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Examining the Antikythera Mechanism
Mr. Droopy Drawers writes "An ancient piece of clockwork shows the deep roots of modern technology. Found in 1900 off the coast of Antikythera, Greece, a clockwork mechanism was found to be a device for calculating the motion of the earth and planets. In an article in The Economist, Michael Wright, the curator of mechanical engineering at the Science Museum in London, says the device demonstrates mechanical principles that were thought not devised until the 17th century. The article quotes research done by Derek Price. Here's Mr. Price's article from Scientific American. Also found some quicktime movies of the mechanism at The University of Macedonia. Very interesting reading."
It wasn't supposed to last 10,000 years, was it?
It's Christmas everyday with BitTorrent.
"...He returned to the surface, removed his helmet, and gabbled that he had found a heap of dead, naked women."
Figures, dude thought he was looking at ancient porn.
Side note. I don't even wanna know how the submitter got his name.
Sent from your iPad.
So what channel is this gem of a movie on?
Looks like some Greeks had developed a set of planetary gears. This is much more advanced than I'd thought the ancients were, but they were still quite a long ways off from the Model T.
It's channel 356 on Dish Network's Pacific Time Zone network.
I think it's Starz Family Edition or something. STZFE is the channel code.
There's only 23 minutes left. The balloon scene is coming up, so you'd better get watching.
--
ssj
Well, sure. The Atlantans needed that clock to coordinate their rendezvous with the Mothership.
Isn't it entirely possible to make a device that demonstrates some principle, but have no understanding of the underlying principle? There is also the comparison of people 'discovering' the Americas before Columbus. Sure, people might have been here before him, but Columus is the one that got the ball rolling as far as Western civilization is concerned and made things happen because of his 'discovery'.
I saw a thing on the History channel that covered the mechanical solar system device. In that same ep, they also had an ancient battery (as in a container with acids etc to store electricity) that was found in Iraq. If memory serves, it dated back to... I want to say 100 AD, but I warn you all my memory's very fuzzy on that #. Suffice it to say, it was several hundred years ago.
They believe the electricity was used to ease pain. Running light amounts of current through pained areas cause it to dissipate. They even talked of people walking into ponds containing eletric eels to ease their aches.
Okay, this isn't really on-topic. It's still interesting, though. There were lotsa cool technologies several hundred years ago that haven't survived to our century. It's amazing!
ATTN: People of Macedonia. All your bandwidths are belong to us!
Signed,
CmdrTaco
that what modern man knows of the ancient world is just a bucket of water next to the ocean. And the water in the bucket is pretty cloudy.
The model T used a rather clever planetary transmision. So maybe they weren't that far.
...is greek and doesn't belong to the country-with-similar-name, namely FYROM (former yugoslav republic of...).
which papers?
The best education consists in immunizing people against systematic attempts at education. - Paul Feyerabend
A detailed account of the mathematics of the mechanism, along with java animations, can be found at the American Mthematical Society: The Antikythera I and The Antikythera II.
To be fair, this battery thing was long before Iraq became what it is today.
Now thats gotta be a new record...?
What is all this talk about an Antikythera Mechanism? The Kythera Mechanism has never been a problem for anybody. I think we should leave things just as they are!
Interesting indeed, shows how little we knew about ;^)
:o
:D
the greeks/ancients - although we should not assume/extrapolate too much after finding just one device. (one clock != mechanized greek civilization != "ancient Greek tradition of complex mechanical technology"
Unfortunately, a whole bunch of ppl are going to read about this clock and use it to claim that Atlantis existed and that aliens visited the ancient Greeks every friday-afternoon
Expect the book in stores near you any day now
Google Search Results
Usually on Slashdot when a blurb-er links 'The Economist' or 'Scientific American' they're linking the magazine's homepage, and they also link the individual article separately. In the current blurb, I had to doublecheck that the links went to the articles instead.
I'd like to see a Slashdot styleguide that recommends against linking the magazines' homepages at all (because it just adds confusion, and if you really want to get there, you're sure to find a link via the article).
For linking the article, my recommendation is that the least ambiguous anchortext is the word 'article'. (The W3C says the anchortext should be descriptive, out of context, but I think this is more work than anyone really needs.)
