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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?"
hunt, homebrew beer/wine, tan animal hides.... you know.... the red-blooded american things.
Yep, I never spell check.
More incorrect spellings can be found he
Because art is nifty, and because it's a massive leap to go from tweaking stuff with keyboard and mouse to actually scratching stuff onto a copper surface with an etching needle. Because it's fun squishing stuff under the thousands of pounds of pressure in the printing press. Because there is a bit of a puzzle figuring out how to get proper textures with aquatint, mezzoting, engraving, or drypoint, or stippling.... Nifty stuff, really.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
I roast my own coffee beans. Coffee has been around since the Dark ages and known in the West since the Renaissance so it's not really ancient. Besides, everyone roasted coffee until the late 19th century. It didn't come in cans until then. Still, it predates electronics and such. (As far as we know ...)
Jim
A dyslexic man walks into a bra.
I was fortunate enough to work at an 18th century living history museum many summers, weekends, and holidays as a blacksmith. Nearly twenty years later, I am still impressed at how much can be done with steel and fire. The technology of tempering is ancient, and the same metalurgical chemistry is used everywhere today in instrument sharpening, oxidization resistiveness, and high strength/weight component design such as in an F1 racecar (when they choose to drive them).
You can set up your own blacksmith shop now for not much more than some fireclay, an old hairdryer blower, some coal fuel, an short piece of railroad track turned upside down for an anvil (always used a forged metal, never cast) and a hammer. Although if I did it these days, I would be more disciplined about wearing hearing protection.
There is no need to use a SlashDot sig for SEO...
Well that's easy. I would have been a pirate.
Many geeks would have probably been monks; it's a structured environment where personality quirks wouldn't be a problem.
Many would perhaps be smiths; blacksmiths, armorsmiths, glassworkers, etc. All types of smithing requires an advanced knowledge of the craft, with nuances more intricate than any xfree86 config file. What makes geeks tick is not sci-fi itself, or computers themselves, it's systems. Geeks love systems. Systems of numbers, systems of logic, computer systems, pen and paper games rules systems, computer language systems. Even non-geeks like systems. Physical Sports are systems; they are self consistent rule-based constructions. Geeks are merely overly obsessed with certain systems, such as the stars, or physics, or computer languages, much like an autistic person could be obsessed with anything, but he chooses a certain something. So perhaps any intricate systematic smithing craft would appeal to the ancient geek.
Amen to this.
I wanted to make my own cider, and despite my love for Cider, my new first love is Mead, and its near cousins, melomels, cysers....mmmmm
My first 1 gallon batch of mead recently hit its stride finally. Dear GAWD is that stuff good.
I swear, if you ever get a good mead, you'll never drink beer again. I'm not kidding, I'm dead serious. I have 5 gallons of strawberry melomel going right now, and another 5 gallons of some dark cider that has been going since mid-october. Both are far superior to their off-the-shelf alternatives, and these are just my first tries!
Resources?
The BrewBoard
and if you wish to take my advice on the mead specifically:
The Compleat Meadmaker by Ken Schramm
That second link *is* an Amazon link, but not a referral link, so I'm not whoring.
Oh, and yes, I did spell "compleat" correctly. Took me forever to find the book the first time. Oops.
Karma: Chameleon (mostly due to the fact that you come and go).
Yes. Gardening.
Its geeky, in its own way.
Not only do you have layout, planting times, and organic methods, but there are loads of experimentation available.
Do you want to use the French-Intensive method of gardening? How about the traditional method? Blocks or rows?
This year, I'm experimenting with rooting suckers from tomato plants and seeing if the new plants are worthwhile producers. I'm also trying to plant late corn in between flowering beans. (I like to maximize my yeild from a small space.) Next year, I'm going to try interplanting lettuce and tomatoes, hoping that the tomatoes will keep the lettuce cool enough to extend the growing season. I'll also try more mulch next year, I think.
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.
... would you like fries with that?
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+1 sarcastic
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.
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
I'm pretty sure many would get into clocks, clockworks, automats and mechanical toys.
There's been a long geek tradition with making automats and mechanical toys, and funny enough the Japanese in the Edo period (1600 onwards) were really good at that stuff, because "inventions" were not allowed in that era. The feudal lords were afraid "inventions" could be used against them, so only fun automats ("karakuri ningyo" etc.) were considered harmless enough, that people were allowed to "invent" if it was for mechanical toys and automats. This started a real boom of the production of ever more amazing geek gadgets.
There are two rules for success:
1. Never tell everything you know.
A lot of "geeks" I know are all members of the SCA. SCA arts and sciences encompass a wide range of reasonably geeky activities, including but not limited to brewing beer, smithing armour and weapons, leatherworking, costuming, fighting in armour, archery and so on.
A large amount of effort and detail is put into the crafting of authentic armour and weaponry, and the enthusiasm and energy dedicated to these tasks often exclude the demands of a more normal, healthy lifestyle, thus making these a small part of larger geekdom.
I am government man, come from the government. The government has sent me. -- G.I.R.
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.
Ok, this is from a thousand-year old Roman engineering textbook I perused many years ago.
