#487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths

The following is a conversation with Irving Finkel, who is a scholar of ancient languages, curator at the British Museum for over forty five years, and is a much admired and respected world expert on cuneiform script, and more generally, on ancient languages of Sumerian, Akkadian, and Babylonian. And also, on ancient board games and, Mesopotamia magic, medicine, literature, and culture. I should also mention that both on and off the mic, Irving was a super kind and fun person to talk to with an infectious enthusiasm for ancient history that, of course, I already love, but, fell in love with even more. And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description or at lexfredeman.com/sponsors. It is in fact the best way to support this podcast. We got Shopify for selling stuff online, Miro for brainstorming ideas with your team, Chevron for reliable energy that powers data centers, Element for electrolytes, and AG one for my daily multivitamin. Choose wisely, my friends. And now onto the full ad reads. I do try to make them interesting, but if you skip, please still check out the sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too. To get in touch with me for whatever reason, go to alexfreeman.com/contact. Alright. Let's go. This episode is brought to you by Shopify, a platform designed for anyone to sell anywhere with a great looking online store. So, of course, Shopify is great as an app, as a service, but the thing that always fascinates me is the engineering behind the scenes. And this is truly an incredible engineering team. And I could talk about this for many hours, and perhaps it's good to give an example. Like, they build a custom search engine rather than using, Elasticsearch or any of the off the shelf engines that will require significant rearchitecture at their scale, c plus plus was the, core language for close to hardware optimizations, memory efficiency across hundreds of millions of items. They created rank flow, a domain specific language combining Python like simplicity with c plus plus performance, rejected hybrid Python call and c plus plus approaches due to deployment complexity, version skew, and operational overhead. I'm reading these things from their recent blog, but I highly recommend. There's so many technical blogs about the various problems they're solving. And they do this, incremental phase type development deployment where they ship fast, optimize later, maintain compatibility always. So in phase one was the first four weeks. They built SIM score DSL, which is a basic c plus plus engine to unblock data science experiments. And then in phase two, which which took two to four months, they built Turbo DSL, which is a high performance engine version of that, which achieves 48% speed up. There's so much more to talk about, but incredible engineering that brings you an incredible product at the end. Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com/lex, and that's …