Recreating a Mysterious, 2,100-Year-Old Clock 209
fergus07 writes "Swiss watchmaker Hublot has created a scaled-down working replica of the ancient Antikythera mechanism. The question is — why on Earth would you want to strap one of these to your wrist? It barely tells the time, and it can't take pictures, tweet or connect to your Facebook. In fact, very few people would have the faintest idea what it is, or why you'd want one at all. But for those that do recognize its intricate gears and dials, this tiny, complex piece of machinery tells a vivid and incredible tale of gigantic scientific upheaval, of adventure and shipwreck on the high seas, of war and death."
vanity (Score:5, Insightful)
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From TFA/TFS:
The question is — why on Earth would you want to strap one of these to your wrist? It barely tells the time, and it can't take pictures, tweet or connect to your Facebook.
Because fuck you, some of us want to tell what fucking time it is without at least a 1GHz processor with 16GB of RAM, you smarmy Gizmag writer asshole, that's why.
Well, keep looking. Said device doesn't do that whatsoever.
Re:vanity (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, yes it does...
From TFA:
Hublot's own working replica of the Antikythera mechanism, scaled down from shoebox size to wristwatch size, and with a built in clock circuit so it can tell the time as well as make its astronomical predictions.
Re:vanity (Score:4, Informative)
That's odd, my $100 Motorola is the best phone I've owned, and I've had phones since the rotary days.
You young whippersnapper. I remember when you had to pick up the earpiece and tap the hanger a couple of times to get Madge's attention down at central and then you'd ask to be connected.
And before that if you wanted to talk to someone at the other end of town you walked over and did it in person. Good for your health, less stress. You wanted to talk to someone in the next city over, you waited until they invented the telegraph and sent one of those newfangled things.
Now get off my lawn.
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wait until they invented the telegraph?
i had to wait until horses evolved!
Re:vanity (Score:4, Insightful)
Office: desk phone, laptop, pc, wall clock, cell phone.
Kitchen: wall phone, wall clock, microwave, stove, cell phone.
Living room: cable box, DVD player, wall clock, cell phone.
Bedroom: alarm clock, weather station, cell phone.
Car: radio, satellite receiver, GPS, cell phone.
So I can't figure out why anybody would wear a wrist watch, unless for fashion. And that makes even less sense.
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Same reason I wear McFlys.....
http://www.back4thefuture.com/ [back4thefuture.com] I feel like I am superfly in these monkeys!
Re:vanity (Score:5, Informative)
Fashion is part of it. So I can tell time in meetings if there is no clock. Because it takes 2 seconds to look at my watch, and more to dig out my cell phone, so when I'm walking it comes in handy. Because there's something really beautiful about a mechanical watch with its gears exposed. Because you can get used to wearing a watch, and if you're not wearing one it can feel odd. Occasionally having an alarm comes in handy. Or a stopwatch.
Just because it doesn't make any sense to you that doesn't mean that other people don't have reasons for wearing a watch.
They also make more than one flavor of ice-cream, too.
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If I can't see a clock, and don't feel like fishing the phone out of my pocket to look, I've got a pretty good idea how long it's been since the last time I looked at the time. Give or take a couple of minutes.
Now, yes, a watch is cool. I like the ones with all the exposed gears and perfectly machined parts that I see in magazine ads. Especially the ones with diving or aeronautical readouts that I don't understand. But is t
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Well, no ... you'll never be as cool as Travolta in front of a lear jet. ;-)
I've
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So I can't figure out why anybody would wear a wrist watch, unless for fashion. And that makes even less sense.
Because some people do not spend their lives indoors. Have you ever tried to look at your cell phone while riding a bike? But hey, this is slashdot. You might be one of those cell phone holster guys.
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Re:vanity (Score:5, Insightful)
On the other hand, I can't figure out why anybody would carry a cell phone, unless for fashion.
