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Workings of Ancient Calculating Device Deciphered
palegray.net writes "Scientists have discovered new meaning behind the functions of the Antikythera Mechanism, which has been referred to as the oldest known analog computing device. In addition to providing a means to calculate the dates for solar eclipses, the device apparently tracked the four-year cycles of the Olympiad. From the New York Times article: 'Only now, applying high-resolution imaging systems and three-dimensional X-ray tomography, have experts been able to decipher inscriptions and reconstruct functions of the bronze gears on the mechanism. The latest research has revealed details of dials on the instrument's back side, including the names of all 12 months of an ancient calendar.'"
Does it run Linux?
it was about time...
Ever to excel
At first glance, I read this as "Workings of Ancient Calculating Divorce Deciphered."
Good to know that the darn things were as hard to calculate to the "Ancients" as they are today!
Proudly supporting the Libertarian Party.
For those interested here are the data sets and some nifty images available to download:
The Data
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
when they found it, it was flashing 12.
... what Stargate Atlantis's next McGuffin-centric episode will be about.
I've always marveled at the "how did they do that" nature of such discoveries and honestly makes me realize an incredible loss of knowledge and skill occurred somewhere in the past (Dark Ages perhaps) that set us back thousands of years.
... also the first known example of "feature creep"
Haha, X-rays decipher your transcriptions! Someone forgot to do a wipe before throwing away the computer.
The article is dated tomorrow. NYT needs a device for calculating time more precisely.
.. paranoid crackpot leftover from the days of Amiga.
now we, computer geeks, can claim ancient greek heritage.
how cool is that, hmmm ?
What ? Me, worry ?
Isn't this the eighth or ninth time this year that they've "discovered" the inner workings of this damn thing?
There are some people that if they don't know, you can't tell 'em.
how do we use it to open a stable wormhole to other planets?
-Ours is the wisdom of Solomon, the magic of Merlyn, the fall of Icaris.
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v454/n7204/abs/nature07130.html
But some idiot lost the boot cog and it won't work with any known version of GRUB, LILO, SYSLINUX or LOADLIN :(
Historians speculate that if someone could get it to boot up, it would run faster than a modern PC running Vista!
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
With your bronze gears and such tomfoolery. Back in my day we sisn't even have abacuses. We had to count everything by hand, do the math in our heads, and remember it!
Now get off my lawn, and take your newfangled gizmo with you!
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
Once they finish working this out, I would really be interested if someone manages to reproduce a working version.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
Nevermind. I have been trolled by wikipedia.
-molo
Using your sig line to advertise for friends is lame.
I think it read "Proof of license -- Certificate of Authenticity -- See License Terms -- Label not to be sold seperately".
Bad example; when working as a speech-writer for legal disputes, Demosthenes was actually criticized for revealing his arguments to his opponents before trial; though considered unethical at the time, that approach seems pretty consistent with open source. He also published all of his speeches so that students could learn from them; again, very much an open source practice.
Don't let the patent trolls know any of this. I am sure they each have ten patents on the operation of this device.
That would have been a card that read Olympia! Where else would they hold the Olympic games?
.. paranoid crackpot leftover from the days of Amiga.
The wikipedia article indicates that people think the device was designed with compactness in mind. So why would you add the feature of calculating when 4 years had passed? It's already keeping track of the months, so couldn't you just count them as they went past? Did I miss something?
Didn't your mother teach you not to do things you would be ashamed to see on the evening news?
It seems to use the Metonic calendar.
Okay, it computes dates. So does it also end on December 21, 2012?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Psh...if you were using a compiled language like C you probably would have gotten first post.
So my point here is that "scientific" computer models should be greeted with skepticism, even when they accurately predict. They should be absolutely scorned when they fail to accurately predict. There are a whole bunch of "scientists" out there running computer similations that are far less predictive than this device that is likey based on a geocentric theory of the universe.
An ancient doping clock/calendar.
