
Hexfoil Marks on Old Books - seventyhorses
https://collation.folger.edu/2018/10/hexed/
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keithpeter
Hexagonal arrangements of circles are about the easiest thing to draw with a
pair of compasses as OA mentions. I wonder if we can distinguish 'meaningful'
hexfoil's from the maths homework of previous centuries somehow?

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WorldMaker
That "can we distinguish" definitely seems to be the crux of the article. It's
definitely a fascinating question with few current answers.

Did the British Roman builders use the symbol because the local tribes found
it superstitiously useful or did the British Roman builders use it for some
other reason (guild mark, perhaps? The fact that it is an early Euclid math
problem suggests it's interest to early architects) and the local tribes
picked it up as a superstitious symbol?

Presumably these are hypotheses you could start to test if you collect enough
evidence, which this article is part of chain of people searching for more
evidence/patterns. It seems likely we may never know the full story, but an
interesting thing to wonder about.

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NegativeLatency
Wayback Machine link:
[https://web.archive.org/web/20181003155924/http://collation....](https://web.archive.org/web/20181003155924/http://collation.folger.edu/2018/10/hexed/)

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rgovostes
Off-topic, but what is the reason for the archive being linked in the comments
so often? In this case, the article was published just a few days ago, and is
still online.

The site doesn't seem to be down, and it's a university blog that can probably
handle heavy traffic. On the other side, directing a lot of traffic to the
Internet Archive to use it as a caching proxy is going to be burdensome.

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LyndsySimon
I've come across old HN posts in searches a few times, and the original
article link was dead - the Archive link was live. I don't know if that's why
it's done, but I appreciate it for that reason.

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NegativeLatency
It was because the server took a very long time to serve me the page. I
figured it was being hugged to death.

