Ah, the good ol' Greek Clockwork Calculator, stock filler piece for 1970s "Believe or Not" type shows narrated by Leonard Nimoy and Arthur C. Clarke. People used to say it was a hoax, because they'd always talk about it at the same time as the Crystal Skull (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_skull#Mitchell-Hedges_skull), but I'm willing to bed the Greeks had a bunch of these calculator things.
"I'm willing to bet the Greeks had a bunch of these calculator things."
Maybe, maybe not. This might have been the first one of its kind, lost in a storm. I wouldn't be surprised if there were more of these, but I think it's more likely that it was either being taken to a buyer, and that the money from the sale would have financed the second through fourth of these.
This reminds me of Civilization II. My hallmark for a good game was getting railroads before Christ. You have to set it to a pretty easy level for that to happen, but it was a cheap thrill. I'm not surprised by this kind of technology. You'd have a foundational genius in his shop and he'd pass his skills onto apprentices. One of them might also be a genius of the same caliber and would add his skill to his master's skill, producing devices like this along the way. But, what if he died young, didn't have worthy apprentices, or his whole shop got killed when a city was sacked? Poof. It's all gone. Without print and the institutions to preserve printed materials, knowledge would get lost, especially because craftsmen often considered their knowledge secret to be passed only to the worthy. T
'Course, I am not a real scholar so I may be full it.
I found the link through the blog of the lady who wrote the Prairie Muffin Manifesto, who pointed to another article which claimed that this device proved that evolution was wrong, because ancient man shouldn't have been that smart, right? I commented on her blog and told her that the premise of the article was all wrong, because in geological terms, "modern" man was at least 50 000 years old, and the increases in intelligence since then have been minimal. I'm wondering if she'll reply. :)
Scratch my analysis. Just occured to me that the great recorders of knowledge in Europe's dark ages were the Arabs and they didn't have printing even if they did have a good recipe for making paper. I'm guessing that you have to have widespread literacy and some kind of formal institution for scholarship. Cool, I think I might have started putting my holiday reading list together. I'm curious about this now.
So, like, she's saying that the ancients could put together, and memorize poems like Iliad and write allegorical works like the ones in Old Testament, but couldn't put together bronze devices? Man, what fruitcake. And, wasn't the Zohar, the book of the Kaballah written in this time as well? If I got the book right, that is. From what I understand, there's pretty subtle math in that one. Seems to me that the ancients tended to disseminate knowledge through initiation in which you had to prove to some master that you were smart enough to figure it out anyway. I digress. My key point is that ancient man was damned smart, but they had to start from scratch every time.
Actually, your analysis is at least partially true. The Greeks tended to separate the practical from the theoretical. Scholars were looked up to, but working with your hands to actually build things was manual labour and put you on a lower footing. So the people who built such an object would not have been scholars, with an audience for their written works. They would have been people bucking the trends of their times, probably artisan craftsmen.
You don't start to see widespread literacy until after the printing press for several reasons, and availability is only one of them. There was also the class system that gave knowledge only to the upper crust and the priests (who were often interconnected.) Mass literacy was not common until the nineteenth century, and functional literacy as we define it today is very, very new - like, within the last fifty years.
This is why I wish I had time in my schedule for History of the Book. I'll have to find out what the texts are for that class and read 'em on my own. As it is, I'm only barely going to make the double specialization I'm doing. Internet Library Services and Youth Services in case you're curious.
"Without print and the institutions to preserve printed materials, knowledge would get lost, especially because craftsmen often considered their knowledge secret to be passed only to the worthy."
Or, as I put it, "I'm not smarter than they were. I just have better libraries."
The lady upon whose blog I found the link, is a homeschooling mother of eleven who wishes the government would stop supporting publicly funded libraries.
Just think: When we all die, some historian is going to get his/her/its hands/pseudopods/etc... on one of the most important historical documents of our era, the Livejournal database!
Seriously one of the more amazing digital library projects I saw was something called The Making of America. The project's genesis was the question of what to do with the thousands of 19th century books mouldering in university library storage facilities. U of Michigan and some other Us decided to digitally scan them in and put them all online. The end result(as of year one) was something like 20% of everything published in the 19th century. Everything: books, catalogs, periodicals, correspondance. It's really an unbelievable archive. So the problem for future historians is going to be finding the signal through the unbelievable volume of noise.