One of the first things a Roman engineer would do on any building site is locate a spring to supply him with water. In order to do this, the engineer would get up before sunrise and lie down on the top of a hill, facing downhill. As the sun rose, tendrils of mist would appear in certain places on the ground. The engineer would note their location, and he would dig in those spots to produce a water supply.
The reason this works? The mist appears where the water table is closer to the surface. By digging, you go below the water table, and the hole will naturally fill up with water over time. This water can be filtered and used.
Isn't that neat?
Farewell! It's been a fine buncha years!
What were engineers doing over 2k years ago? How about building the Antikythera Mechanism (web copy of a June 1959 Scientific American article, p60-7)
An amazingly complex, intricate, and accurate mechanical astronomical calculation device from 80 BC. Found in a shipwreck in 1900, and not fully reverse engineered until 1973, there are no other examples of this level technology in the ancient world.
"It is hard to exaggerate the singularity of this device, or its importance in forcing a complete re-evaluation of what had been believed about technology in the ancient world. For this box contained some 32 [brass] gears, assembled into a mechanism that accurately reproduced the motion of the sun and the moon against the background of fixed stars, with a differential [gear] giving their relative position and hence the phases of the moon."
You can see a reconstructed version of the Antikythera Mechanism here. Another article detailing the probable creation date of the device based on the construction of the gears can be found here"
Another article makes the conjecture that ancient navigators could have used the Antikythera Mechanism to determine longitude via the position of the moon (1800 years before longitude calculation was perfected in England)
Ben in DCBen in DC
"It's the mark of an educated mind to be moved by statistics" Oscar Wilde
These people, in Renessance times, were typically sponsored by rich patrons, who took care of the mundane needs whilst they got on with inventing or whatever. It made for a society that evolved culturally and technologically faster than anything that had preceeded it.
Geeks would likely also have been explorers - it is very likely that St. Brenden "The Navigator" (who sailed from Ireland to Newfoundland in about 600 AD in a leather dinghy) was a geek at heart. There was a lot to discover, and required a mind agile at problem-solving along with fantastic patience, as they would be doing a great deal of nothing much.
You find hints of geekdom in gnostic and hellenistic thought and religion, suggesting early geeks may have been heavy into religion. Again, no great surprise - geeks love answering things, and for a long time, those were the best answers anyone could devise.
Cave painters may well have been geeks, too. One set of cave paintings in England would have been a few hundred feet under an ice sheet at the time they were painted. Someone shimmied down an ice crevice for the sole purpose of dawbing animals that couldn't possibly have existed there on the walls. That guy was NOT normal.
Brewers, throughout history, have experimented with different sources of sugars, flavours, etc. Since wild yeast can take many forms, and since many ingredients would have been expensive, they would undoubtably have researched methods of sustaining the active ingredient in much the same way that modern kids brew their own "ginger beer plants" by splitting bottles and topping up with fresh ingredients to keep the yeast alive.
The vertical loom and tablet weaving, both parts of Norse tradition, involved some highly complex thought and engineering on the part of their inventers and practicioners. Even the Viking longships - which would slide up beaches and could then be used to carry cargo from raids by reversing the oars - show considerable evidence of highly creative thought.
I think it safe to say that geeks throughout history have been much as they are today, excpet maybe more influential, as many of the trades I've mentioned have had considerable status and power in their times.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
It seems -- and this may be somewhat cynical of me -- that an ancient geek would have had a life approximately like thus ( where the timeline is from pre-history up to, say, the 17th or 18th century:
1) Born into violence, filth, and disease.
2) Eek out a life of scavenging or farming, paying taxes to your lord, having some children, most of whom will die before a couple years old, until:
3) war, or some other tribal/religious/cultural dispute.
4) death at 20.
This hypothetical geek from BCE 5000 or AD 1600 might have been the next Einstein, or Stephen Hawking, or anything we can imagine. But he'd never have had the time, opportunity or resources to do anything with it.
We're NOT smarter than previous humans, we just have an *unprecendented* level of peace and prosperity. We have developed a culture where people have the opportunity *not* to toil and die at an early age.
Finally, this success isn't evenly distributed, yet. A fair amount of humanity still lives the way our ancestors did centuries ago.
lorem ipsum, dolor sit amet
You need to study more history. In most ancient cultures smiths were mystical figures, who gave up much for their mastery.
For example, an ancient goidelic bronze-smith's life was generally short and often ended in madness due to the lack of forced ventilation technology. The arsenic and heavy metals naturally occuring in ores acculumated in the body and induced illness and psychosis. Consequently the smiths were often unable to have normal children; so of course fathers did not want their daughters to marry smiths. A smith who wished to marry might have to steal or buy a bride.
The inherited, rigidly defined social and occupational classes you're talking about are a feature of medieval and post-medieval (c.g. Renaissance and Modern) culture, and are very rare in truly ancient times. In ancient times fostering and apprenticeships were more the norm, and typically a smith chose his apprentices or fosterlings based on aptitude and ability.
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
But Herr Heisenberg, how does the electron know when I'm looking?