inkbluesky

thinking bout things, bigger.

Enigma of ancient world’s computer is cracked at last

A 2,100-year-old clockwork machine whose remains were retrieved from a shipwreck more than a century ago has turned out to be the celestial super-computer of the ancient world.

Using 21st-century technology to peer beneath the surface of the encrusted gearwheels, stunned scientists say the so-called Antikythera Mechanism could predict the ballet of the Sun and Moon over decades and calculate a lunar anomaly that would bedevil Isaac Newton himself.

Built in Greece around 150-100 BC and possibly linked to the astronomer and mathematician Hipparchos, its complexity was probably unrivalled for at least a thousand years, they say.

“It’s beautifully designed. Your jaw drops when you work out what they did and what they put into this,” said astronomer Mike Edmunds of Cardiff University, Wales, in an interview with AFP. (photo at the link.)

The Aztecs had a pretty sophisticated grasp of time and the movement of celestrial bodies, but they didn’t really flourish as a sophisticated culture until the 13th-15th century. So their calculations and findings about time and astronomy were at least 1300 years or more after Hipparchos.

Its not celebration of ancient Greeks day, but I happened across this story too. Between the lines: A rare Ancient Greek text is found 

The Archimedes Palimpsest, sold at auction at Christie’s for $2 million in 1998, is best known for containing some of the oldest copies of work by the Greek mathematician who gives the manuscript its name. But there is more to the palimpsest than Archimedes’s work, including 10 pages of Hyperides, offering fresh insights into the critical battle of Salamis in 480 B.C., in which the Greeks defeated the Persians, and the battle of Chaeronea in 338 B.C., which spelled the beginning of the end of Greek democracy.

snip

Hyperides lived from 390 or 389 B.C. until 322 B.C. and was an orator who made speeches at public meetings of the citizen assembly. A contemporary of Aristotle and Demosthenes, he wrote speeches for himself and for others and spoke at important political trials. In 322 B.C., Hyperides was executed by the Macedonians for participating in a failed rebellion.

It is thought that the writings or in this case the ancient transcriptions of Hyperides writings are important because of the history of the war mentioned in the article and because he was a kind of devotee of language and made speeches that were like performances. So they would be both a history and an example of early stage craft and drama.

tiffany thiesen’s flower tattoo

 The N-Word Unmentionable lessons of the midterm aftermath.

The ways our free press has served the powers it was supposed to afflict range from the belabored (Judith Miller’s WMD “scoops” in the Times), to the grandiose (Tom Friedman’s op-ed manifestos for a new political species: the pro-war-if-it-works liberal), to the perverse (Christopher Hitchens’s flogging, in Slate, of a left-wing fifth column so much worse than the Bush-Cheney-Halliburton complex). My favorite editorial pledge of allegiance was a syndicated column by Kathleen Parker welcoming the ministrations of Bush’s domestic spies because, hey, she wasn’t conducting any phone business more controversial than making appointments to get her highlights done.

We have become such “good Americans” that we no longer have the moral imagination to picture what it might be like to be in a bureaucratic category that voids our human rights, be it “enemy combatant” or “illegal immigrant.” Thus, in the week before the election, hardly a ripple answered the latest decree from the Bush administration: Detainees held in CIA prisons were forbidden from telling their lawyers what methods of interrogation were used on them, presumably so they wouldn’t give away any of the top-secret torture methods that we don’t use. Cautiously, I look back on that as the crystallizing moment of Bushworld: tautological as a Gilbert and Sullivan libretto, absurd as a Marx Brothers movie, and scary as a Kafka novel.

From Nixon to Dubya’s current reign modern conservatives might be better termed Nazi-lite. You can go to work, do some shopping, and order a pizza - everyone has all the illusions of freedom absent the political foundations on which a sustainable democracy rests.

It is a sad era when not even your nuts are safe,  Cops crack possible nut-nabber syndicate 

The tipster had read about the thefts and called police Sunday after seeing workers transporting boxes from various nut processors between a rental truck and the warehouse, Merced County Sheriff‘s Detective Vince Gallagher said.

Investigators suspect that the almonds in the warehouse were stolen from Central Valley orchards, and they are examining whether the importer was selling them to stores, Gallagher said.

Growers in California‘s Central Valley produce about 80 percent of the world‘s almonds.