Dad? Is that you? When did you get a computer? I can't figure out why anyone would want a landline phone, all you can do with one is make and recieve calls, and it doesn't even work unless you're home. I don't have a landline. But my phone makes and recieves calls, texts, emails, accesses the internet, is a calandar, a calculator, a camera, a movie camera... it's a damned handy device to have.
If you're not my 80 year old dad you must be trolling.
*eyeroll* (Score:5, Insightful)
it can't take pictures, tweet or connect to your Facebook.
Because THAT'S what's important in a watch.
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Re:*eyeroll* (Score:5, Funny)
My solution is just to loudly yell every action as I take it.
Ad for Fossil watches (Score:2)
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They made some cool PDA-watches that ran PalmOS in the early 2000s. I thought about buying one, but I can never come up with a good use for a computer with a screen literally the size of a postage stamp, while I'm already carrying a regular-sized PDA around...
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Obligatory meme butcher (Score:2)
The ad I see at the top of the page is for Fossil watches. ;-)
Mother******* Adsense spots, how do they work?
(in other words, in order to read an article about a fancy watch and NOT seen an ad for a watch or watch-related service, you would need to be living in 1998.)
Re:Obligatory meme butcher (Score:5, Funny)
The ad I see at the top of the page is for Fossil watches. ;-)
Mother******* Adsense spots, how do they work?
Actually, they use a complicated system of 84 gears ...
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I modify my hosts file directly. I don't need extra shit using resources.
I let Adblock do the work for me, even if it does use a few more computing resources. My computer has a lot more spare time than I do...
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APK has an account now?
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Well... (Score:3)
Antikythera in Lego (Score:5, Interesting)
Antikythera in Lego [youtube.com]
Amazing (Score:5, Insightful)
It's amazing in one respect, and sad in another. The Late Classical Greeks came so close to their own scientific revolution. If it hadn't been for the near culturally fatal effects of the Peloponnesian War, the Greeks may very well have invented science themselves. Can you imagine where we would be now if scientific methodology had fully blossomed 2,300 years ago?
Re:Amazing (Score:4, Funny)
They invented this watch, unfortunately they patented it and drove all competitors out of business before collapsing themselves ;-)
Thankfully, 2,100 years later their patents and copyrights have expired, so we can open-source it.
Assuming, of course, Hublot hasn't patented it themselves.
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It would be amazing if they can get a patent on that.
True. Prior art of 2100 years might be a small hurdle.
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[/sarcasm]
Re:Amazing (Score:5, Interesting)
Way past the distant memory of peak oil and even "post oil"? Not to mention peak- and post- almost everything else industrially useful.
But that's an incorrect historical take on the matter. To blossom a contemporaneous-like science requires, among other things, an extremely solid logical and mathematical foundation, way past what had been developed back in Ancient Greece, plus a very specific kind of world view that only developed once, under a very specific historical context. The first two aspects were advanced to the point of usefulness only during the three later centuries of (what we now call) the Middle Ages, while the third aspect required two more centuries, building upon the first two aspects. These three simply weren't available at the time.
What doesn't mean considering the possibility isn't fun. There are some quite nice alternate history fiction on the subject out there.
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You might be surprised at the mathematical and logical complexity of ancient Greek thought. The logic gets more press (cf. Aristotle), and the math was sometimes looked down upon as un-philosophic and overly technical, but that doesn't mean that people weren't working on it. Archimedes, for one, is known to have asked complicated questions, and Eratosthenes has not only a prime number algorithm named after him but also managed to invent ways to measure the size of the earth. The rudiments of algebra are
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"there's no knowledge of calculus"
Archimedes was actually very close to inventing integral calculus [wikipedia.org]. He calculated areas, volumes and centers of mass using limits.
The biggest thing missing from ancient math was the positional notation system using zero. The next biggest was the printing press.
