from the making-sure-future-generations-remember-us-properly dept.
You send us your most ephemeral and worthless communications, and we'll carefully transcribe them into the most long-lasting medium known to man - a clay tablet.
...
Here's how it works:
Just send us a tweet or text (use the text field in the order form)
We'll carefully translate it into cuneiform
We'll stamp it on an actual clay tablet
and mail it to you.Favorite jokes? Amazing pickup lines? Your 2-star review of last summer's blockbuster?
KEEP IT FOREVER.
I dunno, the choice of Old Persian is rather questionable when everyone knows the lingua franca was Akkadian, and looking at the tablets it's pretty clear they were using a sharpened chopstick rather than reeds harvested from the banks of the Euphrates. In sum: FAIL.
(Score: 3, Touché) by moondrake on Monday November 09 2015, @04:56PM
Sounds a lot like the scams where you can have your name or other favorite word written or tattooed in ancient hieroglyphs or chinese characters using a completely invented 26 letter translation chart between our alphabet and a logographic language system....
(That must be how people end up with the word toilet stamped on their intimate parts)
At least old persian is mostly phonetic (but I think Akkadian is as well).
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday November 09 2015, @05:18PM
How many ways are there to announce to the world at large, "I'm a dumb chump, come take my money!" Or - should that be "dumb chimp"? Nahhhh - chimps are probably smarter than that.
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 2, Funny) by khallow on Monday November 09 2015, @05:33PM
How many ways are there to announce to the world at large, "I'm a dumb chump, come take my money!"
For a modest fee, I'll email you the precise number.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 09 2015, @05:29PM
Or "your family coat of arms" carefully researched by our investigators.
(Score: 3, Funny) by jdavidb on Monday November 09 2015, @06:53PM
ⓋⒶ☮✝🕊 Secession is the right of all sentient beings
(Score: 4, Informative) by The Archon V2.0 on Monday November 09 2015, @07:10PM
The hell of it is, the tat was probably LESS coherent than "bean curd".
http://hanzismatter.blogspot.ca/2006/08/gibberish-asian-font-mystery-solved.html [blogspot.ca]
(See also literally the rest of that site, half the entries refer back to the font in this one.)
Then again, maybe she's like the guy who went for a tattoo that said "Strong" and got one that said "Mexican".
(Score: 1) by angelosphere on Tuesday November 10 2015, @08:37PM
It is actually not funny at all.
I mean, some guy made up a story about a girls Chinese tattoo signs.
There is a photo of her on the first page with the tattoo.
She claims it means: inner peace.
He convinces here, it means some bullshit from a Chinese restaurant menu.
Erm ... the two signs mean: Woman, and Strength.
That is a made up story inside of a made up story ... does not make an sense to me.
(Score: 3, Informative) by bd on Monday November 09 2015, @09:29PM
The website certainly is not reassuring...
They say: We take the letters from your message and transliterate by syllable, as nearly as we can, into cuneiform.
So they don't translate to old persian but just use the persian alphabet.
Just take a look at the first example translation on the website, it is supposed to say: I know when that hotline bling that can only mean one thing
using the table in http://www.omniglot.com/writing/opcuneiform.htm [omniglot.com], the text in the clay tablet reads:
a-la-1-fa-ra-da-sa-a
ga-di-na-ma-ra-i-da-a-la-mi-fa
ra-da-sa-ra-ra-da-ta-vi-ta-ga-da
a-la-1-fa-ra-da-sa-a-ma-a-ka-na-mu
na-i-ba-ta-a-ra-ta-ga-ta-ra-va
ta-i-ta-va-ta-i-ta-va-na-za
a XX i XX ga-za-i
XX XX ra XX XX
Just from the number of letters, that just cannot be a syllabe per syllable translation.
Interestingly, the line "ala1faradasaa" appears in the first and fourth line, and a very similar line appears at the end of second
and beginning of third line with "alamifaradasaa". In line six, we have another repetition with "taitava taitava". I would guess
that this is some old-persian text. Maybe a list of items? The repetitions would be something I would not expect in prosaic text.
Propably it says something like "this idiot can't read old persian"... maybe in poetic fashion, hence the structure and repetitions.
Or am I just blind and don't see the english text?
(Score: 1) by angelosphere on Tuesday November 10 2015, @08:43PM
I was to say about the same:
the left side in the phone is definitely in no way translated in the right side on the clay. However I did not dig into it as deep as you did.
If you translate an alphabet based text, like english into a syllable based one, the text becomes shorter.
English is a bad example, like german, but lets look at the english transliteration of a Japanese text:
"O ne ga i shi ma su" ... spaces added for argument. This are 7 syllables, aka 7 signs in Japanese Kana scripts (every word broken up by a space is a syllable in Japanese). However it is 13 characters in latin alphabet.
I'm just not sure if the cuneiform are considered syllables ... at later times they where characters to.