Once they finish working this out, I would really be interested if someone manages to reproduce a working version.
You could build a Beowulf cluster of them!
28 days each.
Then there's new years day, but that's just a blur.
YKIMS.
Deleted
This device seems to have the ability to accurately predict the future as well. According to the date on TFA, the article hasn't even been published yet!
Truly a marvel of ancient ingenuity! (all sarcasm aside)
The original Roman calendar had ten months, yes, and actually only covered about 300 days, with most of winter considered off-calendar. However, by tradition, the second Roman king, Numa Pompilius reformed this calendar and added January and February (at the end of the calendar), giving the year 12 months (and so at this time, the names of December, etc. as numbered months still made sense). This was the calendar used (with modifications) from roughly 700 BC to the introduction of the Julian calendar in 46BC. The calendar of Numa Pompilius ended up with some crazy leaps and intercalations to keep it reasonably in line with the solar year, so reform was definitely due.
In doing so, the Romans consulted with Greek astronomers, who had a lot of data about such things (though the Julian calendar is merely a solar calendar that keeps pretty good time with the moon, and not a true lunisolar calendar like one based on the Metonic cycle would be). Greece at the time of the Antikythera mechanism (about 50-100 years earlier than the Julian reform), had in fact just come under Roman control.
In addition to reforming the "leap" system, January got pushed to the start of the year, making the "number-names" months no longer descriptive, and the months of Quintilis and Sextilis were renamed for Julius Caesar and Augustus Caesar, respectively.
"FDA staff reviewers expressed concern about the number of patients who were left out of the study because they died."
The didn't exactly LIKE one another but they intermarried and got along. Alexander the Great (or rather more to the point, his father Phillip the Great) was Macedonian and would come to rule pretty much all the Greek Islands and (by the end of Alexander's life) most the known ancient world all the way to India.
There is clear references in Alexander's diary that he suffered some discrimination as a child for being a Macedonian but it was like the difference between a modern-day Scottish and Welsh. Very much like that actually. Ultimately the political differences were small and the cultural differences even smaller. Small enough for Macedonians to become the first Greek emperors anyway.
Now as for Macedonians having been Slavic - that is a bit of a stretch, the slavic nations as we typically think of them didn't really come into their own for close on a thousand years AFTER the time of Alexander, though they outlasted the Romans by a bit they appeared around the same time.
I would say it's plausable that the Slavics may have had Macedonian ancestry, since Macedonia was quite possibly the first settlement of any kind of civilization in Europe but that far back we have almost no evidence of anything and that is pure conjecture. The Slavics could just as easily have been there 10 thousand years earlier and just not left any earlier evidence. To say they may be descended from Macedonians is plausable, but no more so than to say they may have been the descendents of interbreeding between early homo-sapiens and early homo-Neanderthalenses that only developed into a more structured society later. Their highly barbarian society (as opposed to the highly tribal Greeks and Macedonians) doesn't really fit with a RECENT common descent though (for what my gutt feeling is worth - which is at least as much as any other person who studied ancient cultural history).
In the end, the only thing we know for an absolute fact about descent more than one thousand years old is that we are probably ALL descended from Africans our earliest human ancestors were probably dark skinned. Even THEN there are things we do not know - like did the Australian Aborigines split off from the same people who migrated to Europe ? Or did they reach Australia before the continents split ?
There is no way to know short of DNA research which nobody has done yet.
*No, the fact that it is written down is NOT proof to a historian. Alexander probably wouldn't lie about being Macedonian as it must have put a crimp on his career prospects, but we cannot know that he DIDN'T - and a king could easilly pretty damn sure that nothing ever gets written down that contradicts his story - so seriously, we have no real proof. Only tiny bits of supporting evidence, history is trying to figure out the most sensible explanations for them, knowing one of your students will probably come up with something better than you did and be too lazy to write in his paper.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
There are 12 lunar periods. I have never heard that the Greeks had 10 months.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
If it was written in assembly it would have posted before the story. :)
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
Why back in my day we could't afford anything so fancy as fingers and toes. No We had to use Henges to calculate our maths.