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Re:Amazing (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Amazing (Score:5, Interesting)
Rome fell not because it was brutal (as it always had been), but because it ceased to be. It had built an empire upon exceptionalism and an inhumane disregard for any opposition, and this simply could not be translated to fit the mindset of the early church as it was instituted as the state religion. It would not be until the Crusades that the clergy would succeed in bastardizing Christianity enough that it could be used as an excuse for further military brutality.
Re:Amazing (Score:5, Insightful)
The Empire was already in serious decline by the time of the Edict of Milan. You can't really blame Christianity for Rome's failure. A modern understanding reveals that Rome was thumped by the first major wave of invaders out of the Asian Steppe. The economic dislocation, which came before the outright physical disruption (ie. the Huns) were too much for the Roman economy to bear. This was an Empire basically kept together through massive military spending, and thus the underlying economy had to be strong, but as that was shaken, Rome basically entered an age of reaction, rather than action, and blow after blow took it out down. Everything Rome did from that point on; Diocletian's reforms, debasement of the currency, conversion to Christianity, the filling of the Legions with German tribesmen of dubious loyalty, all amounted to stop-gate measures.
Not that I'm defending Christianity, being an atheist myself, but I just find blaming Christianity for the failure is really a matter of putting the cart before the horse.
Re:Amazing (Score:4, Interesting)
You also have your history quite backward. The Huns were not an active pressure upon Rome until after its Christianization. When the Edict of Milan granted religious tolerance (not establishment), the Hunic Empire didn't even exist. By Theodosius I's time, it had barely managed to tame it's barbarian neighbors and still posed no direct threat to Rome. That came much later.
So while there's a certain argument for correlation doesn't equal causation, the real decline of the empire did occur *after* the Christianization. Lots of seeds were sewn before then, both systemically and by some very poor decisions. As an example of the latter, the carrot of Romanization, Roman citizenship, was devalued to nothing by a double blow under Caracalla. First, it was made universal to all free men in the territories. Second, Caracalla got butthurt by the Alexandrians' mockery of him and order thousands of them slaughtered, which, if they were now truly full Roman citizens, inexcusably violated the basic tenet that no Roman citizen could be executed without trial. Roman citizenship was no longer something anybody had to seek, nor was it anything somebody would want.
Rome could have persisted through the barbarians' rise if it would have worked with them instead of being delusional about its superiority. Alaric I who sacked Rome was in fact part of Theodosius' legions (what a coincidence, the emperor who established Christianity...), and was a mercenary for Rome until Honorius betrayed him and his Roman handler Flavius Stilicho. Because Rome broke its promise to pay Alaric and his men, and purged many mercenaries and their families whose survivors clamored to Alaric to lead them in revenge, he did so. If Rome had given the deference Alaric had asked for and not persecuted other foederati, the Western Roman Empire might have been stable enough to resist the Hunic hordes. Hypothetically.
Either way, the important point hear is that you have your history very backwards. The most significant pressures from barbarians and the Huns specifically undeniably followed, not preceded, the establishment of Christianity within the Roman Empire.
Re:Amazing (Score:4, Insightful)
Another commentator mentioned the economic aspect. I won't repeat what s/he said but I did want to add that the Roman economy was largely predicated on conquering territories to generate tax revenue. Why? Because the Senate had voted to exempt themselves from all taxation. As they gained more and more land, it generated less money for the treasury necessitating conquering more people.
-l
P.s., I don't have a citation right now.
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IIRC, it was worse than just tax revenues.
Conquered land was what was given to soldiers as their payment. So you needed an army to conquer land, so you conquered the land and gave it to the soldiers. Now you have more land to guard, so you need a bigger army, so you need to conquer more land, so you can give it to the soldiers, and now you have more land to guard...
Economic expansion was built on conquering foreign lands, and Europe west of Rhine is a limited amount of room, even by horse-and-cart standa
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It's the Greek equivalent of "goy".