I hope that, when Livejournal fades into the mists of time, I'll have enough warning to print out my entire journal on acid-free paper and lock it in the type of document box used for storing property deeds and other important papers from fire/water damage. I think it would be really cool to have a copy of this journal, because it does an excellent job of chronicling my life for the last three years.
The LJ database could be interesting, though. I don't know how - I'm not a social scientist, and I have no idea what strange and arcane things might hide on LJ - but it could be.
I think the Making of America archive might be more valuable when there's more noise. One of the things I thought about is the idea that what appears to be noise may actually be a signal that I don't know how to understand.
Hmm. It looks like her real complaint is the idea of paying taxes, and particularly the idea of getting what she wants by having other people help pay for it. She doesn't seem to have any problem getting what she needs from the government, but she doesn't need books the way she needs roads, water, or electricity.
There is a brief mention of the "insidious influences lurking on their shelves," but that doesn't seem to be her primary point. I don't particularly agree with her - discussing books I'd read with my mother was a good introduction to critical thinking - but I can see her point.
The insidious influences are anything not distinctly dominionist Christian. She wants to protect her children from any book that might open up unChristian thoughts to their little minds. Basically, she wants the opportunity to censor what her kids read, and doesn't want to pay for the opening up of ideas to other kids whose parents also censor their reading material.
What Making of America is awesome for is providing slice of life details for anyone writing fiction. You can search by year and find what people were writing about day to day in all its banal glory. Here's an example courtesy of the guys doing QC in the cube next to me at the time. It's from a 3rd grade reader in the 1870s IIRC:
Mike and Rob are killing birds. Mike has killed three birds. Rob has killed two birds. How many birds have Mike and Rob killed?
So it's a word problem from the arithmetic section with what would be a psychotic bent by our lights. It's proof that people in the 19th century really did have a different mindset than our own. We have to remember that our food system wasn't industrialized back then like it was now and lots of people lived with their food. Gives your pause to think your great to the Nth parents might have named their sunday dinner.
As for LJ, I know that some people are doing research on social networking via things like LJ even as we blog today.
"The insidious influences are anything not distinctly dominionist Christian."
I can't argue that.
"Basically, she wants the opportunity to censor what her kids read..."
No argument with this statement, either. But the refusal to pay for libraries seems to come from a "small government" mindset, rather than any opposition to paying for other people, or any interest in backing up parents who protect their children to the same level that she does. She's talking about taxes for libraries like it's picking other people's pockets to pay for the books she uses.
She spends six paragraphs arguing that point (maybe 5.1 paragraphs, given that one of them is a very short sentence), and out of that, there are two sentences that imply her interest in controlling what her children read. It's treated as a side issue in this article.
I suspect that she'd be against community centers, public swimming pools, and parks, because they aren't necessary. (Well, maybe not the parks. But I'm not placing bets.)
I agree that she's strongly dominionist Christian, and that it influences her thinking. But I think her opposition to public libraries comes from a different source.
It's not surprising that, given her clear distaste for public education, she wouldn't support any sort of public educational system after the K-12 years either - including the public library. It makes me wonder where she does support use of broad taxes to benefit the few, though. Does she support taxes to fund college scholarships for minorities or people in need? What about rehabilitation programs for drug users? Funding for fire departments? ("Who needs 'em? I have a smoke alarm, a fire extinguisher, and I pray to God to bless this house. Let those firemen get a REAL job.") Whatever her real rationale is, it comes across as an inability to see beyond hers and her family's immediate needs - especially in this case, where a public library is a resource that she is always free to tap into but chooses not to (as opposed to, say, paying for social security although she is unable to make use of it until later in life).
Anyway, unless she has a problem with democracy on the whole, I think she can't make any real progress anyway: the public will decide what it feels is needed, whether she thinks she'll be able to take advantage of it or not. The reality is that not everything can be run like a private membership club (with fees), or else 99% of government programs wouldn't stand a chance.
Not to say that all people with similar mindsets are selfish, though - there is always a limit to how many and what kind of government programs to enact. Striking the balance between enacting programs to benefit society and reducing the burden on the public is always a challenge. But in this case I think the benefits of a public library system VERY CLEARLY outweigh the costs, and that's why I say that she comes across as being very narrow-minded.