This is about my eighth 'META' comment, and almost all of them have been moderated down as offtopic, but I think the Slashdot community needs to become more sensitive to these usability issues.
To think they went there probably to escape loud, obnoxious people in their own country... Ah, the irony if they saw it today!
I don't know about anyone else, but I found the account of Ancient Greece's terracentric solar system model interesting:
...using elaborate models based on epicycles, in which each body describes a circle (the epicycle) around a point that itself moves in a circle around the earth.
Basically, the epicycle is centred on the Sun, which the Earth orbits. But their model seems preposterous now, because, to a person with a heliocentric view of the solar system it is overly complex, as all you have to do is think of the Earth circling that point as well, and you remove an order of complexity from the problem. I wonder if this seems simple just because of my heliocentric upbringing, or because the Greeks of the time were so convinced that the Earth was the center of the universe that they were blinded to the truth and missed the more simple explanation? Who first proposed the heliocentric model? I doubt it was really Copernicus, if this epicyclic model existed first!
We Build Beautiful Websites
Oh, paper, in singular; "Über formal unentscheidbare Sätze der Principia Mathematica und verwandter Systeme" in particular if I understood matters correctly.
It was that or "when are they going to port NetBSD to it?"
mod me down, put me out of my misery
"dope will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no dope"
Let them know that it is vengeance for that affair about the gameboys :)
Even when the underlying principle of a technology is fairly well understood, and put to substantial use, there is no guarentee that the techology will survive the ravages of time. Concrete is a good example.
The Romans had perfected concrete and used the substance to great effect. Many of the surviving Roman ruins today are concrete structures. Yet at the fall of the Roman empire, the knowedge of concrete was largely lost. It took several hundred years to simply begin regaining that knowledge. It took over a THOUSAND more years for the technology to reach simular levels as when it was used by the Romans.
Keep in mind that this was a technology with very obvious and... concrete... examples to demonstrate that the technology had existed and would provide considerable bennefit if rediscovered. This is very unlike tales of "greek fire", ancient batteries, or a piece of clockwork burried at the bottom of the sea.
History has shown many times that knowledge can be a precarious thing. It is little wonder that sometimes mankind has to redisover past discoveries. And I would think it takes little away from those inventors to have discovered simular technology had existed, unknown to them, elsewhere on the face of the earth in a very different time.
The Economist article mentions that research on the Antikythera mechanism was carried out with Allan Bromley from the University of Sydney. This recent eulogy in the Sydney Morning Herald presents the life and achievements of this remarkable identity.
This device models the planetary orbit of Saturn (amongst other things)!
The ancients weren't even supposed to know the orbit of Saturn from observations, so the irony is that the designer of this device must not only have been lucky but he must have never known how lucky he was, since he shouldn't have been able to verify his design (at least for Saturn)!!!
Some coincidence, indeed!!!
So, did somebody way back then have an observatory complete with a powerful telescope? And was that somebody not hung up by the belief that the world was flat? Or maybe at least some ancients had a few clues?!
P.S.
On a somewhat related topic, the ancients seemed to know about the precession of the equinoxes. This implies measurements taken over a period of more than 10000 years and a sufficient theory to interpret those observations. If you are not familiar with the concept of the precession of the equinoxes, then think of the statement, "We are entering the Age of Aquarius, Age of Aquarius (woo, wah!)".
Explain that coincidence!
Economics is the key. When you are limited by the amount of money you have, you can't do any research. And yet money is just a piece of paper now, and yet it'll still lead us to the next depression. Looks like we still haven't learned anything this past 2000 years. (Most Greek scientists are either rich themselves or are supported by the rich...)
Discoveries like these reconfirms my beliefthat there really is nothing new under the sun, or at least it is an extreemely rare event. It makes you want to take a closer look at patents of all types and ask yourself if they are *really* original ideas.
"Your superior intellect is no match for our puny weapons!"
If I were ever to write a sci-fi story, it would be about a race of aliens who are the perfect engineers, but the universe's crappiest scientists. After several thousand years, they finally got to space, but don't understand a damn thing. Big rockets, built by trial and error. Some type of computer, but probably still using some oddly sophisticated form of vacuum tube (since they don't understand QM well enough to build a transistor; they probably completely missed the whole semiconductor bit).
