I need to find a good deal for a good laptop. But that will have to wait after mid-Jan. Can anyone give me any hints about that? Are the prices for Macbook Pro going to drop? Dell? Any tips?
I also need to find a place where to shop at the lowest price for (Pantene like quality) shampoo and related bath products. That's for a shorter term though. Gotta load the bags for when going down to labana!
n 1900, a team of sponge-divers discovered an ancient shipwreck from around 65 B.C.
On the ship, they discovered the remains of a mysterious machine about the size of a shoebox. X-rays of the fragments revealed that it contained about 30 intricately arranged gears.
Scientists think it was used to calculate eclipses and other astronomical cycles. Now, researchers have completed a three-dimensional scan of the pieces, and have uncovered more of the writing on its surface. They say the device is even more impressive than they had thought.
The rear side of Freeth and colleagues' reconstruction1 of the Antikythera Mechanism, viewed sideways on. The left gear and pointer system simulated the Saros cycle for predicting lunar and solar eclipses; the right gears and pointers were for the Callippic cycle that synchronizes synodic months and solar years. At the centre, mounted on the large gear-wheel, were two pairs of identical gear-wheels, e5/e6 at the centre and k1/k2 at the left (see also Fig. 5 on page 590). The pair k1/k2 was provided with a pin-and-slot device that induced an irregular movement in the pointer at the front of the mechanism indicating the position of the Moon. This system simulated a model of the Moon's motion developed by Hipparchus of Rhodes in the second century BC.
Michael Wright's reconstruction of the Antikythera Mechanism
No earlier geared mechanism of any sort has ever been found. Nothing close to its technological sophistication appears again for well over a millennium, when astronomical clocks appear in medieval Europe. It stands as a strange exception, stripped of context, of ancestry, of descendants.
Considering how remarkable it is, the Antikythera Mechanism has received comparatively scant attention from archaeologists or historians of science and technology, and is largely unappreciated in the wider world. A virtual reconstruction of the device, published by Mike Edmunds and his colleagues in this week's Nature (see page 587), may help to change that. With the help of pioneering three-dimensional images of the fragments' innards, the authors present something close to a complete picture of how the device worked, which in turn hints at who might have been responsible for building it.
But I'm also interested in finding the answer to a more perplexing question — once the technology arose, where did it go to? The fact that such a sophisticated technology appears seemingly out of the blue is perhaps not that surprising — records and artefacts from 2,000 years ago are, after all, scarce. More surprising, to an observer from the progress-obsessed twenty-first century, is the apparent lack of a subsequent tradition based on the same technology — of ever better clockworks spreading out round the world. How can the capacity to build a machine so magnificent have passed through history with no obvious effects?
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I don't understand half of what it says, but it is sure impressive that they'd come up with such a device so early in our history.