I do think that her desire to control what her children wants to read plays significantly into this narrow-mindedness, but as I'm not her I can't say for certain. It seems that her choice of "public libraries" for today's attack (instead of, for example, art museums / public broadcasting / retirement benefits for government officials / something more expensive with a smaller target) just HAS to come from some other personal bone to pick.
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velvetpage) wrote2006-12-04 11:35 am
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I saw a piece on the History Channel about the Antikythera mechanism, but I didn't realize that they were close to being able to reconstruct it.
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Maybe, maybe not. This might have been the first one of its kind, lost in a storm. I wouldn't be surprised if there were more of these, but I think it's more likely that it was either being taken to a buyer, and that the money from the sale would have financed the second through fourth of these.
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'Course, I am not a real scholar so I may be full it.
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You don't start to see widespread literacy until after the printing press for several reasons, and availability is only one of them. There was also the class system that gave knowledge only to the upper crust and the priests (who were often interconnected.) Mass literacy was not common until the nineteenth century, and functional literacy as we define it today is very, very new - like, within the last fifty years.
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Or, as I put it, "I'm not smarter than they were. I just have better libraries."
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Seriously one of the more amazing digital library projects I saw was something called The Making of America. The project's genesis was the question of what to do with the thousands of 19th century books mouldering in university library storage facilities. U of Michigan and some other Us decided to digitally scan them in and put them all online. The end result(as of year one) was something like 20% of everything published in the 19th century. Everything: books, catalogs, periodicals, correspondance. It's really an unbelievable archive. So the problem for future historians is going to be finding the signal through the unbelievable volume of noise.
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I assume she has a reason for this opinion, but I can't think of one that makes sense.
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I think the Making of America archive might be more valuable when there's more noise. One of the things I thought about is the idea that what appears to be noise may actually be a signal that I don't know how to understand.
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http://buriedtreasurebooks.com/weblog/?p=1721#comments
Basically, if government schools are dens of evil, can government libraries be any better?
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There is a brief mention of the "insidious influences lurking on their shelves," but that doesn't seem to be her primary point. I don't particularly agree with her - discussing books I'd read with my mother was a good introduction to critical thinking - but I can see her point.
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I understand why she says what she says. I still think she's wrong, but I understand her viewpoint.
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So it's a word problem from the arithmetic section with what would be a psychotic bent by our lights. It's proof that people in the 19th century really did have a different mindset than our own. We have to remember that our food system wasn't industrialized back then like it was now and lots of people lived with their food. Gives your pause to think your great to the Nth parents might have named their sunday dinner.
As for LJ, I know that some people are doing research on social networking via things like LJ even as we blog today.
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I can't argue that.
"Basically, she wants the opportunity to censor what her kids read..."
No argument with this statement, either. But the refusal to pay for libraries seems to come from a "small government" mindset, rather than any opposition to paying for other people, or any interest in backing up parents who protect their children to the same level that she does. She's talking about taxes for libraries like it's picking other people's pockets to pay for the books she uses.
She spends six paragraphs arguing that point (maybe 5.1 paragraphs, given that one of them is a very short sentence), and out of that, there are two sentences that imply her interest in controlling what her children read. It's treated as a side issue in this article.
I suspect that she'd be against community centers, public swimming pools, and parks, because they aren't necessary. (Well, maybe not the parks. But I'm not placing bets.)
I agree that she's strongly dominionist Christian, and that it influences her thinking. But I think her opposition to public libraries comes from a different source.
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Anyway, unless she has a problem with democracy on the whole, I think she can't make any real progress anyway: the public will decide what it feels is needed, whether she thinks she'll be able to take advantage of it or not. The reality is that not everything can be run like a private membership club (with fees), or else 99% of government programs wouldn't stand a chance.
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I do think that her desire to control what her children wants to read plays significantly into this narrow-mindedness, but as I'm not her I can't say for certain. It seems that her choice of "public libraries" for today's attack (instead of, for example, art museums / public broadcasting / retirement benefits for government officials / something more expensive with a smaller target) just HAS to come from some other personal bone to pick.
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That's part of why I don't agree with her viewpoint. She's fine. Who cares about all those people that can't afford to buy the books they need?
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