Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Automata On The March

Posted by Hemos on from the the-joy-of-playing dept.

OldSchool writes "The Morris Museum (NJ) was recently awarded The Murtogh D. Guinness Collection of 700 historic mechanical musical instruments and automata (mechanical figures). The extraordinary collection represents one of the most significant of its kind in the world. There's pictures, demos, and animation of these devices at the museum website."

1 of 53 comments (clear)

  1. Re:um, yeah by Trurl's+Machine · · Score: 4, Interesting

    To begin with, to help all fellow nerds to understand that terms such as "cybernetics", "algorithm" or even "program" are not directly related to microchip-based modern computers. The term cyber- is often foolishly interpreted as "something computerlike" (especially in media buzzwords such as cyberporn or cyberbusiness) while it comes from ancient Greek (kybernetikos) and means actually "steering". I think it's good for any nerd worth its name to abstract sometimes from modern computer hardware and think of the whole theory of steering and algorithms in its pure form.

    By the way: since pornography comes also from ancient Greek and means "depiction of a whore", cyberporn literally could be translated to "steering whore". Hmmmmm...