this post was submitted on 26 Sep 2024
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Today I Learned

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Source : « The Great Scientists: From Euclid to Stephen Hawking », from John Farndon

I.d.k. why i thought that Euclid, and perhaps also others, were around Plato or before, just wanted to share, what a time.

B.t.w., we know about ChatGPT, some about Sam Altman, but nothing about the researchers, and the same goes for every other technology, it's a choice of society 🤷(, causes&consequences).

Edit : Transcript :

All the same, if anyone wanted a proper education, Alexandria in Egypt was the place to go, and here Archimedes went as a young man.
At the time he was there, the city was the greatest centre of learning in the ancient world. Although the museum or university there was barely 20 years old – the city itself had been founded by Alexander the Great just half a century earlier – it already held an unrivalled library, containing at least 100,000 scrolls, including all of Aristotle’s priceless personal collection.
It was here that the great Euclid taught geometry, that Aristarchus showed that the Earth revolved around the Sun, and that Hipparchus made the first great catalogue of constellations, categorizing stars in terms of their brightness. And it was here that, much later, Ptolemy wrote the Almagest, the most influential book about the nature of the universe for 1,500 years.
Euclid was probably dead by the time Archimedes was there, but Archimedes undoubtedly met Eratosthenes, the brilliant thinker who measured the circumference of the world to within 4 per cent of modern figures, and made a measurement of the year’s length as precise as any until barely half a century ago.

Edit : Now that i think about it, conquering Persia&Egypt&.. probably helped them in developing these knowledges/sciences

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[–] soumerd_retardataire@lemmy.world 2 points 1 month ago (2 children)

What a weird rule, do you know why it exists ?
What should i have done to post this information then ?

[–] malle_yeno@pawb.social 8 points 1 month ago (1 children)

What a weird rule, do you know why it exists ?

Accessibility. A blind person (or someone who just can't see that well, or who wants to read it at a different font and sizing level) has the opportunity to read this in text form with a screen reader or with adjusted view settings. But those don't work with images (screen readers may if the image has alt text).

Ease of search. If someone wanted to find this post down the line, they are not able to search the actual text of the post because it's an image.

Quality. In all honesty, what is gained by this post being an image instead of text? What is the visual element adding that couldn't be accomplished with italics and bolding?

What should i have done to post this information then ?

Copy it and treat it as a quote in your written post (same place you put your source). You can add formatting to it if you want to emphasize parts.

I personally prefer a picture because most softwares for browsing Lemmy require to load the whole post in order to read the selftext, but agree with your arguments/explanations, so if that ever happens again i'll try not to forget to accompany the picture with a transcript.
Thank you very much for such an answer/explanation.

[–] AnimePhantasm@lemmy.world 7 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Its very unfriendly to screen readers. In a lot of pictures-of-text posts you will see people transcribe the text so that everyone can access the web equally :)

[–] soumerd_retardataire@lemmy.world 0 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

Oh, ok, thanks for the explanation, their software usually has an OCR feature since we can nowadays easily read much harder pictures than this one though, otherwise they wouldn't be able to browse most social medias. Seems like this recommendation is 10 years too old if i'm not mistaken.
Even better : since a description of the scenery would be more useful to them for some memes/pictures, but more difficult to do for the o.p., i don't think it'll be long until free softwares offer them a description of pictures in their favorite style of description(, since, after all, large language models like ChatGPT can already do this).

It'd have been easy for me to copy-paste the text in the selftext, i'll try to remember this if there's a next time and thus interpret this rule as "no picture unless accompanied with a transcript", unless i'm wrong in this interpretation.
Thanks again for this information.

[–] delirious_owl@discuss.online 4 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Yeah, posting pictures with text next to a transcription is fine.

Posting pictures without bothering to copy and paste the text for blind folks is not ok