Just because you can build it doesn't mean you MUST understand it. Just look at the aquaduct system build without any particular conception of gravity or potential energy; just "it works".
Yes, I have read it. Please explain how this refers to the topic. I am deeply interested.
The best education consists in immunizing people against systematic attempts at education. - Paul Feyerabend
The Egyptians also made "beer" (really about 0.5% or 1 proof) for normal drinking from the waters of the Nile. It is an interesting question whether their civilization was really based on the inadvertent discovery of the astringent property of ethanol.
Religion is the opiate of the masses. The wealthy smoke the real stuff.
This was a weird idea (re)invented by the Catholic Church. Eratosthenes [sp?] not only demonstrated the Earth was round, he actually calculated its diameter (accurate to about 5%)... around 300 BCE. The reason everyone thought Columbus was a lunatic wasn't because of the supposed "sea monsters" -- it was because they couldn't possibly carry enough supplies for them to reach modern Indonesia by boat! (If the Caribbean plate weren't there, causing the long island chain, they would've all perished before even reaching the Yucatan peninsula.)
Religion is the opiate of the masses. The wealthy smoke the real stuff.
The problem the Greeks would've had was "why don't they 'fall' just like objects on the Earth do?" The answer they came up with was that the bodies in the sky were "ethereal" (essentially massless in modern parlance) and were moved about in regularity by the gods (or the planets' Ideals if one were a Platonist). Thus they wouldn't have imagined the bodies in space to be like the matter on Earth, making, by default, the Earth the center of the cosmos.
Religion is the opiate of the masses. The wealthy smoke the real stuff.
Actually, Aristarchus, a Greek aroud the early part of the 3rd century BC, came up with it. Copernicus basically rehashed what Aristarchus said, improved on it a bit, and now most people believe that Copernicus came up with the idea.
This, however, is clearly what it is purported to be. Why obfuscate the issue?
This is pretty damn far from Von Däniken.
-dameron
" To be fair, this battery thing was long before Iraq became what it is today."
Really ? The people of Iraq in ancient times were the Assyrians, and back in 3000BC they weren't running round like The Rock smiting evil- they were more into nailing the skins of evildoers onto the city walls, building piles of body parts from their enemies and demanding tribute from places for no reason.
Also the Assyrians invaded a whole bunch of places, slew many and did a fair bit of feasting. They had numerous wars with their neigbours.
graspee
It is funniest when performed by Patrick Bateman, Esq.
I used the device and I still have kytheras all over the damn place.
As a side note. The article mentioned that a "computer scientist at Sydney University helped Analyise the images to work out what the componenets were."
I had the pleasure of being a student on Alan's for some time. He was intensly interested in this sort of thing. He was involved in studying Babbage's work, and in the re-creation of Babbage's Difference Engine. I remember standing with him in front of a display case containing gears from one of these projects as he explained how they had been manufactured.
Alan Bromely died on August 16 this year after a long battle with cancer. I remember in 1998 I was studing a subject taught by Alan. Twice during one semester he was unable to give lectures due to his chemo therapy, but he continued to teach, and always had time to explain something to anyone who wanted to listen.
The Babbage project
An article in the Sydney Morning Herald
A university publication
Democracy isn't about no one telling you what to do. It's about everyone telling you what to do.
I had no idea George Clinton was from Atlanta!
Your mind is squeezed by a blast of pain!
This is the thing Feynmann commented on, especially the
.
improbability of one of these really being ancient, in one of his
letters printed in "What do _you_ care what other people think?", pages
94 - 96:
Yesterday morning I went to the archeological museum. . . . Also, it was
slightly boring because we have seen so much of that stuff before.
Except for one thing: among all those art objects there was one thing so
entirely different and strange that it is nearly impossible. It was
recovered from the sea in 1900 and is some kind of machine with gear
trains, very much like the inside of a modern wind-up alarm clock. The
teeth are very regular and many wheels are fitted closely together.
There are graduated circles and Greek inscriptions. I wonder if it is
some kind of fake. There was an article on it in the Scientific
American in 1959. . .
