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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.'"
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.
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"
The article is dated tomorrow. NYT needs a device for calculating time more precisely.
.. paranoid crackpot leftover from the days of Amiga.
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v454/n7204/abs/nature07130.html
I, for one, welcome our new analog computing overlor...
What do you mean, "They're dead"?
Life is short; think quickly.
Isn't this the eighth or ninth time this year that they've "discovered" the inner workings of this damn thing?
It's hard to say. They're also using the device to keep count... They think.
Those who believe the Internet is private,
find their privates are on the Internet.
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
I'm imagining Beowulf imagining a Beowulf cluster of these things.
Nah, if anything, I can imagine Beowulf ripping out one of its clock hands and throwing it to the sea
No sig for the moment.
Once they finish working this out, I would really be interested if someone manages to reproduce a working version.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
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.
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."
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?
You've clearly never developed software for salespeople.
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."
ALL models should be greeted with skepticism. Hell, all THEORIES and all HYPOTHESES should be greeted with skepticism.
That is the very foundation of successful application of the scientific method.
There's a big problem with what you're saying, however... you say that a model that does not accurately predict should be scorned. That is false. Models are often revised to account for inaccurate predictions. As one famous scientist explained, it is not the Eureka! moments that drive true discovery, it is the "That's funny..." moments. In other words, the failure of a model to accuately predict will often lead to greater understanding of what is being modeled. Do you think that the General Theory of Relativity should be scorned, even though, as a modeal, it fails to accurately predict the existence of dark energy and dark matter?
So, to sum up -- yes, skepticism is important in all science. But a model that does not predict accurately may still have value to the scientific community... at the very least, it can be the starting point for a revised model that does accurately predict.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
I predicted these very first two posts. Ahhhh Slashdot, how your constant familiarities of Beowulf clusters, Linux, Soviet Union, Goatse and frosty pissers never tend to cease!
You must not be new here...
That's just silly. Where then did Jesus's brothers ands sisters come from?
I agree, but for fairness' sake I'll add that some people think that "brothers and sisters" referred to his cousins (linguistically it's perhaps possible, but again, I agree with you: they were biological children of Mary and Joseph). Better evidence, IMO, is Matthew 1:25a: "But he had no union with her until she gave birth to a son." If that doesn't say they "did it", I don't know what would...
Anyway, the whole "virgin Mary" business is silly: Jesus was born of a virgin. Nothing says she had to remain a virgin after that. The idea of a "sinless Mary" is silly, too: "My soul doth magnify the Lord. / And my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour." Savior from what, if she was sinless? And if she was sinless, Jesus wouldn't have had to die for sin: she could have done it.
Of course Joseph "knew" his wife. I think that was the mangu's point.
I know... I was responding to the quoted "Pillar of Faith". It was just too good to pass up... can't you picture Joseph? - "You mean we can't ever WHAT?!"
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
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.