2,100-Year-Old Antikythera Device Recreated In Working Form 258
coondoggie writes "A
new working model of the mysterious 2,100-year-old astronomical calculator, dubbed the Antikythera Device, has been unveiled, incorporating the most recent discoveries announced two years ago by an international team of researchers. The new model was demonstrated by its creator, former museum curator Michael Wright, who had created an earlier model based on decades of study."
Re:Why so down? (Score:5, Interesting)
They are just down because they didn't come up with it first.
Plus people like to take pride that we are much more advanced then we were 2000 years ago.
However after the burning of the Library of Alexandra it sent man kind 1000 years back in progress. The thousands of years after have been in general very tough for human survival only for the past 500 years or so have we caught up, but before that the concept of playing with gears and realizing that if you have a small one and a large one they move at different speeds was to academic and in general worthless as it didn't put food on the table.
Is it on ThinkGeek yet? (Score:5, Interesting)
I'd love to get one of these for my shelf or desk somewhere. I wonder if someone would make these and sell them on ThinkGeek.com? Another good question might be whether or not someone has modelled the device in OpenGL? It would make a really cool screensaver!
Re:How come... (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually, worse. You get NetworkWorld... AGAIN.
NetworkWorld's sock puppets are working overtime for Christmas. This is at least the 3rd story in 24 hours or so to make slashdot. Sad, desperate, or what? Mind you, if you've read any of their site you'll understand why they need to spam to get readers.
This story was on the BBC months ago by the way.
It's sad, not amazing (Score:5, Interesting)
The Greeks and Romans had some clever inventions [wikipedia.org]. The sad part is that all the efforts they did at math and engineering came to a stop, and most of it got lost during the Middle Ages. If you travel through southern Europe, you'll see several engineering works, like the Pont du Gard, Coliseum, Arles amphitheatre, etc, which had no equal a thousand years after they were built.
It's a bit frightening that any intellectual progress was stopped for a thousand years, and I wonder could it happen again?
3D lighting pictures of the Device (Score:5, Interesting)
Not so amazing inventions. (Score:5, Interesting)
But the technology we have today isn't really capable of space travel (look how expensive and impractical it is). These Greek and Roman inventions are the same. You can't really use that steam engine to do any work, and it is impractical to build those kind of structures with your hands or with animal power.
Today's steam engines, and internal combustion engines, on the other hand, can really make building those kind of structures possible on a large scale.
Re:Really? (Score:2, Interesting)
I think it's pretty amazing by modern standards. If you watch the video, there's a "clock hand" for every visible planet. That wouldn't be so impressive if it were heleocentric... just a bunch of simple gears. But it's geocentric, which means that depending on the relative position to the earth, sometimes they're going forward and sometimes backwards, and sometimes standing still. And the position of the moon is not based on a circular orbit, but implements Hipparchus's complex epicycle algorithm for the lunar cycle. If there are more impressive modern mechanical designs, I don't know what they are.
Re:RELIGON KILLS THE MOST PEOPLE (Score:3, Interesting)
And the only thing that can motivate them to stark rationalism is? I dont see where Atheism is the answer. If I read you right it is Faith itself and not religion that is the problem. So why not hate every faith based thing? Why chose religion for your ire?
Face it, the only thing that can motivate people to mass-murder is an irrational, unjustified belief in some sort of bullshit worldview.
True. And Atheism solves this how? Honestly Atheism is becoming one of them with every post like yours. Welcome Cog of the Machine. And you wind up with a religion flame, yet you encompase every *ism known with that. Anarchy is great until you have to live in it. Can you get a drink from the tap in your house? Does your Internet/phone/TV work? Thank the people that keep Anarchy at bay then.
Sera
Re:Why so down? (Score:4, Interesting)
The Library of Alexandra was in essence a place you can go to find all the knowledge of the known world, allowing a place to go to seek knowledge in an environment that will let you do so.
All true, and they also followed a somewhat "information wants to be free" philosophy. The Library of Alexandria reportedly had a policy that any ship that entered it's harbor was to surrender any texts or writings they had on board to the library for them to be copied by the scribes and added to the library before being returned to the ship of origin.