I asked the archeologist lady about the machine in the museum -- whether
other similar machines , or simpler machines leading up to it or down
form it, were ever found -- but she hadn't heard of it. So I met her
and her son of Carl's age (who looks at me as if I were a heroic ancient
Greek, for he is studying physics) at the museum to show it to her. She
required some explanation from me why I thought such a machine was
interesting and surprising because, "Didn't Erastosthenese measure the
distance to the sun, and didn't that require elaborate scientific
instruments?" Oh, how ignorant are classically educated people. No
wonder they don't appreciate their own time. They are not of it and do
not understand it. But after a bit she believed maybe it was striking,
and she took me to the back rooms of the museum-- surely there were
other examples, and she would get a complete bibliography. Well, there
were no other examples, and the complete bibliography was a list of
three articles (including the one in the Scientific American) -- all by
one man, an _American_ from Yale!
I guess the Greeks think all Americans must be dull, being only
interested in machinery when there are all those beautiful statues and
portrayals of lovely myths and stories of gods and goddesses to look at.
(In fact, a lady from the museum staff remarked, when told that the
professor from America wanted to know more about item 15087, "Of all the
beautiful things in this museum, why does he pick out _that_ particular
item? What is so special about it?")
oh c'mon, SOMEONE had to do it. At least I have enough fortitude to take the karma hit.
People need to wake up and realize those who came before us weren't stupid or some how not as inventive as moderm man. Let's freaking give credit where it is due. We wouldn't be here without what came before us. Obviously, our ancestors weren't dumb enough to completely wipe out humanity. Scientists and geeks need get off their high horse and realize we're all freakin pieces of meat. The only thing that matters isn't how freakin smart or inventive a person is. It's how a person carries himself from day to day.
Assuming you are, in fact, the proprietor of robotwisdom.com:
Thank you for The online shorter Finnegans Wake. It helped me through a tough first read, and I'm looking forward to the second.
What if it was just a fancy leather shaper that just *happened* to have astronomical ratios in it?
Table-ized A.I.
I always love to see how our current civilization derived its knowledge in part or in full from the past. It gives a feeling of connectivity to our past, like we are not an island - but instead part of a much larger history. It also removes national boundaries, and helps me remember that even though we are from different races, we all have a common ancestry.
Much of our current culture and knowledge we owe to ancient Greece - yet ancient Greece was also no island. From whom did they derive their knowledge? The historian Josephus (born around AD30) said that Abraham, father of the Jews, taught the art of astronomy to the Egyptians. What other mysteries await us in history? It magnifies the ignorance of our current day, that thinks we are unique, when in fact all the thoughts and concepts we come up with are merely repeats of something older. Perhaps in a new skin (Eg computers and electricity), but the same concepts.
See that and a whole bunch of other eye-poppin' stuff in this gallery. However, strange doesn't need to be small, in fact it can stand out a fair bit (bear in mind (which the page's author doesn't seem to have done) that things move over time).
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
It is missing one very important feature:
The snooze button!
Table-ized A.I.
They're really good at getting important things wrong, but this time - at least in general - they may turn out to have been right, or at least righter than their opponents.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Wave yer lookin' gear at this. (-:
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Visit http://plug.linux.org.au/~leonb/2000_seminar2a.htm l for some Wordless viewing pleasure. :-( Thank you, SlashDot, for that gratuitous space in the text. )-:
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
There's a lot of chocolate cities around;
We've got Newark, we've got Gary
Somebody told me we got L.A.
And we're working on Atlanta
But you're the capital, CC
Gainin' on ya!
Snickersnee3: Build your own 3-watt Luxeon Star headlamp from scratch
Wow! "I have read it" That gives you the upperhand, if you also understood it ;)
I had only read Gödel's work from semi-quotations and other author's interpretations. But that is also true for most other authors like Mendeleev, Newton, and others whom I believe I have understood somewhat too... Anyhow, thanks for the link. But, I see have little to comment beyond the first hundred rows, or so; I simply don't understand mathematics well enough.
From what I had understood of Gödel, which may the vulgar interpretation, he claims that anything can be claimed using a limited set of facts, and these claims cannot be disproofed. Maybe that is stretching "Gödels papers" a bit, maybe not. Anyhow, what I meant, which I'm sure you understood, is that interpretating the former use from fragments of mechanical devices is indeed shaky. "I'll show you a brick and you recreate the building." Maybe _that_ is stretching "Gödels papers" a bit, maybe not.
