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?
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.
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.
Please use us as a caching proxy (rather -- please use us to link to a specific version of online material)! We would love it if random
CMSs used a publish event to trigger our save-page-now functionality to archive content as-shown: https://blog.archive.org/2017/01/25/see-something-save-somet...
(Better yet -- maybe high-traffic sites like HN could trigger SPN on post events to grab a copy of the page as shown so if it goes offline people can continue to view & discuss?)
Existing replies are great. Also: The wayback link will come from the wayback servers / CDN, providing an easy bypass if the original submission is on an underpowered platform (no cdn, running in someone's basement, geographically distant ISP, etc)
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.
I've usually seen it used as a way to bypass paywalls. For this case I'm not sure though. I suppose smaller sites often go down under high traffic load.
