When it came to making cogs and gears, the ancient Greeks got there more than a millennium before anyone else, scientists say.Wow! What do we say about that? Obviously the ancients weren't quite as stupid as some of us would like! Well, don't worry. A genius by the name of Harry McCall addressed this point so eloquently that I have to quote his words in full:Using advanced new imaging techniques, scientists have reconstructed the gear structure of the mysterious Antikythera mechanism—one of the world's oldest computers.
. . .
The device employs an elaborate arrangement of more than 30 gears for its calculations. The level of miniaturization and complexity is remarkable, with some parts resembling those used by 18th-century clockmakers.
"It is extraordinarily sophisticated," said Stephen Johnston, an expert on astronomical calculators from the Museum of the History of Science at the University of Oxford in England.
"In its complexity it exceeds medieval cathedral clocks, which were developed over a thousand years later."
-National Geographic News
the ancient Greek were MUCH more intelligent than the dumb Biblical writers. Classical Greeks such as Plato, Socrates, Aristotle were the exceptions. I web noted that this gadget was Greaco-Roman and not Biblical.
It reads like poetry, doesn't it? So now we can safely conclude that not all ancient people was stupid, just the ones we need to be.
2 comments:
Well I think us atheists have already show that the bible was written by illiterate sand people. what's more, we must remember that women were the first eyewitnesses to the risen Jesus and women can't use computers so there.
Wow, someone really doesn't understand skeptics at all. Just repeating what The Authority of Hollywood and the mainstream media says about us.
Ancient people were pretty much exactly as smart as we were. They had the same faculties, imagination, and so forth.
What they lacked was the same knowledge base. "If I have seen further, it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants." Back then, a lot of the 'giants' hadn't been born, yet.
As for the skeptics' current attitude towards the mechanism, I usually find it's this: "Oh, that's a cool gizmo. Glad to see they could put their knowledge together to make it." The surprise I had was about the same level as when I found out that Cave Story, my favorite indie videogame, was made by one guy. Cool, but well within the realm of plausibility to be almost unnotable.
As for that line about "cream of the evolutionary crop": I hate to break it to you, but Star Trek isn't real. Yes, it's a cool show, but the "science" of that fiction is crap.
Oh, and cute, anonymous, about the eyewitness thing. Did it ever occur to you that there's a reason eyewitness testimony is regarded so lowly in comparison to forensic evidence? Humans aren't gods. Our brains are not indelible film for our eyes. Our memories can be changed and distorted by all sorts of things.
Of course, we're talking about a book written centuries later about what some supposed eyewitnesses said, and I'll stop there, because we're getting into fractal wrongness.
Oh, and as for the sexism game, you might want to try wrangling in all your fundie friends who go on and on about some of my blogging friends being obviously stupid and inferior women. Never seen a skeptic take that attitude, and if I did, I'd give them the flaming of a lifetime.
But anyway, since I've had my on-topic fun poking at the walls of your ivory tower, tell that MrFreeThinker guy from here who stopped by my place we're having some big laughs at his embarrassing posts. Wonder if he's going to delete them like that one guy did at Akusai's place.
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