Every morning I had to get up and trudge 200 mile through snow to get a 20 ton piece of rock and then drag it all the way down to Salisbury just to do me multiplication table.
How did it work? Did it have springs?
Bert
4 8 15 16 23 42
That's just silly. Where then did Jesus's brothers ands sisters come from? (Mark 6:3)
Before you reply, get your minds out of the gutter. Of course Joseph "knew" his wife. I think that was the mangu's point.
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
Only in Europe, and only because anyone who wrote a book without the Church approval would be burned at the stake. But what about the rest of the world? While the monks in Europe were copying their religious texts, the rest of the world was inventing Damascus steel and the number zero, among many other things.
The monks in Europe were so blinded by their faith they couldn't see the brightest supernova in historic times. Not a single mention to one of the most remarkable natural events ever seen on Earth. No wonder they call it the DARK Age!
Well, I'm an atheist (ok, more agnostic) and swift to blame religion myself. Butm to be entirely fair, I'm not sure why you blame the church there.
1. The early Franks were pretty proud that they're warriors, not scribes. They're not the only ones.
Charlemagne was the first monarch there who even tried to learn to write. Very late in life and, while he must be commended for his real efforts and time dedicated, it seems to have gone nowhere.
2. Antiquity itself wasn't that much more literate. Yes, in the middle ages only the rich learned to read and write. Guess what? The Hellots of Sparta and the poor of Rome, but especially _outside_ Rome weren't much richer and nobody taught them to read and write. And even in Egypt, while for the rich it was a thing of _pride_ to be literate (and addressing a letter "to your scribe" was a form of flattery, meaning, "I know you're your own scribe"), don't think that the poor working the fields had time to go to school.
We have a somewhat distorted view of Greece and Rome, in that basically we have a distorted tunnel view of it. We see the greatness of Athens at its peak, or Sparta... which were populated only with rich slave owners, whose only job was to be soldiers and philosophers. Athens additionally had managed to cheat the other Greek states, who had joined as _allies_ against Persia, with Athens as merely heading and organizing the army and funds, but found themselves actually turned into vassals of Athens and paying tribute as... well, more like a form of paying for protection. And not against the Persians, if you know what I mean.
So, yeah, the Athenians of Pericle could build great statues and temples, and sit around debating politics and philosophy, on the money of the whole rest of Greece and on the work of countless slaves. They _were_ the rich guys, and yeah, they could read and write. Big improvement over the Dark Ages, where also the rich guys could read and write, eh?
Ditto in Rome. We look mainly at what happened inside Rome itself, and the great democracy they had, but forget about the whole regions where they reduced the peasants to utter poverty by confiscating the lands and distributing the lands of a whole bloody province to half a dozen rich families. Again, we see the rich and maybe also middle classes this time, getting an education and living in nice cities. And a few slaves used as personal clerks. But forget about the 80% of the population, who was working the fields outside the cities, and who lived a heck of a lot worse and nobody educated those. Don't think that anyone educated the slaves in Sicily, which are documented to have been borderline starved and sometimes outright starved, so their masters could sell more grain to Rome. Or don't think that the slaves in the mines, which was little more than a slow death sentence, got educated first.
Ancient times were a lot shittier than some people assume. Maybe a little better than the darkest of the Dark Ages, but for most of the poor people, not by much or not at all.
3. Romans insisted on your learning Roman or Greek too, so...
4. What we inherited as the idea of the Dark Ages is, well, partially (though not totally) just the eternal circle of nihilism. Each time people go disillusioned, it seems to be a common reaction to go basically "OMG, our contemporary culture is nothing, we're living in the (new) Dark Ages" and "somewhere else / somewhere in the past, now that was Teh Golden Age, and the land of milk and honey!"
