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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."
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'.
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
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.
The Catholic Church knew the earth was round. (Read Dante's "Divine Comedy" if you don't believe me). Their mistake was to insist that the earth be considered the center of the universe.
Of course, back then the universe was the earth, the sun, the moon, a bunch of stars that seemed to move in sync, and four lights that moved independently, so it was less grandiose to suppose that the earth could be in the middle of it all.
Then Galileo saw some lights going around one those four lights, and in time that really blew the lid off the whole thing.
Even so, it took people quite a while to figure out that there are these 'galaxy' objects, and that we are inside of one.