Anyway, cool user number!
"From what I had understood of Gödel, which may the vulgar interpretation, he claims that anything can be claimed using a limited set of facts, and these claims cannot be disproofed."
Sorry, to which should be added
and these claims cannot be disproofed without additionl facts from an external reference.
Yeah I understood it, and yeah you are stretching it. Did you understand it?
Man I need to go to sleep but look why did you reply? Now I have to answer. Jesus H Christ. I'll let Nagel answer for me.
Taken from Godel's Proof by Ernest Nagel, if you havent read it, then do so.
"...in other words, we cannot deduce all arithmetical truths from axioms. Moreover, Godel established that arithmetic is essentially incomplete"
later on
"The discovery that there are arithmetical truths which cannot be demonstrated formally does not mean that there truths which are forerver incapable of becoming known"
Godel's incompleteness theorem only refers to formal systems. Like the Principia Mathematica. It does not in any way refer to building a watch back together. A formal system is a system of logic based on its on consistency. Godel showed that using a set of axioms he could prove those axioms incorrect therefore destroying its own consistency.
I hope that clears things up.
The best education consists in immunizing people against systematic attempts at education. - Paul Feyerabend
Well, even the heliocentric model presented by Copernicus contained epicycles. Not quite as many as the Ptolemaic system (which was a mathematical mess by the 16th century as the general model was continually appended rather than torn down and rebuilt), but there were still definitely some. Copernicus created a heliocentric universe that had circular orbits for all of the bodies. Coming from the knowledge that planetary orbits are elliptical, we can see how this leads to problems. For example, if the position of Mars is charted nightly against the background of the stars, there will be instances where it appears to move one direction for a few nights, then stop, turn around, start moving backwards for awhile, then stop, turn around, and then proceed on its usual course!
The way to explain this sort of oddity and yet preserve your blessed circular orbits is to insert epicycles. The planets are traveling in circles while orbiting a central body (the sun, or the earth). With some tinkering, an epicyclic system can be constructed that fits fairly well with observations taken from the vantage point of earth, at least most of the time. Not all the time, mind you, which is why it too had some (in hindsight, again) rather pathetic attempts to patch it up, epicycles on the epicycles and rot like that. Heliocentric theories had been proposed before, as another poster mentioned, by Aristarchus in ancient times, and then Nicholas de Cusa in the 15th century. Both of these models suffered from the same type of complexity that the one put forth in De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium.
What made Copernicus different is that he worked out a real mathematical basis for his solar system. Copernicus also correctly realized that the system could be made simpler if the inner planets moved faster than the outer planets, and thus completed their orbits even faster than distance of the circle they covered alone would predict. This seems obvious now- inner orbits must move faster, because gravitational forces varies with the inverse square of distance, but Copernicus lived before Newton, so he wasn't operating with that knowledge. His system was incorrect, yes, but it was at least based on something more concrete than aesthetic value. It then fell to Kepler to divine the true mechanics of the Solar System. His calculations showed that if the orbits of the planets were ellipses, with the Sun at one focus (he introduced the word "focus" in this context, btw), then the whole epicycle thing wouldn't be necessary at all to fit experimental observations. Moving on ellipses meant that the planets did not move with constant velocity- they moved faster when closer to the sun, and slower when farther away. Combined with Copernicus's concept of the inner planets moving faster, bolstered with mathematical properties of ellipses to become Kepler's Third Law, the whole epicycle thing became pretty much unnecessary.
"FDA staff reviewers expressed concern about the number of patients who were left out of the study because they died."
in a sense.
he stated that there are proofs that can not be derived from a formal set of axioms and its transformational rules.
The best education consists in immunizing people against systematic attempts at education. - Paul Feyerabend
AFAIK the transistor was discovered largely by trial and error, and it took years before they figured out how it worked. Of course, understanding the theory certainly helped in making transistors smaller and smaller. As for your story idea, how do you figure they would program those computers?
I picked up a little book on this device in a supermarket in Rhodes 2 years ago for about 3 euro.
..
