What Ancient Tech Do You Do?

neonfrog asks: "Before silicon, before electricity even, what the heck did those of us with geek brains do? Our brains have not evolved appreciably in half an eon (at least mine hasn't, but I may be descended from turtles). What would today's programmers have been doing centuries before the invention of the keyboard? What would an electrical engineer be doing a millennia or three before the concept of resistors and capacitors? What piqued their curiosity? Were their skills esoteric or exotic? They can't all have been Leonardo Da Vincis or court 'magicians', right? Summer's starting and, for some, it's hobby time. I bet the Slashdot community harbors quite a few Journeyman, or even Masters. I know a lot of geeks are beer-makers (and I do so appreciate you folk ... urp!) so there's no danger of that knowledge getting lost. What other ancient tech do you indulge in and keep alive? What are some good resources?"

Comments

Sailing

[southern]

I try to get out sailing after work everyday in the summer. Yes there is a navigation computer on board, but basics haven't change since humans took to the sea.

Re:Sailing

[g-san]

I'd agree. Take the basics of knots for example. You have knots that slip, knots that don't slip, knots that come undone easy under a load, knots you can trust for a few hours and knots you can trust for months, and those knots that you never tie because they don't hold or are known to get stuck. Knots that are functional, knots that are pretty and knots that are both. Those knots have been in use for hundreds of years, and there is a reason... they work.

It's also very fuzzy and analog. The wind changes direction and speed, the current changes, you have waves, you sail trim may be dead on or not. There is no such thing as staying on a heading of 270 exactly for two hours. The weather for tomorrow may be what is predicted or may not, you learn to watch the water and the sky. Sure there are electronics on board, but if you are out on a clear day, it's all by your senses of sight, touch and hearing. Very unlike this binary behemoth that earns me my living (and pays for the slip.) And what I know about sailing will still be good in 5 or ten years, unlike most computer related topics.

Religion stifles advancement in our species

[Anonymous Coward]

Before silicon, before electricity even, what the heck did those of us with geek brains do? Oh, the geeks have only recently been truly free:
Archimedes, the father of calculus, has his ancient texts bleached and written over with religious mumbo jumbo. Over 1800 years passed before Newton 're-discovered' calculus.
Galileo proclaimed that the earth wasn't the center of it all. Then the Catholic church made him recant (this was the time of the Inquisition which killed a friend of his just a few years before). (it was only in 1992 that the Catholic Church said Galileo wasn't such a bad guy, and that was after 12 years of arguing)
More recently Louis Pasteur, a lifelong rationalist, had his crazy ideas of bacteria and disease poo-poo'd by various religious leaders.

Seeing a trend? Ancient geeks were free to test and invent only so long as the results agreed with the religious diatribe of the day.

Re:Religion stifles advancement in our species

[Monty_Lovering]

Actually you'll find that compared to say, Islam, Christianity was very backward until the renaissance.

The Arabic Islamic world was the most advanced civilisation in the early centuries of the second millennium, whilst the European Christian world was stagnated around the bits of Greek science they could understand.

In addition to developing from the knowledge of the Greeks in such areas as medicine, they developed our modern mathematical characters and the idea of 0. They also developed a law system where Christians and Jews could peacefully co-exist in Islamic countries, albeit as second class citizens.

This was a far cry from the situation in Europe where anyone who was non-Christian in the same period was likely to end up dead. Even being suspected of something like witchcraft (normally an elderly woman with some property but no surviving relatives, funny that, eh?) was a death sentence, unless of course you weighed more than a duck.

Somehow the Muslims in power were more able to tolerate the advance of science than the Christians in power during the same period.

So the original post seems to be fair in its focus on Christianity as a bad example of established power structures fighting progress with dogma.

And it still goes on; eggs, sperm, zygotes, blastoclysts and embryos with less nerve tissue than a per rat are claimed to have equal rights to born humans by the Roman Catholic Church.

Jehovah's Witnesses oppose the transfusion of blood.

Fundamental Christians deny the vast level of supporting evidence for an ancient naturalistically formed Universe where life developed under the control of natural selection, and insist on a literal 7 x 24-hour day creation. ... of course there are Muslims and Hindus capable of equivalent stupidity, plus stuff like Mormons, Scientologists, etc., but Christianity seem to win the contest as 'religion most likely to stifle scientific advancement'.

Look at the lobby groups now most opposed to stem cell research...

food for the animals

[josepha48]

.. probably most geeks would be dead, with our bad eyesight, and all, only a few really smart ones would be saved ..

Musician

[hoggoth]

It's not tech, but I bet a lot of geek minds that are attracted to programming languages are also attracted to the languages of music.

Also designing and building musical instruments would be pretty geeky even in the 16th century.