-l
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Re:Amazing (Score:5, Interesting)
Well the Peloponnesian War predates this clock by about 300 years...
But the ancient Greeks indeed came so close to the scientific and industrial revolution that it makes a fascinating fiction of alternative history. For example they even had working steam engine and railway around the same time period of the clock:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeolipile [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diolkos [wikipedia.org]
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Slavery is another reason. There was no need to automate because they had slaves. It was a double-edged sword: slaves freed-up enough people to ponder the universe, but it also meant less value in automation. Greeks excelled at "thought science", but not so much at empirical science that required rolling up your sleeves.
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Re:Amazing (Score:5, Insightful)
Not true. The church sponsored scientific discovery. In a world created by God, the laws of nature are God's laws, and worthy of study.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Gods-Philosophers-Medieval-Foundations-Science/dp/1848311508/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1321560353&sr=1-1 [amazon.co.uk]
http://jameshannam.com/ [jameshannam.com]
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Christian_thinkers_in_science [wikipedia.org]
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Nothing would have happened.
They needed all the modern tools such as heavy slave labor and better knowledge of metals such as aluminum, titanium, or even high carbon steel. Science achieved on the back of regular people that figured things out. The first high carbon steel swords were not made by scientists that were thinking about it. they were made by a uneducated swordsmith who had worked in a dirty forge for all his life.
Science rides on the backs of the common man.
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The first high carbon steel swords were not made by scientists that were thinking about it. they were made by a uneducated swordsmith who had worked in a dirty forge for all his life.
More likely, for three or four generations, if not more.
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This worker could have well be a curious weekend scientist. Talent is born in about the same rate among all layers of society.
He could find books in a monastery. And it is not unimaginable a that he could learn to read from someone.
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You are mistaken, they did have a "scientific revolution" the Greek world extended beyond Greece, look into the extended sphere of Greek culture, I would suggest that Syracuse on the Island of Sicily Alexandria in Egypt and all of the extended influence of Hellenism well into Roman times and it was the heavy hand of Roman bureaucratic interference and Stoic philosophy that finally brought it to a standstill!
The things we know about are too numerous to put here, the number we have never even heard about are
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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Well, the collapse of the Western Empire directly was related to the Germanic tribes (that's right, it was the goddamn Germans as usual), but indirectly the German tribes themselves were being forced by forces deeper into Eurasia; the various tribes of the Asian Steppes who, by the time they were done, had transformed, seized or destroyed a good many of the civilizations of Late Antiquity. The Eastern Empire survived the first waves of barbarian, and might even have survived the Turkic invaders, if it hadn
I love the bit of snark in the article (Score:5, Funny)
It's funny because its true.
What I'd like to see (Score:3)
is a kit to build a working replica of the mechanism.
RepRap Map needed (Score:4, Interesting)
If it can be done in LEGO, surely we can create the RepRap CAD files to make one?
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I wonder if anyone's done an Antikythera mechanism in Minecraft?
You can't have one (Score:5, Informative)
Per TFA:
The watch is a concept piece only, and will be presented at the Baselworld watch show in 2012.
Maybe if enough people begged, they might make a production run.
I wouldn't mind having one, but I'm not holding my breath.
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You do know this watch would not cost under 5 digits right? I wouldn't be surprised if they charged $30k for it.
Re:You can't have one (Score:5, Funny)
What are you? Part of the 99%?
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You're off by about two orders of magnitude. Check the price of the much less complicated Patek Celestial [jomashop.com]. Hublot sells watches for six digits that only tell the time.
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Oh holy shit 8-(
And I thought the $30k watches were crazy...
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There's one thing about that watch that really bothers me: it's only water resistant to 25M (~82ft). If you're going to try selling me a watch that costs more than I make in a year I'd better be able to drop that fucking thing in a volcano before it breaks.
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The one I'm wearing now is water resistant to 50M and my less-formal watch is water resistant to 200M and also shock resistant, and it tells me the time and date with nice big letters and has an EL backlight. Together they're less than $200.
