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Understanding the Antikythera Mechanism (hackaday.com)
szczys writes: We attribute great thinking to ancient Greece. This is exemplified by the Antikythera Mechanism. Fragments of the mechanism were found in a shipwreck first discovered in 1900 and visited by researchers several times over the next century. It is believed to be a method of tracking the calendar and is the first known example of what are now common-yet-complicated engineering mechanisms like the differential gear. A few working reproductions have been produced and make it clear that whomever designed this had an advanced understanding of complex gear ratios and their ability to track the passage of time and celestial bodies. Last year research by two scientists suggested that the device might be much older than previously thought.
There are echoes of multiple catastrophes like "The Deluge" and Thera in legend. No telling what we will find when the archeology of the last 25,000 years is recovered from the flooded ice age shores in 300-400 ft of water. Thales awed warring Greeks to scamper away from battle in 585 BC with his showmanship about blotting out the sun, showing us he could predict total eclipse. Bits of math and astronomy might be precious surviving threads no telling how far back. Plato's claim of priests' families handing down secret history / legends across the millenia might not be total bs. Time immemorial indeed.
The Greeks were amazing thinkers. They also used complex wrapping of rope around poles, pulleys, and pegs to program automated plays--mechanical TV's essentially.
Too bad they never leveraged it, probably due to the abundance of slaves.
William Wilberforce, a UK abolitionist, may have sparked the industrial revolution more than the steam engine and technology.
A steam engine was invented by the ancient Greeks. However, because slaves were so common then (usually captured enemies), they didn't think much about labor saving devices. Their gizmos were mostly considered show pieces, and thus there was little incentive to improve on their efficiency or utility.
William Wilberforce's pressure on UK politics reduced slave usage, making machines a more attractive alternative, thus propelling advances in manufacturing machinery.
Table-ized A.I.
It is said that a wealthy shipowner had the Mechanism built as a navigational aid but the captain of his flagship, incensed at the slow operation of Debian on it, hurled it into the Aegean.
There's another problem with ancient society: Plato. If you read Plutarch's life of Marcellus, the Roman who beat Archimedes and Syracuse, you'll find that Platonic philosophy and its emphasis on pure mathematics had vilified those who translated mathematics (and physics) into the realm of the physical - into machines. Ancient Greeks and Romans highly prized the transcendent truths of mathematics but not their application on earth, which was the province of lesser thinkers. Plutarch makes the point that Archimedes broke with this tradition and invested himself in applying mathematics to the physical world, sinning against Platonism but creating breathtaking (and, for Marcellus and his troops, very painful) results.
For millennia afterwards, the only legitimate application of mathematics was architecture. The Romans certainly knew how to apply math to building aqueducts, bridges, and other civil engineering projects - but these were the work of specialists, not philosophers. Not until the medieval fascination with optics did math get its application to physics, and even then it was very specialized.
The Antikythera mechanism was not a labor-saving device, nor are steam shovels and engines and cotton gins the only kind of application of engineering principles. The real breakthrough was taking mathematics out of the hands of philosophers and making it a separate discipline without the hangups of Platonic philosophy.
Now Greek slaves have University Degrees and a minimum wage of 340 Euros. Try beating that.
Roses are red, violets are blue, most poems rhyme, but this one doesn't...
My udder moistens with thoughts of you whipping me with your wit. My personal secret Stockholm syndrome fetish towards my herder. As I gaze up from the meadows, dazedly chewing my cud, I look at your leather cowboy hat with both a mix of horror and curiosity. In the fleeting moments of madness I wish I was a horse, if only you would mount me and ride me in the wind. With a huff, however, the melancholic reality of my own existence comes flooding back to this moment in time, dulled by my own senses. I dolefully wait for that moment you might grab my teats and forcefully place a suction cup upon them, if only to extract my milk in all its creamy goodness.
Mooo my friend. Mooo, Mooo MOOOO! May you one day find the courage to drink straight from my breast, my bosom swells with misplaced gratitude for my own existence. Love Daisy. Xxooxxoox.
I'm not saying it was aliens, but it was aliens.
Ancient aliens!!
If that were so, why is the device engraved in Greek rather than Egyptian Hieroglyphics?
Oh, I didn't mean to imply that it didn't, just that you have a better chance of recovering whatever it was by getting a detailed image of the magnetic domains than simply dropping the disk/tape into a (hopefully expertly restored) compatible machine. If certain properties of the recording system are known, such as it using a certain run length code that is DC balanced, then when a value is present that violates the allowable symbols on the disk, then the magnetic (and hopefully an aligned optical) image of the surface can reveal which bits are likely corrupted, and make a manual restoration.
The analogy to this is a printed manuscript, vs. a photocopy, vs. an OCR. If you have the OCR, then the only knowledge you have is that there was an error (or even less) in transcribing, if you can go back to the photocopy, which is analagous to an analog recording from the devices read head, then you can make a probalistic estimate as to which bit(s) were in error to result in the corrupted checksum, but the most definitive answer comes from a careful study of the original media magnetic and visible surface.
