forget everything you ever hope to accomplish
ngon master
because this is just so much cooler.
http://www.engadget.com/2010/12/10/apple-engineer-uses-lego-to-rebuild-ancient-greek-mechanism-wil/
http://www.engadget.com/2010/12/10/apple-engineer-uses-lego-to-rebuild-ancient-greek-mechanism-wil/
Replies
So I don't get how it works exactly. How can gears be adding/substracting/mathing numbers? Seems like they have what's basically a clock on one side, then an eclipse calendar on the other. So maybe they figured out the math of the ratio between hours and when an eclipse happens ahead of time, and then made a machine that uses that ratio to show when an eclipse happens?
essentially, yes that's right.
now... in the modern age, it's more of a novelty toy and to be fair just falls under the "oh that's neat" catagory.
what i find amazing is that 2000 years ago, greeks built that bad boy out of stone, and it worked to precision of within 5 minutes.
Yeah, that really is amazing.
I saw this a while ago too:
[ame]
Which got me thinking, that thing isn't bigger at all (or maybe smaller?) than the earlier electronic computers we had that did basically the same thing. So, could we have had basically steampunk computers? Assuming that tech could be miniaturized, could we have had computers that are as powerful as what we have today, only without electronics?
But A++ for inventing the thing 2000 years ago.
It must of been incredibly powerful to be able to predict events like that.
Spin a smaller cog on an axle with a bigger cog on another axle, suddenly the axle with the smaller cog will have done more rotations than the rotations you put into the axle with the big cog.
= multiplication.
Also... wow I had no idea they figured out the purpose of that device. And to replicate it's functionality too... Jeeze, just imagine if that scientific progress were left to progress on it's own (IE, no invasion(s) of Greece), we'd probably be colonizing space by now. They were just a stones throw from making a Babbage Machine.
Simple answer no :P
And while while we could make entirely mechanized computers to some degree.. well, lets just say there's a good reason we are moving away from moving parts in computers, now imagine those moving parts on the microscopic level.