Fools and their money...
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It's only foolish if you can't afford it.
It's only foolish if you buy something without considering whether it it has value to you. Even if I had a quarter of a million burning a hole in my pocket it would still be foolish for me to buy such a watch because it doesn't have the features I want. It would be just as foolish for me to spend ten dollars on a Justin Bieber CD because that doesn't have any value to me either.
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Haha awesome -- and they only provide a 2 year warranty. You would think that for 6 figures they could eke out a lifetime warranty...
-l
Because you can (Score:5, Insightful)
Why on Earth would you want to strap one of these (Score:4, Funny)
to your wrist?
It's obvious! So that you're ready for when the evil Kythera Mechanism shows up!
Shame on the Author (Score:5, Insightful)
If you have to ask "Why?" when talking about this project, I pity your lack of intelligence and creativity.
A lot of nerds don't get horology... (Score:4, Interesting)
A lot of nerds simply don't get horology. They'll consider hand-crafted masterpieces as "junk" that your el-cheapo thinkgeek-powered watch renders useless...
But not all nerds are like that: quite some of them also recognize true craftmanship and fine horology when they see some. I do certainly see the appeal of such a watch for people into pure mechanical watches...
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No, it was because one part of the system did time in base-2 and the other part did it in base-10. After operating a while they'd get noticeably out of sync and then the missile would miss its target because of this.
Really cool ... (Score:4, Interesting)
So I'm suddenly imagining an alternate "steam punk" timeline in which we had mechanisms and gears 2000 years ago. It's always amazing to see what was really known back that far.
That's absolutely cool.
As someone with a lot of watches, that Hublot wrist watch is a really cool timepiece. A skeleton watch with 2000 years of history to it.
Though, as other people have pointed out, I bet this would cost a pretty penny.
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So I'm suddenly imagining an alternate "steam punk" timeline in which we had mechanisms and gears 2000 years ago. It's always amazing to see what was really known back that far.
Turns out it's actually mechanisms and gears, which means it's not so alternate.
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Funny, but I meant where they had been in continuous usage for all of that time. Not something which got lost and only rediscovered "recently" (by historical measures).
But if we'd had clockworks gears for 2000 years, I can only imagine how many cool things would have been invented centuries ago.
Re:Really cool ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Just imagine what we lost when the idiot Christians burned the Library of Alexandria.
Just imagine how much was lost in ideas because if stupid laws or traditions in a certain islam bible.
Just imagine how many scientists were killed in early society in general because their ideas or understanding was greater than some monarch, and we cant have that!
Humanity has gone out of it's way to destroy knowledge in the name of hating change. Organized political Religion (Catholic church, Radical Islam, Moonies, David Koresh, Church of the Latter Day saints, Scientology, etc....) is simply a powerful tool to help spread hate and control. None of these religions have ANY use other than to keep certain people in power and rich at the expense of others.
Knowledge levels the playing field, therefore heads of powerful organizations go out of their way to SQUASH knowledge as it threatens their power and might.
Not all religion does this, but the ones that have a few that benefit greatly over the control of a large group of followers does.
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The 'Mysterious' part. (Score:4, Insightful)
Chuckle at the "made by aliens" silliness as we all do, there really is a mystery to this device.
Archimedes was more than brilliant enough to work out the math for this orrery, also to work out the design for gear tooth profiles. He had the position and influence to have access to materials and the best crafts-people of the time. But how did they actually build that thing?
In theory an astonishingly good watchmaker could hand-file all those gears. In practice, I'm not so sure. Gears are finicky things, every single tooth must have the correct angular position, pitch diamerter and involute profile. A gear can look very pretty but simply not work with another gear. (I have made several such.) If you don't believe it, just go to a hardware store, buy a riffler file kit and some brass washers, then have at it. No microscope, no computer, no plotter. Any tools you hypothesize have to be built using the same starting conditions. It will be an educational experience. One of your observations will be that you can not see well enough to get the profile to adequately match the math for two gears to mesh smoothly.
