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Antikythera Mechanism: An ancient 'computer' that 'shouldn't exist' [video]

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Re: Antikythera Mechanism: An ancient 'computer' that 'shouldn't exist' [video]

#81

Post by ch4s3 »

toss1 wrote: post #77
bobthechef wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An example closer to home, though perhaps not as stark, is the loss of expertise in various industries that have been outsourced. The US is a good example. This is one (of many) arguments against outsourcing your industry just because it's cheaper and increases the profits of the outsourcing company. The tradition and culture that allows a certain industry to flourish is interrupted and destroyed and rebuilding that…

Yup, this is a massive strategic blunder of historical scale. While the US and western countries are asleep at the switch and think that they are exploiting cheap Chinese labor, the Chinese have a 100- and 500- year plan and are exploiting our myopia for short-term profits to gain manufacturing expertise and military advantage. It may not be too late to reverse, but it is close. It is really the result of not thinkin…

A 100- and 500- year plan is ludicrous on it's face. They don't even credibly hit their 5 year plans a lot of the time. The idea of planning something so large and complex so far into the future seems like wishful thinking at best.

Re: Antikythera Mechanism: An ancient 'computer' that 'shouldn't exist' [video]

#82

Post by f00zz »

x1f604 wrote: post #69
ceejayoz wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Guess what we do most of our iron smelting with?

Primitive iron smelting was done with charcoal, I believe. Correct me if I'm wrong.

Yeah, I think we switched to coke during the Industrial Revolution not because it's a better fuel than charcoal, but because we were running out of trees.

Re: Antikythera Mechanism: An ancient 'computer' that 'shouldn't exist' [video]

#83

Post by Robotbeat »

ceejayoz wrote: post #73
x1f604 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Primitive iron smelting was done with charcoal, I believe. Correct me if I'm wrong.

Yes. Being stuck at that point would be the problem.

Would it? Most new smelting plants today in the US (any built in the last few decades) use a mixture of hydrogen and carbon monoxide as the reducing gases (natural gas primarily as feedstock, but no reason it couldn’t be about 90% hydrogen produced via, say, hydroelectricity or wind).

Coal didn’t overtake charcoal for smelting iron in the US until the latter half of the 19th century, well after the first industrial revolution.

Melting down scrap iron is one of the main sources of steel in the US, and that is done straight with electricity in arc furnaces.

Coal accelerated the second industrial Revolution, but it was not essential. Far more important for enabling the first industrial Revolution was some of the early scientific knowledge about steam and pressure, such as the work of Robert Boyle, a lot of that based on a sort of reaction to the classics that had been revived in the Renaissance. The biggest argument for coal is indirectly in that it helped the viability of British society (after the island had most its tree cut down over the previous 500 years) which played an important role in the Scientific Revolution (Robert Boyle was Anglo-Irish)… although by the time Britain was playing an important role, the scientific Revolution was already underway on the mainland of Europe. As long as our books are not all destroyed, I think we’d have no problem bootstrapping from charcoal the second time around.

(I think a lot about long term data storage… writing in stone or fired clay still seems like one of the best methods for writing that needs to last 10,000 years… it was, after all, preserved Greco-Roman classics that enabled the renaissance and therefore the scientific Revolution.)

Re: Antikythera Mechanism: An ancient 'computer' that 'shouldn't exist' [video]

#84

Post by kbr2000 »

sharemywin wrote: post #35
api wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been programming since... well... technically since I was a kid in the 1980s and professionally since 1998. I think several areas have regressed quite a bit. The biggest one by far is desktop GUI programming. From the late 1980s until the mid-2000s GUIs had all kinds of standardized visual cues, context sensitive help, UIs usable by both mouse and keyboard, standard interface designs across apps, data binding, a…

I miss VB. it was really easy to use. There are tools out there but you have to pay every month for them.

Check Lazarus [0] for Free Pascal [1].

Another viable option would be Visual Tcl [2] for Tcl/Tk [3]. Given the event-based nature of Tcl and Tk, I find it matches well for a methodology like VB provided.

And it's far from the only one I remember (although you'll need to do some research here [4]). For example, Komodo IDE used to have a Tk GUI builder that provided for the same kind of methodology, which has been split off in [5].

Enjoy!

[0] https://www.lazarus-ide.org/

[1] https://www.freepascal.org/

[2] http://vtcl.sourceforge.net/

[3] https://www.tcl-lang.org/

[4] https://wiki.tcl-lang.org/page/GUI+Building+Tools

[5] http://spectcl.sourceforge.net/

Re: Antikythera Mechanism: An ancient 'computer' that 'shouldn't exist' [video]

#85

Post by api »

ceejayoz wrote: post #54
rozab wrote: post #11

Jonathan Blow's talk 'Preventing the Collapse of Civilization' goes into detail about how technology can regress, with the Mechanism being one example. This kind of thing is far more common than we think, most would be surprised to learn that Ancient Greece had writing for about 600 years before forgetting it. There was no writing in Greece for over 400 years, until they adopted the Phoenician alphabet around 730 BC.…

One of the interesting possibilities for the Fermi Paradox is the fact that we've wiped out the readily accessible deposits of iron, coal, oil, etc. A second go at the industrial revolution would be much harder, if we regressed that far.

I'm not sure I buy this. The main driver of the industrial revolution was intellectual: the emergence of science, classical liberalism, mercantilism, and modern economics. All this was in place before anything really took off.

