> Unfortunately this means that there's probably not much chance for a rich field of xenoarchaeology to exist since it's not even possible to do this on our own planet.
I think you've reached this statement too eagerly but would be interested to discuss this point. Do you mean that the materials they used would have disintegrated and their (presumably carbon-based lifeform) bodies wouldn't have left any fossils?
My main thoughts on this come from reading Vernor Vinge's [1] excellent Marooned in Realtime which discusses some of the condundrums resulting from transferring information over massive periods of time. I think part of it talks about subduction zones where everything is eventually riven back into the Earth's mantle, essentially lost to any kind of current archaelogical techniques.
I feel like these problems are all around and often present in games. There's one that particularly infuriates me in Hearthstone, a Blizzard developed TCG, where when a game ends it causes the processor to furiously spin up and causes all kinds of anomalous behaviour like webcam cutting out, mic distortion and other generally laggy behaviour.
I'm aware that there's probably a lot going on at the game's end but I'm still utterly convinced there is a coding bug causing this amount of processor spiking but I lack the skills of debugging Unity, which is the game's engine, to determine what actually is going on. I guess that's the issue, the ability of conducting the research the kind in the OP article is extraordinarily rare even among game devs so these problems persist (Hearthstone is just turning 8 years old now) without anyone with the deep knowledge to rectify it.
Sounds like you'd be interested in https://ctftime.org/ if I understand you correctly. Contains list of current and upcoming CTFs going on as well as write-ups for them when finished. Decent site for people trying to expose themselves to as much CTF competition as possible.
It's too long ago for me to remember the site's name but the subscription to it came when you signed up for a free Hotmail account back in the late 90s.
You would get an email each day that would take you to the site where you had to solve a reasonably cryptic whodunnit. I've never been good at these sorts of things but I would spend ages reading the story trying to solve the riddle. Pretty fun but years later I can't remember its name and I do miss it from time to time. It was a comfort to know these puzzles were being created and solved in the background but now is no more.
Used to work for federal healthcare contractor, primarily in SAS. File conversion was a pain, but working in Stata would generally yield runtimes roughly an order of magnitude faster.
It helps a lot to think of SAS a as a set of tools, and then recognise what provides equivalent capabilities.
The DATA step follows conventions very similar to awk, though what SAS offers by way of data conversion (especially from mainframe formats) is hard to provide. The fundamental concept of iterating over the input stream is useful to keep in mind.
I've also found that awk is useful for writing SAS programs themselves. I bumped into this dealing with large data dictionaries and trying to make sense of them. Parsing those and generating the corresponding SAS statements, then seeing if the results made sense was far easier than coding by hand. (The dictionary, of course, failed to correspond entirely to the actual datasets, requiring mods, but the dev/test/modify cycle was far faster, and far more repeatable.)
For data storage, an RDBMS backend or SQLite is probably good, though you can also use various structured files (CSV, other delimited, column-formatted, etc.) Columnar + compression buys you much of the advantages of a SAS data set in terms of size.
For the various statistical and graphics capabilities, R, gnuplot, the JS plotting library, and some related bits. I'd really like to see what tools for generating dyamic SVG there are these days, as that's a graphics format that seems exquisitely suited to data-driven rendering.
For advanced quantitative programming: Python or related languages and libraries.
For report generation: these days I'd probably head to a lightweight markup language and Pandoc to create whatever format(s) I wanted. Or you could wire up dynamic Web output with the application engine of your choice.
For application design or creating commandline / back-end tools: whatever tools you prefer, ranging from scripting languages to compiled langauges. It's been a long time since I've worked with SAS, but its Macro and app development language (which I can't even remember the name of now) are both quite crufty.
The key advantage to SAS as I noted in an earlier comment is that many of the tool choices are made for you, in that that's what SAS offers you. You can go outside that set, though back in the day, few shops really seemed to be much interested in that. The problem is that the tool choices are limited, and any additional tools have significant costs.
Going with free/open options liberates you, but also means you've got to litigate the tool-choice battle. That seems to be a problem mostly at shops that continue to use SAS in part -- I don't know if it's sunk-cost fallacy or other dynamics, but there's quite often resistance at both management and developer/analyst levels to going to other tools (or had been in my experience). I found that and other dyanmics sufficiently frustrating that I largely stopped using the tool decades ago, with occasional (and regrettable) relapses.
What strikes me most about these documents is the mundanity of life back then. Like an agreement to pay someone back is one of them (a basic IOU), the other is a telling off for some financial reason. It's strange to think back then people were having equivalent disagreements and deals as they have now.
Ancient times always tend to feel very untouchable because of the massive span of time separating us and them, but I see that the basic tenets of human life still existed back then from this limited material. It makes me wonder how far back we would have to go back to find proto-civilisations that make no sense, human sacrifice not withstanding.
You can get this same sort of feeling from the various graffiti found preserved in places like Pompeii. I am extremely interested in this very thing. If two thousand years doesn't separate everyday people from "the normal problems" that we experience, I wonder equally if I could go back ten thousand or fifteen thousand years and have the same kinds of thoughts ("Arkurush has refused to pay for the chickens I gave him").
Think of it this way. Is browsing to a random HTTP address via IP on the internet and then screencapping the picture produced on your browser legal?
Then using a VNC client in the same way would fall under the same legal purview. I think as long as there is no interaction to carry out functions, attempt password/username combos, then it's fairgame.
A prosecutor armed with the CFAA would probably disagree with you.
Browsing to an address with your browser is like checking to see whether a shop on main street is open right now. Attempting to connect to a an address with VNC is more akin to walking around the back of a house and checking if the rear door is locked or not.
I think you've reached this statement too eagerly but would be interested to discuss this point. Do you mean that the materials they used would have disintegrated and their (presumably carbon-based lifeform) bodies wouldn't have left any fossils?
My main thoughts on this come from reading Vernor Vinge's [1] excellent Marooned in Realtime which discusses some of the condundrums resulting from transferring information over massive periods of time. I think part of it talks about subduction zones where everything is eventually riven back into the Earth's mantle, essentially lost to any kind of current archaelogical techniques.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marooned_in_Realtime