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More astronomical geekery
Feb. 3rd, 2008 02:45 pmI was told that the Caledon chat-channel in Second Life went all frothy over collectively discovering that 'Gears' was an available surname (when you create an account, you have to choose from a list of surnames the company generates, then add your own given name). One of the names suggested to go with gears was 'Antikythera', which didn't ring a bell.
Chalk it up to bad mental file management - 'Antikythera' was saved as 'ancient Greek computer so there'. You might remember there was quite a bit of excitement when people noticed, after nearly a century of it sitting around, that this was actually a sophisticated astronomical calculator of a sort the Romans couldn't be bothered with because they were, y'know, Romans (at least they built good roads). The Device uses several cleverly-calculated gear interactions to reproduce specific astronomical phenomena - positions and eclipses and such - to come up with calendar and position figures. Here's some of the sorts of numbers involved - and mind you, the Greeks built the machine, but the Babylonians did the observations! ( Cut for lots of extreme lay geekishness )
Chalk it up to bad mental file management - 'Antikythera' was saved as 'ancient Greek computer so there'. You might remember there was quite a bit of excitement when people noticed, after nearly a century of it sitting around, that this was actually a sophisticated astronomical calculator of a sort the Romans couldn't be bothered with because they were, y'know, Romans (at least they built good roads). The Device uses several cleverly-calculated gear interactions to reproduce specific astronomical phenomena - positions and eclipses and such - to come up with calendar and position figures. Here's some of the sorts of numbers involved - and mind you, the Greeks built the machine, but the Babylonians did the observations! ( Cut for lots of extreme lay geekishness )