It was about 40 pages and alot of the history of the what was going on at the time, the story of how the thing was found, the investigation and rows over what it was afterwards, sketches of what was found, an sketches of an extrapolation of what the whole thing would looked like, etc
I cant remember if there was an ISBN code this but i'll check at home later if anyone is interested.
regrads
pthooper
Feynmann, was always so good a pointing out how guillible we can all be when presented with pseudo science from the clever schiester. This is clearly a fake, so mod parent up.
What was different about Columbus as compared to all the other people who had discovered America was that the recently invented printing press was used to make his discovery widely known.
Oh, how ignorant are classically educated people. No wonder they don't appreciate their own time. They are not of it and do
not understand it
Typical Feynmannian arrogance. His fellow physicist, C.P. Snow, recognized that there are in fact "two cultures" in modern society, and that natural scientists tend to be as ignorant of the humanities as scholars in the humanities are about the natural sciences.
Cutouts of the gears I think was something invented by clock makers to reduce gear inertia. Pendulums don't exert a lot of force. This wasn't something driven by a pendulum.
I can explain it. It is an actual Chrono Trigger that was left there by accident by some purple-haired boy from the future.
and it is considered good design factor, but it is also of questionable legality, at least in some major parts of the world (the EU, for instance). I still much prefer it, but attempting to make people do stuff that has questionable legality is ... not a good idea.
PS. I know that both the links in my posting are deep links - go figure :-)
Black holes are where God divided by zero
Shhhhhhh... How to build an assault battery of Covenant Plasma Arc Projectors is described in every Bible. We don't want Iraq to start building those things too...
I'll have you know, sir, that some people are not satisfied to leave things as they are. CERN has carefully combined and measured the products of the collision of an Antikythera and a Kythera. They hope to duplicate the experiment after fundraising and equipment adjustments. Results of the first experiment will be in the December issue of Antikythera Journal.
"Yeah I understood it, and yeah you are stretching it. Did you understand it?"
:) It was used in the sense of a metaphor. But your reply amused me (which is why I replied to your reply), got me to read the original article, and got me a lesson in using knowledge I really don't know that much about. ;)
What if I'm a Turing machine? Would you appreciate only certain asnswers to get convinced if I say I understood?
But, yes, I understood beforehand I was stretching Gödel's Proof a bit.
Cheers! It's a new sunny day!
When a British school casually mentioned that its science curriculum included Creationism, there was a huge furor. When it died down, Richard Dawkins commented that the clerics were doing a better job of promoting evolution and destroying creation than the Atheists were, and that they (the Atheists) were better off standing back and watching the masters at work.
Christian belief has never held that the Earth is flat. Neither has the Medievel Church, AKA Roman Catholicism, counted that assertion among the very many things that they got wrong over the years. IRL, the furor was over whether the Earth was the center of the universe or not. The RCC said yes, science said no.
Depending on your perspective, they were both right. Earth seems to be within 100 million lightyears of the centre of the universe, a cosmic stone's throw, whereas the science (IRL, the religion of Naturalism) which espouses a Big Bang doesn't admit to a universe with a centre (or edges) at all.
Science as we know it doesn't propose helicentrism. The situation described in the previous paragraph is galactocentrism, and science doesn't like that too much either.
Science in general, at least science as we know it, was started by Christians. The founder of Scientific American, for example, was a Christian and a Creationist. Pasteur, Paley, Newton were all Christian Creationists, along with many, many others. The idea of classifying animals doesn't make much sense from an Orthdox Darwinistic point of view, because you'd be expecting great randomness (many intermediates), little systematism; and a pagan point of view, all warring gods or mischevious spirits, wouldn't be oriented toward constancy or systematism either.
Christians, including Creationists, are still very strong in science despite centuries of propaganda war against the idea and the extreme difficulty of gaining or holding tenure while admitting Creationist ideals. For an example of such a scientist, the author of the world's most effective geodynamics modelling program, Terra, is a Creationist; another Creationist accurately predicted, from Creationist principles, what the magnetic fields of Neptune and Uranus would be like (quite different to everyone else's ideas) long before we put a suitably equipped probe past them to do measurements.
If you can be bothered looking, you will discover that many ancient civilisations weren't as primitive as they seemed. But because it speaks against orthodox Naturalistic science, the evidence which clearly shows this is treated as Winston Churchill describes: `Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing happened.'
