Sometimes pride is okay

A common human failing we see regularly is to infer past or other cultures as somehow inferior to our own. This can happen to the point where we view them as somehow less intelligent than we are. "We" being defined as whoever the observing culture is. Western European culture has a particularly obvious pattern here. Englishmen, secure in the center of the vast British Empire, speculated on ambiguous skull patterns as definite proof of the innate cognitive superiority of the English brain.

We do it today. Reading some of the writings from different period of human history it's hard not to say what were they thinking? And then some artifact from the past will just astound us with its sophistication and humble us into realizing that humans have been really, really smart for a very long time.

Nowhere is this more shown than with the Antikythera mechanism. Long story made short: the mechanism was discovered underwater in 1900 and dismissed as just a lump until in 1902 a gear wheel was observed in it. Years go by and studied observation determines it was a mechanism. More recently, modern research technology such as CAT scans and exotic photographic techniques were applied to it to get a true three dimensional picture of it. All of this is in the wikipedia article and more. Go read it.

Nature shows a very nice documentary on it here. A good article on it is here.

The mechanism was used to predict the timing of the Olympic Games.

The Games had to happen every four years on the full moon closest to the summer solstice. Now, let's think about that. This machine related the lunar cycle to the solar cycle-- two cycles that have no natural connection. That is, there is no easy harmonic that could be used to determine a relationship such as four to two or six to three. A solar year is 365.25 days long (remember leap year). The lunar cycle is 29.53 days. The relationship between these two is 12.3772+. This device had to figure out solstices, full moons, etc., in relationship to one another, with nothing but rods and gears. And it does it beautifully.

Now, I've been doing a little machining in the last couple of years. Mostly with a lathe. I covet a mill. The device was made out of bronze. It did all of it in an little box 13 inches high, 6.7 inches wide, and 3.5 inches deep. It was made by hand. And it was intended to schedule an event we pay homage to this August.

Things like this make you proud to be human.
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Links of Interest
Cognitive Science and Moral Philosophy
Toward a Type 1 Civilization
Atheist Rapper
Darwin on the Right
Fact Checking 101
The Mechanicrawl
Zap Gun Moves Ahead
The Drinking of the Shrew revisited
A Robot Perv
Desalination Made Easy
The $10 Microscope (I want one)
Scaphokogia! (Pronounced like it's spelled)
Why elders lose memory