So back then, someone thought Rome was all that. Funnily enough, Rome at various points had thought Greece had been all that. And Greece had thought that their Mycaenean ancestors had been all that. And if you go forward in time instead, you find a disillusioned 19'th century England thinking that the middle ages had been such a golden age of chivalry. Some still do.
Others look with nostalgia at the peak of the age of disease, social injustice, broken social contracts, nobles _and_ cities plundering the former common lands
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Time warp: a view into the devices of BC geeks.
Geekdom is eternal.
Camping on quad since 1996.
...that the original creator of the Antikythera mechanism was Milo Rambaldi.
This is absolutely fantastic. I remember being quite excited when I heard the news of the discovery, and I've followed up whenever I can on this. I'm a Classics major so this is close to home, at least for my studies, and it's great to see they've learned more about it. I'd be interested to know what actual Greek words they've found on the mechanism as well, though. Cheers indeed.
What, they hadn't discovered the other two?
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
It makes me wonder if ancient archaeologists were unearthing simple tools (perhaps hunting and farming implements) that were ancient to them, and had equal difficulty imagining how they worked and what their purpose was, or if archaeology was easier long ago. And will archaeology be harder or easier in the future? Hopefully we are leaving more clues behind, but our devices are more complex.
It makes me wonder how much difficulty future archaeologists will have in a few thousand years when they unearth the Slashdot servers and try to imagine how they worked and what purpose they served.
And the answer to that is: so are the historians.
There are a lot of strong theories but we really don't know exactly. We do know that the Macedonians were very close culturally to the Greeks and certainly later on very close genetically since they intermarried A LOT - but we don't know for sure what their origins were. Were the Macedonians descendents of the Greeks ? The Greeks from the Macedonians ? Or were they from entirely different sources that joined culturally largely because of their proximity ? Truth is, nobody knows for sure, there are no records going back far enough and most of what we have from the times are so mixed with mythology that it makes figuring out what mythology was truth, what was mythology but not real and what was real but LOOKS like mythology a veritable nightmare.
For one thing, we now have archeological evidence of a genetic defect that could lead to giantism combined with a single centrally-placed eye - so that means the Cyclops MIGHT have been real. Of course the skull we based that on WAS found in Texas so COULD the anomally have been widespread enough to have occurred in Greece and be documented ? Or maybe there is no link and the Illiads' cyclops is really just a story.
About the best answer anybody will give you is that however they originated it probably happened (and we can't even say THAT for sure) before the invention of writing. Genetics are unlikely to help that much either because even a strong set of correlating markers often cannot clearly tell you which set is older.
An example is my own genetics. The Venters in South Africa are Afrikaners who have long held traditionally that we are of German descent. Recorded history confirms this at least partially (there is strong records that the first Venter in South Africa was a German migrant who Dutchified his German name - Von Demptner) - but we bear a set of markers unique among all Afrikaners (including fellow German descendants) that is not found anywhere else in the world - except among one subset of Polish people. Nobody knows where or how our ancestors got to Hameln from Poland, but one theory suggests that they didn't. That we are in fact descended from Vikings who went to live in Germany and were themselves descended from interbreeding while the Vikings ruled much of Poland many years earlier. We don't yet have enough data on the Slavic gene-markers to confirm this though it matches a lot of what we DO have in recorded history (and I must admit I rather like the idea of being some tiny bit Viking :p ).
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Those are awesome! Mod parent up (if this thread is still alive.)
Maybe a rich nobelman or bishop might sponsor a craftsman to make such exquisite devices, but there werent hat many potential customers. Modern clockworks got off the ground because churches and monastaries wanted more reliable ways of scheduling group prayer and there were a lot these in late medieval times. Then busnessmen and up-and-coming-types want one too, and you'v got a good market then.
Similar issue in China. Crasftsman made some nifty things for the emporeror, but few others to sell it to.
This device has an uncanny similarity with OLPC machines. They both are powered by hand cranks and they both can do/count googole.