Industrialization without fossil fuels would scale much more slowly with wood being used at first and then probably crops being grown for energy (biofuel). Once we figured out electricity we'd have large scale hydropower and wind power. Then we'd figure out either photovoltaics or nuclear fission, at which point we'd be off to the races. My guess is we'd be almost 100% nuclear and hydro powered right now with use of photovoltaics growing.

Stable power grids would probably take longer to emerge, but we figured out simple rechargeable batteries (lead-acid) fairly early. People would probably have banks of these in their homes to power minimal lighting and things like radios, TVs, etc. at night and run their appliances at specified times when the grid was at high power. You'd probably see a food system less dependent on refrigeration until stable grids emerged.

On extremely long historical timescales I suppose depletion of other elements is possible, but things like iron are incredibly common in Earth's crust. I'd be concerned more about rare elements.

Re: Antikythera Mechanism: An ancient 'computer' that 'shouldn't exist' [video]

#86

Post by throw0101a »

rozab wrote: post #11

Jonathan Blow's talk 'Preventing the Collapse of Civilization' goes into detail about how technology can regress, with the Mechanism being one example. This kind of thing is far more common than we think, most would be surprised to learn that Ancient Greece had writing for about 600 years before forgetting it. There was no writing in Greece for over 400 years, until they adopted the Phoenician alphabet around 730 BC.…

> how technology can regress

Anyone interested in 'rebooting' society after a major collapse can check out:

> The thirteen chapter book starts off explaining how humanity and civilization works and has come to be and how this could possibly be altered in the event of worldwide disaster — such as avian flu. Leaving us with the essential question of what knowledge would we need to rebuild civilization as we know it, which Dartnell answers by looking at the history of science and technology.

> Dartnell explains and realistically details a 'grace period' in which survivors can salvage food, materials and tools from the ruins of today's society. However, after a certain point this grace period would end, and humanity would have to produce their own food, make their own tools, practice hygiene and fight infection to maintain health, and develop energy stores for a new society to survive the aftermath.

> The book covers topics like agriculture, food and clothing, substances, medicine, and transport. Darnell points out that applying the scientific method to basic knowledge will enable an advanced technological society to reappear within several generations. Along with giving the history of scientific invention and how that applies to humans were they to recreate that, the book also offers anecdotal bits of information in the form of endnotes. Giving facts such as how carrots were originally white but grown orange in honour of the Dutch royal family, and how onions are the leaves of the onion plant.[3]

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Knowledge:_How_to_Rebuild_...

Full bibliography available if anyone wants to dig into a particular topic:

* http://the-knowledge.org/en-gb/the-book/

Re: Antikythera Mechanism: An ancient 'computer' that 'shouldn't exist' [video]

#87

Post by paxcoder »

rozab wrote: post #11

Jonathan Blow's talk 'Preventing the Collapse of Civilization' goes into detail about how technology can regress, with the Mechanism being one example. This kind of thing is far more common than we think, most would be surprised to learn that Ancient Greece had writing for about 600 years before forgetting it. There was no writing in Greece for over 400 years, until they adopted the Phoenician alphabet around 730 BC.…

>most would be surprised to learn that Ancient Greece had writing for about 600 years before forgetting it. There was no writing in Greece for over 400 years, until they adopted the Phoenician alphabet around 730 BC.

[citation needed]

Re: Antikythera Mechanism: An ancient 'computer' that 'shouldn't exist' [video]

#88

Post by pjmlp »

usrbinbash wrote: post #44
api wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been programming since... well... technically since I was a kid in the 1980s and professionally since 1998. I think several areas have regressed quite a bit. The biggest one by far is desktop GUI programming. From the late 1980s until the mid-2000s GUIs had all kinds of standardized visual cues, context sensitive help, UIs usable by both mouse and keyboard, standard interface designs across apps, data binding, a…

That's not a problem of the craft however, it's a problem of the culture. We are perfectly capable of writing native GUIs, and we have powerful tools for it as well. QTDesigner comes to mind as a well known example. The problem is, about 12 years ago, application design went through a gameification and "toy-i-fication" phase, from which it has yet to recover, because suddenly, everything had to look like it was desig…

The problem is when this culture extends a couple of generations the craft gets lost.

Re: Antikythera Mechanism: An ancient 'computer' that 'shouldn't exist' [video]

#89

Post by ceejayoz »

Robotbeat wrote: post #83
ceejayoz wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. Being stuck at that point would be the problem.

Would it? Most new smelting plants today in the US (any built in the last few decades) use a mixture of hydrogen and carbon monoxide as the reducing gases (natural gas primarily as feedstock, but no reason it couldn’t be about 90% hydrogen produced via, say, hydroelectricity or wind). Coal didn’t overtake charcoal for smelting iron in the US until the latter half of the 19th century, well after the first industrial r…

I think that vastly underestimates the dependency tree in modern society. Storing hydrogen in useful quantities is tough, requiring fairly sophisticated metallurgy and cryogenics.

Finding out we've got a hard to replace left-pad module somewhere far up the tech tree wouldn't be fun.

Re: Antikythera Mechanism: An ancient 'computer' that 'shouldn't exist' [video]

#90

Post by pjmlp »

sharemywin wrote: post #35
api wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been programming since... well... technically since I was a kid in the 1980s and professionally since 1998. I think several areas have regressed quite a bit. The biggest one by far is desktop GUI programming. From the late 1980s until the mid-2000s GUIs had all kinds of standardized visual cues, context sensitive help, UIs usable by both mouse and keyboard, standard interface designs across apps, data binding, a…

I miss VB. it was really easy to use. There are tools out there but you have to pay every month for them.

What is preventing you to use VB.NET with WinForms? Still out there.
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