themselves yet extraordinary for us, can never be captured by algorithms. The fork, the joke, the window, the ball, the shoebox, the book, the bird, the flower: all of these live on as precious memories “kept” deep in our heart.

This profound core, present in every man and woman, is not that of the soul, but of the entire person in his or her unique psychosomatic identity. Everything finds its unity in the heart, which can be the dwelling-place of love in all its spiritual, psychic and even physical dimensions. In a word, if love reigns in our heart, we become, in a complete and luminous way, the persons we are meant to be, for every human being is created above all else for love. In the deepest fibre of our being, we were made to love and to be loved."

-Pope Francis Dilexit Nos (2024, 20-21)

17-year-old Addison Bethea was in 5-feet-deep water near Grassy Island in Florida when a shark suddenly bit her on the leg.⁠ ⁠ As Addison struggled in the water, her brother Rhett Willingham leapt into action and dived into the water.⁠ ⁠ Fighting to save his sister’s life, Rhett managed to free his sister’s leg from the shark’s grip, before dragging her to safety on his boat.⁠ ⁠ Addison was then airlifted around 80 miles away to Tallahassee Memorial Hospital, where she underwent emergency surgery to amputate her leg.⁠ ⁠ If it wasn’t for her brother’s quick-thinking and brave actions, Addison could have lost her life on that day too.⁠

Reproducción de vigas de madera con mortero:

Wood veneer

Did you know the only place on earth without time? ⏳

🎥 geographiany

The World's First Dictionary: A Mesopotamian Legacy

The earliest known dictionary in history comes from Mesopotamia.

The artifact before you is the oldest bilingual dictionary, consisting of 24 cuneiform tablets.

It features word lists in Sumerian alongside their Akkadian equivalents, providing a linguistic bridge between these two ancient languages.

These tablets are part of the renowned Ebla archive, a treasure trove of Mesopotamian knowledge.

By 2500 B.C., Sumerian scribes had developed a writing system with around 800 cuneiform signs, allowing them to document myths, fables, essays, hymns, proverbs, epic poetry, laws, medical texts, and even astronomical observations.

Today, this remarkable dictionary is housed in the Louvre Museum in Paris.