For example, say you have a CRC error on an old zip file from a DOS format floppy: if you can go back to the original media, and see in the optical domain that there is a scratch across the surface, and register that against the magnetic domains on the disk, then you can make a probable guess that the bits that are corrupt are the ones under the scratch, and try flipping them until you get a correct CRC. If it is a CRC32, then there is a very low probability that flipping those bits in an incorrect manner results in a valid checksum, and so you can assume that the set of bit flips that results in a correct sum when you attempt to flip those that fall under the scratch (or hunk of mold, which should be delicately cleaned off too), is the correct original data. If you were just looking at a binary dump of the media, then you would have no information to guide your guess work, and if you were to flip bits entirely at random, there is a lower chance that you can recover the original data, and a low confidence that you made the right correction (though if it's ASCII/EBCDIC/etc text, it's quite easy to use common sense to recover sparse bit errors).
Overall, though, I expect the century of B&W photography to be the best documented, by virtue of that technology's inherent stability.
Of course. But I've also found laser printed documents appear to survive quite well, with the limit imposed by the paper rather than the toner. I imagine laser printing onto polymer sheets like OHP film would result in excellent longterm survivability for important documents. There are companies that will record data onto gold plates with electron beam or focused ion beam recording techniques, as long as the chain of custody is properly maintained, these artefacts would be reasonably assumed to survive a millenia and still be readable.
Sorry I'm late. I was having my hair done.
Made in Egypt ... With technology they got from refugees from Atlantis, clearly.
And look what happened to Egypt after they let in all those refugees!
Yeah, they built the Pyramids.
Hmm... This is more true than you might know. I watch an obscene number of documentaries and the subjects vary greatly. One of my favorite subjects is archeology as it ties in nicely with my absolute favorite - history. Other favorites are a variety of sciences, more specifically astrophysics and astronomy.
As of late, a recurring subject that is tangentially included is that things are turning out to be quite a bit older than we had previously thought. We're finding that ancient civilizations and their tech are much older than we'd previously believed. As we learn, we're finding out that the galaxy is older than we'd previously believed. We've been able to make further refinements and find out that the human species is older than believed. We've now determined that humans likely came to the Americas, in two separate waves, and that this happened further back in time than we'd previously believed.
It's kind of interesting and I keep hearing it mentioned in the various documentaries that I watch. I watch them almost to the exclusion of everything else so the internet has been a great benefit to me in those regards. I've never been a fan of television and haven't really watched much (or any, really) in a very long time and haven't watched much at all since the mid-1980s. It is nice to have this as a resource and something that I truly appreciate having access to but I digress.
If you're curious, the first wave of humans to make it (according to current evidence) to the Americas were in South America and the second group stomped across in the north. There's no evidence that the two groups ever met. Some Amerindians were able to use DNA to demonstrate this, or a portion of this, as evidence in a case to recover some remains. That particular documentary was some NOVA production and was a series about the origins of man. I've forgotten the title but I think it was something like, "Where did we come from?" (I don't watch for scholarly reasons but as passive entertainment. Learning is incidental and not my goal which means that names, dates, and specifics often are not locked in memory. It's learning by osmosis, so to speak.)
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
I don't know if that was a Greek or if it was a Greek living in a later date and living in Egypt. I forget his name and am a bit too lazy to look it up but if the person you're speaking of is the same one that I'm thinking of (the first to do such) he was also the person who made the first steam engine except he never made it work. He did things like make a coin operated holy water dispenser? If it's him then it's usually (wrongly) attributed to the Greeks and to the age where they were at their peak. He was an Alexandrian (not sure if by birth or not) and did much of his work in the temples there. The famous historical UK model maker has recreated some of his work including the device you seem to be referencing.
(I just re-watched a documentary about him, specifically, a couple of months ago.)
Oh - Heron. That was his name, as I recall. Heh... There's a whole documentary about him, at least I think it was entirely about him. He was, as I recall, from an age that's typically considered later than the age of the Greeks. He was in Alexandria, as I recall. Only a few of his writing survived the destruction of the famous library there. It was in the library, they believe, that he did much of his work and research which would have, of course, relied on the older Grecian works.
I may be misremembering something but I'm pretty sure those are the main details. It's correct to say that he was Greek (as I recall) but not *really* correct to say that his work is attributed to the Ancient Greeks. This may be incorrect but I think his work was sometime in the 200 BCE range or newer? They may have even been in the 100 BCE area but, as said, I've not made a scholarly pursuit from this but simply seen him pop up in a bunch of documentaries over the years. Unfortunately, there's no good indexing of documentaries that would enable me to search the transcripts and find him and I'd probably be too lazy to do so considering that I've not even bothered to open Google for this comment but it would be awesome.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
And then they ran into the Romans, who were pretty good doers.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
My computers have information in them. The knowledge is in my head.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."