So the greatest mystery, for me, is: How did they make the measurements required for this work?
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"Gears are finicky things, every single tooth must have the correct angular position, pitch diamerter and involute profile"
no. The more accurate those things are, the better it measurs time. And this think wasn't very accurate. By today's standards.
"No microscope, no computer, no plotter." Modern tool might be dampening you imagination.
Can I use math, and pencil and a ruler? Then using that get a master gear maker to make them? because that's probably how it was designed.
Or even better: Imagine making a wat
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"Gears are finicky things, every single tooth must have the correct angular position, pitch diamerter and involute profile"
no. The more accurate those things are, the better it measurs time. And this think wasn't very accurate. By today's standards.
As far as I know, the original machine was not meant to measure time. It had a crank you gave one turn every day, and it showed the position of various stars etc. More like a calendar than a clock.
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IF a man in the same time was able to draw a perfect circle, I guarantee that they could figure out how to draw the figures to map out simple gears that do not need to mesh tightly. this was a hand cranked device that moved pointers, excessive lash would not be a problem.
come on people (Score:3)
don't ruin the plot of the next dan brown book/ the next nicholas cage national treasure movie
this sort of speculation does not belong in the halls of science. it belongs rightly in the realm of populist lowest common denominator pulp fiction with paranoid conspiracy theories studded throughout
lexical heresy (Score:3)
Bad things happen when you read while scrolling... (Score:2)
The "l" in "clock" didn't register with my eyes as the title of this post moved down my screen...wow...
plagiarism in slashdot summaries (Score:2)
It's really annoying how so many slashdot summaries these days are plagiarized directly from TFA. (I'm assuming that fergus07 is not the same person as Loz Blain.) Cutting and pasting withour giving proper attribution to the author is plagiarism.
An even more pathetic example was this one [slashdot.org], which was, ironically, about academic dishonesty.
And let's say for the sake of argument that fergus07 *is* the same person as Loz Blain, and "an anonymous reader" *is* the same person as Kirk Klocke; then they should revea
Re:This has been done before (Score:4, Informative)
Yep this is far from the first replica, but it's the first one I've seen made so tiny.
Re:This has been done before (Score:5, Informative)
The article mentions this, and has a link to it. Replicating the device is not the achievement, doing so it such a small package is. They also threw in a few extra gears so it can tell time in addition to everything else.
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and had you read the article you'd know they even mention the lego one in it
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Wait, did you mean weight?
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Ever make a pig wait? it gets very disgruntled.
And since time flies, his sentence makes perfect sense.
Re:Who cares if it... (Score:4, Funny)
And since time flies, his sentence makes perfect sense.
You know, I always had trouble with the phrase "time flies when you're having fun". If I'm having fun, why would I want to time flies?
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You know, it's always assumed that the Antikythera mechanism's housing looked something like this:
http://images.gizmag.com/inline/hublot-antikythera-mechanism-first-computer-watch-14.png [gizmag.com]
But who says the corners couldn't have been rounded?
The ancient Greeks will have some serious royalties to cough up after all this time...
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Are you mad?!?! You like the idea of naked oiled youths zipping through the aether in astervarka, possibly meeting psychic aliens and bringing them home?
Do you really want to meet the nude dude with the Ood?
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...and after the film is released, I can watch it on my watch, thus negating the need for the first watch to begin with!
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That was inspiring and cool. I can't wait until I can let my son near something like that and have him be interested in more than destroying it. :)
Greek alphabet abuse (Score:5, Insightful)
It was looking awesome until I saw the close up, where horribly misuse Greek letters according to their coincidental resemblance to Roman letters. They use a Lambda instead of an "A"! ARRRRRGHH! I'd hate myself for having that on my wrist.