Lego Antikythera Mechanism

YouTube ^ | 09 Dec 2010 | NatureVideoChannel

[TheOldLady]

Oh, my mistake. Apparently almost everybody burned the Library from time to time for more than a half-millennium. I don’t know enough about it to argue, so I give up. (I’m ignorant, not stupid. Usually.)

[SunkenCiv]

:’) The shopping carts? ;’)

[Antoninus]

Actually, Julius Caesar burned the library. The action of which you speak was trivial compared to that of Caesar.

The library was partially burned many times and then rebuilt. But the final blow was that administered by the enlightened adherents of Mahomet.

[Antoninus]

In fairness, almost all of what we know of classical Greek literature, mathematics and science is from translations and copies that came down to us from the Islamic University at Damascus. Arabic and Persian scholarship in the Middle Ages was of a very high standard, outstripping Europe by centuries.

That is true only if you discount Byzantium which was still the epicenter of classical learning and civilization deep into the middle ages. And it should be remembered that Syria and the near-east was still majority Christian for a long time after the Muslim conquest. This is not to say that Muslim scholars played no role at all in transmitting classical scholarship. In my opinion, their role has been over-estimated.

[Lonesome in Massachussets]

Clearly, Ptolemy exclusively and Euclid primarily came back to Europe through Arab translations. Fragmentary copies of Euclid have been found, but our knowledge of Euclid is really through Damascus and through the its Islamic university. A great deal would have been lost without them. Ptolemy's Syntaxis is known today by its Arabic name, Almagest.

[bigheadfred]

Ahhhh. Who needs Lego? The 15 month old grandson and I set up a fine looking Stonehenge with wood blocks last night. Both versions. The original (mostly grandpa), and the way it appears today (mostly grandson). :-)

[zeugma]

There are lots moreof us AFLs than you’d ever imagine.

[BenLurkin]

It isn't so sure that gizmo wasn't a later artifact that just happened to land on an older wreck.

[TheOldLady]

Of course. Why? Is this thread about anything else?   :-p

[Peanut Gallery]

My son enjoys designing ‘mini-kits’ using Lego Designer. He gets the part numbers for each piece from the lego website, and then we go to the Lego Store (there is one about 10 miles from our house) and place the order there instead of ordering online from home. It saves shipping fees and is much less expensive than ordering using the lego designer software. If you do not have a Lego store near you, you will still have to pay shipping, but ordering from the online store should still be less expensive than ordering from the lego design software.

The way it works is that you place the order, but before submitting it, you purchase a gift card for the total amount. Then when you submit the order, the store clerk overrides the shipping fee, and you pay using the gift card.

[FourPeas]

Interesting. I’ll definitely keep that in mind. The closest Lego store is hours away, but we do occasionally make trips to The Big City. Thanks for the tip.

[filospinato]

I bet that there are lots of closet AFOL’s around. The LEGO technic stuff is great, I’ve used it to explain about gear mechanics and 4 bar linkages to my 7 year old son. In fact, in a kinematics class at school, the teacher handed our technic LEGO bricks and we used them for the same thing, understanding the fundementals of linkages.

[MaxMax]

Obamao should be in the center of that standing at a podium.

[SunkenCiv]

it is certain that it's ancient, from the inscriptions on the artifact; also circumstantially, the virtual reconstructions of it show a narrow range of a few ancient centuries when the planetary motions it will generate would be accurate.

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[SunkenCiv]

:’D That probably happens a lot. ;’)

[SunkenCiv]

:’)

[1010RD]

We live in a world of lost knowledge.

“Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?” - George Eliot