61–70 of 70 posts
What would the world be like if these ancient scientists and engineers persisted and their science and craft carried on and developed further? Instead, the period that followed gave rise to belief systems that still give us problems today. How very sad.
I'm keeping my hopes up that they formed a secret society and are guiding the world with a steady hand towards an enlightened future. (Then I read the news and cry in my corn flakes, of course.)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 h…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 h…
It seems to me you have that exactly backwards:
If you stack books horizontally on shelves, which each shelf corresponding to a same-size range of years (e.g., a shelf per decade), with earlier periods on lower shelves, it would form a quantized approximation of the textbook logarithmic curve.
If you stack books vertically on the floor in similar periods with earlier periods on the left, it would form a quantized approximation of the textbook exponential curve.
Nobody designs such a thing as a first project. There must have been many predecessors, showing a progression in complexity.
It'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.
What do you mean?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> For a while there we couldn't rebuild the Apollo rocket engines either. What do you mean?
The point is: technology doesn't last any longer than the people who produced it.
The 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.
For example, if you don't know what the current date is, the device will be useless to you. And if you know what the current date is, knowing how many days to the next eclipse is useful for - what?
If the device were generally useful, many more of them would be made, as well as similar devices, and we'd have found more.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do we know why such expertise was lost in the first place? The collapse of the Roman empire wasn't for another couple centuries.
My only question, was there only one ever? It seems implausible that it would be unique
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm keeping my hopes up that they formed a secret society and are guiding the world with a steady hand towards an enlightened future. (Then I read the news and cry in my corn flakes, of course.)
Write it, it would make a great chapbook.
Can anyone with free access post the PDFs from the Almagest journal articles? http://www.hpdst.gr/publications/almagest/issues/7-1
http://www.megafileupload.com/bbgb/Almagest-Volume7-Issue1-T...