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The Antikythera Mechanism

The Antikythera MechanismThere's an amazing documentary over at Nature all about The Antikythera Mechanism, an ancient mechanical calculator (also described as the first known "mechanical computer") designed to calculate astronomical positions over time, which was built over 2,000 years ago, most probably by Archimedes in the colonies of Corinth in Sicily. It's absolutely mind-blowing.

The The Antikythera Mechanism is basically a big (very complicated, and way ahead of it's time) clock, which calculates the date of solar and lunar eclipses, as well as when the various "games", including the Olympics, are scheduled to happen. In that way it's one of the few ancient mechanisms which displays not only astronomical events, but also events of cultural significance.

I highly recommend you click on that there link above and spend a few minutes learning about one of the most important archeological finds in history.

There is, of course, also a (long!) page all about it ovar at Wikipedia.

I also recommend spend a bit of time going through the Nature Online Video Archive, there's loads more there that will blow your mind.

For those of you who don't watch the video, it's pronounced "ANT-EE-KITH-ER-A".

(I'd embed the video, but there's no easy "embed video" option and I'm too tired to fiddle with embedding .swf files the hard way. Sorry!)

Posted by Matt at 11PM |

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