However as my parent pointed out: the same fragments are repeated several times, which makes no sense.
(Score: 1) by angelosphere on Tuesday November 10 2015, @08:29PM
Reminds me to a true story.
A girl copied some Chinese characters (Kanji) from a restaurant menu and painted them on a shirt.
When she was in a different town, at a railway station, for some reason random Chinese men where suppressing laughters and the girls whee giggling at her.
The girl who told me the story was studying Chinese at that time and was asked to translate the signs, because of that incident. She hat painted: "Good and Cheap" on her shirt. Well .... not that embarrassing. "Honi soit qui mal y pense."
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday November 09 2015, @05:02PM
Should have diverged and either gone esoteric such as Stross style Old Enochian or modern such as QR codes.
Really hacking the system would be a message that is simultaneously an Old Enochian curse and an old Persian shopping list and a valid QR code all at the same time.
(Score: 2) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Monday November 09 2015, @05:05PM
Now I'm thinking about what would be involved in building a USB clay tablet printer...
(Score: 2) by Joe Desertrat on Monday November 09 2015, @05:37PM
Now I'm thinking about what would be involved in building a USB clay tablet printer...
Will there be Linux drivers released for this?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 09 2015, @06:04PM
Why not adapt a 3D printer to use clay, bake it in an oven to cure?
(Score: 4, Funny) by jdavidb on Monday November 09 2015, @06:55PM
ⓋⒶ☮✝🕊 Secession is the right of all sentient beings
(Score: 2) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Tuesday November 10 2015, @09:19AM
> Job's laser clay tablet engraver
Yeah it looks shiny, but it's way overpriced for the specs and doesn't engrave properly if you are "holding it wrong".
> the world has changed a lot since then, and seems to take itself much more seriously.
I think it's just that the geek world has shifted out of the workplace. It used to be that the only place for geeks to get together and share in geek humour and geek culture was at work (and only then if you happened to work in a sufficiently geeky workplace) but now there is the internet, which provides a million places to swap obscure SF references and comedic short stories.
(Score: 1) by throwaway28 on Monday November 09 2015, @05:42PM
Petco sells custom engraved nametags for about 11 dollars each, 80 characters (4x20) per side, 160 characters total. Small size is easier to lose than a clay tablet, but diamond-engraved aluminum is permanent enough for me.
(Score: 1) by Osamabobama on Monday November 09 2015, @07:12PM
When you guys back up your hard drives (which you do, because it was covered here about a month ago, right?) do you choose the longest lasting historic medium because it should hold up pretty well? For instance, the 3.5 inch floppy had a pretty good run, which would suggest they last a long time. On the other hand, storage durability is immediately useless if one can't read the data on the day it is written.
Long term durability can be predicted fairly well at this point, too. I suspect that granite or glass would fare better than clay if buried in a swamp. Just because a few clay tablets are the oldest surviving writing doesn't mean that technology hasn't overtaken them.
Whatever--I'm boring myself writing about the technical failings of a product that isn't intended to be taken seriously. Just give a kid a stick and some clay and have them make an original art project to bury in your yard for future generations to discover. More fun, less money, just as useless.
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 09 2015, @07:26PM
FRIST POST!
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Monday November 09 2015, @11:26PM
My opinion for what it's worth is that this looks like a bit of fun. The translation might be a bit off, and it's hardly something that's ever going to be hugely valuable, but still, it's no-where near as bad as having some stupid Chinese thing tattooed on your neck.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 10 2015, @05:21AM
My tattoo says "true love" in Chinese. But someone who actually spoke Chinese said my tattoo said "cheap prostitute". I have learned to live with the ambiguity of translation. Although, one of these is just wrong. #hashtag #immortalTweet #ImmortanJoe #IMayAlreadyBeDead
(Score: 1) by angelosphere on Tuesday November 10 2015, @09:00PM
There is actually not much to misinterpret in Chinese signs.
You read them like street signs ... only sometimes you are wrong in that case.
However "true love" and "cheap prostitute" may be a playing with words, or other meaning changes (no idea how the english term is).
Lets assume "cheap prostitute" would be CHO PAUTT ... where CHU and PAUTT are some Chinese Kanji meaning exactly that (of course a girl in that profession would rather call herself: "your pleasure" or something). Now lets assume you can find words that are pronounced exactly the same way. That means two different Chinese "Chars" that look completely different but also sound like CHO PAUTT. As a "secret sign" you might use those chars to describe your profession.
So it would be in real life the other way around. A prostitute likely never had "cheap prostitute" tattooed on her skin.
However she might have the tattoo "true love" ... probably in the wrong chars, to _indicate_ that she is for hire.
Regarding your tatoo, I would need to see the signs. If you have an iPad/iPhone you can download "imiwa" and try to translate them your self, it is actually not that hard.