Can anyone with free access post the PDFs from the Almagest journal articles? http://www.hpdst.gr/publications/almagest/issues/7-1
Seconded. I tried to use sci-hub but I couldn't get it to work.
The Antikythera mechanism is still revealing its secrets
51–60 of 70 posts
Re: The Antikythera mechanism is still revealing its secrets
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, maybe the news is just there to steer us towards a new and more glorious dawn. Due to the laws of thermodynamics I have little belief left for a beneficent (let alone malignant) secret society of any stripe. But I could be wrong. There are more things in heaven and earth and all that.
Why would the laws of thermodynamics apply to a secret society?
They're saying the second law of thermodynamics (in a closed system, entropy always increases) means a complex secret can't be kept for a long period of time: the tendency of life/the world towards chaos means that the truth will inevitably leak out.
It's more a poetic application of statistical mechanics than a rigorous one.
Re: The Antikythera mechanism is still revealing its secrets
#53It's strange to me that all of the knowledge it took to make a device with this kind of precision was lost for 1400 some odd years. What the hell happened?
Time happened, and all civilization is perilously fragile.
Don't be so surprised. For a while there we couldn't rebuild the Apollo rocket engines either.
Re: The Antikythera mechanism is still revealing its secrets
#54The sad thing about this machine is its uselessness. It only had value as an amusement, or to religious people. Many inventions have been lost and reinvented because the earlier incarnations were not in a useful form.
Perhaps if it was contrived instead to be a mundane adding machine, it might have found use among merchants, tax collectors, and bankers, and hence been duplicated in large numbers, and would not have been lost technology.
Re: The Antikythera mechanism is still revealing its secrets
#55The sad thing about this machine is its uselessness. It only had value as an amusement, or to religious people. Many inventions have been lost and reinvented because the earlier incarnations were not in a useful form. Perhaps if it was contrived instead to be a mundane adding machine, it might have found use among merchants, tax collectors, and bankers, and hence been duplicated in large numbers, and would not have b…
I'm just going to go ahead and disagree. Having an accurate calendar provides much more than just 'amusement', and is in fact an important part of an organized society.
Re: The Antikythera mechanism is still revealing its secrets
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd agree that it probably is a real photo, but you're right. It even looks like a digital painting - not just a 3D render. I wonder if the designers picked colors and surfaces that maximize visibility and sharpness underwater for safety reasons.
How do colors and materials that lend themselves well to photography make the suit more safe?
Heightened visibility of the suit in emergency situations.
Re: The Antikythera mechanism is still revealing its secrets
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
This contradicts the earlier description of "growing in a logarithmic curve" -- it's an exponential curve. A logarithmic curve would look like this: - The 1900s stack: 1" tall - The 1910s stack: 2" tall - The 1930s stack: 3" tall - The 1970s stack: 4" tall - The 2050s stack: 5" tall ...
"Ignore the details, consider the premise." :) Have an upvote and go read the guy's Wiki article. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derek_J._de_Solla_Price
The "logarihmic" premise was false from the start, that's why the people (I too) couldn't understand what you initially wrote.
Re: The Antikythera mechanism is still revealing its secrets
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Ignore the details, consider the premise." :) Have an upvote and go read the guy's Wiki article. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derek_J._de_Solla_Price
The "logarihmic" premise was false from the start, that's why the people (I too) couldn't understand what you initially wrote.
If you stack books horizontally on shelves by year it would form the textbook exponential curve. If you stack them vertically on the floor it makes the textbook log curve. It's a visual metaphor. Apparently not a very good one.
http://science.larouchepac.com/gauss/ceres/InterimII/Arithme...
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-47zv3839-6U/UP37FwkfOhI/AAAAAAAACU...
EDIT: Wow, this is still ongoing? You can mount a hockey stick horizontally or vertically on a wall, guys. Think about it.
Re: The Antikythera mechanism is still revealing its secrets
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thanks for sharing that link, it is very interesting. But I'm curious - what do you think is wrong with the site design? It's responsive, legible, tasteful, and has no extraneous graphics nor a single thing that uBlock had to block. I wish the rest of the web was this beautiful.
Yes, it's the default Wordpress "Twenty Fifteen" template. It contains very important books corrupted by cut and paste into the wonky WordPress editor / blog post renderer. Someone in a hurry might think it was an autogenerated GoDaddy cash parking page, not one of the more interesting sites on the web. Thus my note.
I get it. I made my comment before looking past the front page to find the corrupted books.
Re: The Antikythera mechanism is still revealing its secrets
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
Was it lost? Or did those who could build such a thing simply did not think it was worth doing so? The astronomy knowledge and the mechanical theory needed to make the Antikythera mechanism were well known in ancient times, and I don't think those were ever lost. The mystery of the Antikythera mechanism is how it was actually built. But do we know how long it took to build? If it was built in a short time frame, then…
Science is never lost, only suppressed.
The history of concrete is quite interesting.
http://www.romanconcrete.com/docs/spillway/spillway.htm
http://io9.gizmodo.com/how-the-ancient-romans-made-better-co...