They couldn’t break into a fruitcake factory and steal all the fruitcake so that millions of Americans could be spared having a rum soaked door-stop.

time is not on your side 

I haven’t done anything on tech for a while. As Windows Vista will be coming out soon and considering the time of the year a lot of people will be trying to decide to go with a new MAC ( that can boot with Windows) or get a new machine with Vista installed. For MAC veterans who tend to be very loyal its a no brainer. On the other hand Windows vets might need a little help to decide. The part that compares MAC and Vista starts about half way down, but if you want a good introduction into Vista the rest might be useful too, Windows Vista FAQ

Q. Can I run Windows Vista on a Mac?

Yep. The two major options for running Windows on a Macintosh system–Parallels and Apple’s Boot Camp–both support it.

[  ]..Q. How does Windows Vista stack up against the most recent Apple OS?

In our 2005 World Class Awards, we named Apple’s OS X 10.4 (”Tiger”) the third-best product of the year, while Windows XP wasn’t mentioned at all. But Windows Vista at least narrows the gap between operating systems that hail from Redmond and Cupertino. In part this is because Vista adds so many features–from decent integrated search to Gadgets (aka Widgets) to fancy 3D effects–that Tiger already has.

With Leopard, the next generation of OS X, due out next spring, Mac owners will get some new features that may put Windows users farther back in their rear-view mirrors. For instance, judging from previews, Leopard’s Time Machine continuous-backup utility may be superior to Vista’s Backup, System Restore, and Previous Versions data-recovery features.

Artists Protest Over Planned Eakins Sale 

 Several dozen local artists dismayed by a university’s decision to sell Thomas Eakins’ masterpiece “The Gross Clinic” joined Sunday the fight to keep the painting in its hometown.

Thomas Jefferson University announced Nov. 11 the planned sale of the painting for $68 million to a partnership of Wal-Mart heiress Alice Walton and the National Gallery of Art in Washington. The university set a Dec. 26 deadline for a counteroffer.

This Eakin’s painting has been featured in every survey of American art book that I have ever read it deserves ti stay where it is. Yes the money will supposedly be used for research and infrastructure improvements, but those needs are hardly new for any university. Wal-mart’s participation in this little bit of black-mail is ironic since its profits in 2004 for example were 11 billion dollars. Wal-mart could write that university a check for  the amount of the Eakins painting as a donation and hardly miss it.

wearing smooth larger 

Community from India claims to be lost Jewish tribe

KIRYAT ARBA, WEST BANK — When Tzvi Khaute came six years ago from a remote corner of India, claiming to be of the lost Jewish tribe of Menashe, Israeli authorities didn’t buy it.

Things may be starting to change. About 1,000 members of the Bnei Menashe community are now Israeli citizens, and 218 others, the largest single group so far, began arriving recently.

I just found this curious. The Menashe hyperlink is to the entry on Wikipedia and goes more into the history of this lost tribe.

Like the tribal story in some places time passes at a different pace, Tattoos more socially acceptable

Because Oklahoma finally gave in and legalized tattooing, one tattoo parlor has already opened up in Stillwater.

In our grandparents’ day, people who got tattoos were those in the military or in jail. That’s obviously no longer the case, because tattoos are much more acceptable among people our age than they were half a century ago.

Tattoos are more ubiquitous today than ever, and traditional attitudes about those with tattoos have shifted.

It’s no longer as big a deal as it used to be to get inked. That is, the stigma associated with tattoos has faded and given way to a hip culture in which tattoos are on their way to becoming the norm, and the un-inked could soon be in the minority.

Celebrities, both male and female, have no problem displaying their newly-inked designs on the red carpet, something that was unheard of in the “Golden Age of Hollywood.” And many consider getting a tattoo for an 18th birthday a rite of passage.

But as tattoos become increasingly present in our lives, vestiges of stereotypes still remain in situations, such as job interviews and even character judgment. Some schools of thought still exist that view tattoos as badges for delinquency and associate tattoos with lower-class status.

This is an old-fashioned point of view. It’s not fair to judge job applicants based on what they have on their skin, because it is unlikely to hinder their ability to perform well career-wise.

If tattoos in Oklahoma were originally against the law because the state was concerned about enforcing the health regulations that we have to have in order to have a legitimate tattoo industry that’s understandable, but if the law was about social taboos, well welcome to the 21st century where police officers and nurses have tattoos.