Engineering and Mathematics

[dutky]

Both engineering and mathematics are ancient disciplines, with origins dating back almost as far as written history itself. The ancient Babylonians, Sumerians and Egyptians were aware of mathematics to the extent that they were able to contruct mathematical proofs for the same geometric theorems that we all learned in high school. These same cultures obviously had a superb understanding of engineering in order to be able to build monumental architechture that stood for millenia, all without the benefit algebra or decimal arithmetic (much less, calculus).

There is no reason to think that the sorts of folks that became engineers or mathematicians 5000 years ago were, tempermentally, any differnt from the sorts of folks that become engineers or mathematicians today.

There were, no doubt, other highly skilled and technical professions that would have attracted ancient geeks: other's have mentioned smithing, scribing is another possability (just being literate enough to read and write was analogous to the general level of education of most geeks today), as is accountancy (conducting simple arithmetic without the benefit of decimal numbers must have required great patience and dedication). In the far east, at least since about 200 B.C., there was a good chance that anyone with reasonable education would have become a government functionary under the Confucian civil service system. I also suspect that, in other times, when people's conception of the world was very different from ours, many geeks may have gone into fields that would seem highly esoteric by modern standards: ancient geeks may have become musicians, artists, poets or monks as a means of persuing the life of the mind.

Finally, we should recognize the uncomfortable fact that most ancient geeks probably never got the opportunity to persue any career whatsoever. Throughout most of history, most people, no matter what their personal interests or inate abilities, were destined to be peasant farmers, servants, slaves or other bondsmen, like their fathers and grandfathers and so on. The idea that people, no matter what their station by birth, should be able (or even required) to choose their path in life, is a thoroughly modern concept.

Railroading...

[Pig Hogger]

Between my first job and my second job, I spent a summer in a railroad museum in Vermont, where I touched to many rail trades, from painting old cars to firing a steam engine. If ever I was sent 100 years in the past, I'll go working on the railroad...

They struggled to survive, like everybody else.

[nerdup]

A hundred or a thousand years ago, large portions of the population didn't have time to sit at their desks and play around with "hobbies". If your entire waking life is spent trying to scrape a living out of semi-fertile ground on one leg because you lost the other one to infection after dropping a rock on your toe, your options for being a geek are limited. SCA fantasies notwithstanding, if you lived in the middle ages it didn't matter how smart or creative you were if you were born to the wrong parents. If you had a brain for math and logic, you would be free to think about such things while digging up weeds, but applying them to any sort of nerdy pursuit was way beyond the means of your average (read: non-noble) person.

It's only in the last hundred or so years that our technology and standard of living has allowed non-wealthy people to fulfil their potential regarding intellectual pursuits. Asking what "nerds" did before there were computers and high technology is like asking what fighter pilots did before there were planes... they worked at normal jobs trying to survive, just like everybody else.

Re:History of the Ancient Geeks

[phixson]

Monks yep. You could renounce your worldly existence and join an order.

Smiths nope. Unless you were rich, in which case you had actual education and intellectual opportunities, you did whatever you were _born_ to. If your family were farmers, you were a farmer, period. We tend to project our current state of affairs into our speculations about the past. This is fun, but it has no effect on history.

Until the very recent past, there were geniuses laying bricks and plowing fields because the simple fact was, no matter how smart you were, there was no opportunity to use your brain to make a living. Maybe you could invent a better way to lay bricks? Maybe, but remember, there have been many other brick layers smarter than you and they didn't.

If we're really honest, most of us, lucky as we are to be coding, are not really advancing the state of anything now. We're laying bricks. Granted with Java/C++/Python instead of clay and mud, but still laying bricks.

At least we got to choose to be brick layers.

Hahaha

[marcus]

You really don't know much about much about farming do you?

Try blacksmithing when you don't control the fire or the availability of the quench water.

How well do you handle different ores? Can you actually make a decent alloy from the dirt on the ground?

Oh well, I'm still educating city kids.

I did spend this last weekend with an axe and some trees. It's great whole body physical exercise, and beats meditation to smithereens as far as the ease of mental focus and achievement of Zen is concerned.

Re:Make mead.

[bill_mcgonigle]

That second link *is* an Amazon link, but not a referral link, so I'm not whoring.

Well, for Pete's sake, put a referrer link in there next time. I mean, you're providing us with useful information and it's not like I'm going to save money if you don't put a referrer link in there - Amazon is simply going to keep the profit.

Now, who would I rather see the money go to, Amazon or Numbski? That's easy.

If you were selling your book there might be a conflict of interest, but Amazon has nearly every book in existence so this is just a matter of who gets the money, and contrary to the comments of some on Slashdot, there's nothing wrong with making money for your work.

WRT naturalistically formed universe

[anomaly]

You said:Fundamental Christians deny the vast level of supporting evidence for an ancient naturalistically formed Universe where life developed under the control of natural selection

I would certainly be described as one of those "Fundamental" Christians, and I must respectfully take issue with your point.

