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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]

#91

Post by scrumper »

ch4s3 wrote: post #81
toss1 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm not sure I agree with that. Misses on short-term plans are a different concern to progress on a multi-century plan. Pig iron production might've missed its forecast for 2020, but it'd undeniable that China is building tremendous expertise in advanced manufacturing - and at a similar rate to that at which the west is shedding it.

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

#92

Post by pjmlp »

darkwater wrote: post #42
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…

How comes that circa 2000 VB6 was the most hated and belittled programming language out there? I was there, I remember it. Now it's suddenly part of the golden age of desktop programming? I think you should put your nostalgia glasses off.

When the option was between VB 6 or doing COM in raw C++....

Granted we still had MFC, but then the COM lovers at Microsoft started pushing for ATL, and everything that followed from there.

On the other side we had (and still have) Delphi and C++ Builder, but Borland's management killed the indie culture around them.

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

#93

Post by marcus_holmes »

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.

Japan has very low quality iron ores. Yet they turned out (arguably) the best steel swords in the world.

Constraints don't always lead to bad outcomes.

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

#94

Post by marcus_holmes »

luma wrote: post #4
smitty1e wrote: post #3

"Simply shouldn't exist" Pyramids were wonders of the ancient world long before the Python web framework. The condescencion of the modern age toward those who came before use never ceases to amuse.

All they're saying is that the technology represented in this device has no equivalent in the historical record anywhere near that time and that place. It's not to say that it literally cannot exist, rather, our historical understanding of these peoples is clearly incomplete. These are the sorts of findings that change our understanding of history which makes it pretty exciting to me. The Clickspring series on this m…

I think that's gp's point: rather than saying "An ancient computer that we don't understand is making us realise how little we know about the ancient world and challenging our assumptions about ancient technology" the headline is "An ancient computer that shouldn't exist".

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

#95

Post by jrochkind1 »

crispyambulance wrote: post #70
ceejayoz wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 think it might be helpful to consider what happened to the dinosaurs. The same could happen to us if we fail to evolve in time... Asteroid hits. Wipes out almost all life. A million years later, the biomass around us will have all been converted to a black ooze (oil), covered by millennia of rock, sediment, and tectonic plates. Eventually future civilized beings who plunder the Earth for our biomass that has been c…

Are you suggesting if the dinosaurs had tried harder to "evolve in time", they could have better survived an asteroid hit? I don't think that's how evolution works. For humans either.

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

#96

Post by mring33621 »

jjkaczor wrote: post #50
darkwater wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How comes that circa 2000 VB6 was the most hated and belittled programming language out there? I was there, I remember it. Now it's suddenly part of the golden age of desktop programming? I think you should put your nostalgia glasses off.

The language was crap - the IDE/designer was excellent. For me - the sweet-spot that I used for all of my own personal projects after outgrowing VB1-6 was... Borland Delphi. The IDE/designer was at least as good as VB - but the Object Pascal language was so powerful. It was truely object-oriented and if one wanted, one could work at a high level of abstraction. Yet it could also natively drop-down to low-level Window…

Visual J++ has entered the chat

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

#97

Post by digbybk »

smitty1e wrote: post #3

"Simply shouldn't exist" Pyramids were wonders of the ancient world long before the Python web framework. The condescencion of the modern age toward those who came before use never ceases to amuse.

If a web framework in the Pyramids was discovered, it would defy our understanding of the history of technology and "simply shouldn't exist". It's a dramatic way of putting it, but it's really just saying that our understanding was wrong. It shouldn't exist given our model of the world, so our model is wrong.

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

#98

Post by ceejayoz »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #93
ceejayoz wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Japan has very low quality iron ores. Yet they turned out (arguably) the best steel swords in the world. Constraints don't always lead to bad outcomes.

There's a difference between "we have to do more refining to get usable metal" and "there's literally none around unless you go deep underground into a new deposit".

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

#99

Post by mc32 »

naikrovek wrote: post #80
mc32 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do we have any contemporaneous record of this mechanism, or have references to the device not survived for some reason? If such a device was considered advanced or cutting edge or of note back then then wouldn't we expect some reference to the device?

very little from the past survives through to today. I don't think there is any record of this device existing other than the device itself, and mention of it after its discovery in the early 1900s. to some that will be proof that it is not truly an ancient device, and I think that is hogwash. most things just don't last that long, especially paper, which is where mention of the device would be found, if it ever is f…

I don’t doubt it’s ancient. I’m not skeptic from that POV. I do find it curious that such an object would be exist but not have some fanfare around it. I’m sure there’s an explanation that eludes me. Could have been developed in some secrecy for example because it have the people who used it some advantage?

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

#100

Post by ben_w »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #95
crispyambulance wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it might be helpful to consider what happened to the dinosaurs. The same could happen to us if we fail to evolve in time... Asteroid hits. Wipes out almost all life. A million years later, the biomass around us will have all been converted to a black ooze (oil), covered by millennia of rock, sediment, and tectonic plates. Eventually future civilized beings who plunder the Earth for our biomass that has been c…

Are you suggesting if the dinosaurs had tried harder to "evolve in time", they could have better survived an asteroid hit? I don't think that's how evolution works. For humans either.

One thing I sometimes wonder is: if there was a dinosaur species which had reached roughly our level of intelligence and society, would they have left enough of a mark on the world that we could even tell?

If they got further than us, tried to capture an asteroid and mine it, could they have wiped themselves out without leaving behind technosignatures that would still be visible?

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