Do be sure that you have some idea of what you're on about next time. (-:
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Wow. Kinda like the Christians. Only nicer.
To single out a group that has done that as if it wasn't the accepted world standard is silly. Not to defend religious wars of course, as on the whole the reasons wars are waged are pretty pathetic more often than not. It all comes down to power and aggression, with the reasons layered on top of that not truly relevant.
Now that i have stolen your idea, i must sell the rights to disney!!! Mwahahahaha.
Seriously, that is an interesting idea. Niven and pournelle had aliens that were almos the exact opposite of that, they had been bred to intrinsically understand science and engineering.
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
Agreed.
My flame was aimed at the parent poster who implied that behaviour of the Assyrians is tied to the behaviour of current Iraq. I believe that it can be shown the all groups of people have a history of behaviour unacceptable by modern western standards. If one was in a controvertial mood, one could say that modern western society behaves in ways which are unacceptable by modern western standards.
Important works - unfortunatly only in fragmentary form - from ancient times concerning sophisticated machinery include Hero of Alexandria's (another man supposed to have invented a steam engine) Pneumatica, Automatopoietica, Belopoiica and Cheiroballistra; Philon's De Ingeniis Spiritualibus; and Vitruvius's On Pneumatics for example.
Insanity is the last line of defence for the master diplomat. But you have to lay the groundwork early.
Looking at the second sentence, I was prepared to come after ya, but then I read the third sentence. There, I only disagree that it would be controversial. :)
ummm...how about Al-Biruni? or ibn Al-Haitham?
and let's not forget the granddaddy of computer science, Al-Khawarizmi.
i'm looking forward to learning how science as we know it was started by (cough) christians (cough).
united states nuclear device terrorist bioweapon encryption cocaine korea syria iran iraq columbia cuba
I didn't catch this story when it was first posted, but this device is a serious research interest of mine. (Blame Dava Sobel and her excellent "Longitude" - that book has cost me a small fortune, and set me to learning about globes, clocks, sundials, armillary spheres, orreries, tellurians, chonometers, sextants, octants, latitude hooks, astrolabes, backstaffs, Nathaniel Bowditch, and who knows what all else...)
/.'s inane posting system to make them all clickable. Whaddya want for free?)
http://www.grand-illusions.com/antikyth.htm: //www.csd.uch.gr/~venturas/index2.htm. giant.net.au/users/rupert/kythera/kythe ra2.htmh era/kythe ra5.htmt p://www.ballarat.edu.au/student/cc6rmr/kythera/ kythera.htmr chimedes/Sphe re/SphereSources.html~ crorres/Archimedes/Sphe re/SphereIntro.htmli ce/usna_pap.htmlu blic.htmc e/Students /Jesse/CLOCK1A.htmld u/GreekScience/Studen ts/Jesse/differ.gifd u/GreekScience/Studen ts/Jesse/antik.gif1 031.htm
I got the fever so bad I even had Amazon hunt me down a $150 copy of Price's book (this was several years ago, long before they bought bibliofind and had theri current network of used book shops.)
Anyway, I can't post the book of course, because I fully respect and support copyright law, but I do have a fairly extensive list of links about the Antikythera mechanism that might be useful for those just beginning to be infected with curiosity about the gadget: (Sorry, there are so many of these I'm not jumping through
http://www.ams.org/new-in-math/cover/diff1.html
http://www.ams.org/new-in-math/cover/kyth1.html
http
http://www
http://www.giant.net.au/users/rupert/kyt
http://www.math.utsa.edu/ecz/ak.html
ht
http://www.mcs.drexel.edu/~crorres/A
http://www.mcs.drexel.edu/
http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/rr
http://uranus.ee.auth.gr/TMTh/p
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/GreekScien
http://hydra.perseus.tufts.e
http://hydra.perseus.tufts.e
http://www.uh.edu/engines/epi
Enjoy.
P.S:
I think Rob Rice's paper may be one of the most interesting overall, if only because it goes a long way toward suggesting that the knowledge to build such a device might correlate with the substantial evidence that the Rhodian navy had unmatched navigational and command and control capabilities, including the ability to navigate and coordinate the motions of fleets at night, giving them an impressive strategic advantage over all opponents.
"The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last