People who believe as I do do not deny the evidence. We collect evidence and draw inferences from it to see how that fits into our view of how the universe works. To be fair, this is precisely what naturalists do. We all share the same evidence. We differ in the meaning of the evidence and the explanations that accompany the evidence. Only a fool would reject solid evidence.

You also said:Christianity seem to win the contest as 'religion most likely to stifle scientific advancement'

I'll take issue with that as well. While it is true that many who claimed the name and power of the Christian church have abused that power and have done despicable things, that is not consistent with Christian beliefs. The list of Christians who have offered up significant scientific advances includes:
Johann Kepler, Francis Bacon, Blaise Pascal, Robert Boyle, Charles Babbage, Samuel F. B. Morse, Gregor Mendel, Louis Pasteur, Henri Fabre, Lord William Thompson Kelvin, Joseph Lister, George Washington Carver, Wernher von Braun, and many others.

To suggest that scientific advancement is inherently incompatible with Christianity is simply not inclusive of the facts.

Look at the lobby groups now most opposed to stem cell research...

Embryonic stem cell research is definitely opposed on moral grounds.

Adult stem cell research - the area that shows therapeutic benefit TODAY is not morally out of bounds and is helping people to live a more healthy life. This is GOOD science, and should be promoted.

Embryonic stem cell research is different. We believe that all human life is sacred and that no human should be killed to make life easier or healthier for someone else. The science shows that these zygotes are inherently human - that all that is required for a person to grow from a fertilized egg is food and shelter.

Science's technological reach has exceeded its moral grasp in this area. Science has long existed in a realm where there were moral guidelines on appropriate research. e.g. People must know that they are part of an experiment, and what the risks are, etc. I feel strongly that one day, the conventional scientific wisdom will look on this and say 'oops' we messed that one up.

FWIW - While I've not seen it written this way elsewhere, I rather like the idea of a "Fundamental Christian" over the moniker "fundamentalist" As a Fundamental Christian, I hold fast to the tenets of the historic Christian faith, which is somewhat different from the connotation of a fundie as described on /.

Respectfully,
Anomaly

Re:WRT naturalistically formed universe

[Monty_Lovering]

As you're getting into this;

"1. The existence and complexity of the universe"

This is what I call the green hat paradox. Some religionists maintain that it is impossible the complexicty around arose without a designer. They cannot answer the question of where the complexity represented by that designer arose.

It is like a man with a green hat saying you can't belive what someone is saying as they are wearing a green hat. The very insistance on a designer for complex systems invalidates their own belif as they cannot provide a designer for the complex ssytem that is their 'start conditon'.

Political manuevering has resulted in the spawning of Intelligent Design. If anything ever cralwd out of the abortion bucket, it is ID. Talk about a oxymoron; it's a self-falsifying theory.

"2. The accuracy of the biblical record"

Like saying there was Global Flood when there is no evidence for it and direct evidence against it?

"3. The evidence of the changed lives of the people who knew Jesus personally
4. The evidence of the way that my relationship with Jesus Christ has changed my life."

These claims are not unique, they are made by believers in the paranormal, by scientologists, by alien abductees, by healthfood fanatics, by reformed addicts, by other religonists outside of the Christian traditon. They just change who they give credit to.

As for any internal proof, I'd recommend you learn more about auto-suggestion and dwell on the fact the shaman of a tribe of neolithic hunter-gatherers ALSO believes he is right because of his internalised experiences with the spirit being he believes in.

You seem to base your opposition to abortion on the loss of POTENTIAL. What about the loss of potential for a woman who is not in a postion to raise a child? What about the loss of potential to children born in developing countries or to disadvantaged familes? How come the minute a baby is born all this talk about loss of potential goes away? The stance you have is niot consistant unless you take step to ensure the loss of potential is also prevented from happening once a child is born.

However, unless you are able to counter evidence I presented in my other post to you (that there is no Biblical prohibition against abortion even though logically there would be if the writer had wanted there to be one), all you are doing is supporting a Pharasitical elaboration of Biblical law, and I'm sure you know what Jeus thought of the Pharasees.

You say you are doing gods will, but I see no evidenece for it in this respect, so that even if one accepts the existence of god all you're doing is expressing a personal opinion you've copied of someone else, not a law that can be shown to be divinely inspired.
I think the main problem with the abortion debate (other than it being approached from two different paradigms whose arguments are largely meaningless to each other) is that at 12 weeks gestation, whilst a baby is a tiny 2" long human being in appearance, that is where the similarity ends. In terms of neurologica complexity (the thing that arguably makes us human), there is no comparison.

If cats had scales and long flicky tongues people would like them far less. They are cute and cuddly, even if they are totally self-centred couch parasites. Likewise, if 12 week-old fetuses had scales, or were still an amphorus blob, there just would not be the issue.

Because it LOOKS like a tiny little human being, people think it is. But it isn't, not in any meaninful fashion, even when compared to a new-born.