AND THE COFFEE PERCOLATOR GOES "WHEE"

December 6th, 2006 at 8:15 pm | Current Affairs

In lieu of writing about my, like, totally boring life, I thought I’d post some links I find entertaining, links that I discovered on my journeys along dusty cathode tubes of the Internet.

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This was funny, if you know a little bit about comics and Jack Chick. I’ve heard this “Jack Chick” mentioned before, but only had a vague idea to what he was about. Turns out he was kind of crazy. Anyway, go see what might a collaboration between Stan Lee and Mister Chick might have been like.

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Continuing this geeky trend, I thought this bit of news was pretty damn cool:

An ancient astronomical calculator made at the end of the 2nd century BC was amazingly accurate and more complex than any instrument for the next 1,000 years, scientists said on Wednesday.

The Antikythera Mechanism is the earliest known device to contain an intricate set of gear wheels. It was retrieved from a shipwreck off the Greek island of Antikythera in 1901 but until now what it was used for has been a mystery.

[. . .]

The calculator could add, multiply, divide and subtract. It was also able to align the number of lunar months with years and display where the sun and the moon were in the zodiac.

Edmunds and his colleagues discovered it had a dial that predicted when there was likely to be a lunar or solar eclipse. It also took into account the elliptical orbit of the moon.

(Read on.)

Theories like this make me wonder if Atlantis really might have existed existed (or at least if some analogous version did). If the Greeks were making shit like this over 2000 years ago, imagine the technologies that the Atlanteans possessed some 6000 years earlier. Consider the following: Atlantis had some huge catastrophe that wiped out most of its civilization. The survivors scattered, and some made it to Europe. The level of technology would have been difficult to maintain for more than a generation or two; imagine some disaster wiping out humanity’s electricity now — where would we be in a hundred years? Early industrial age, if we’re lucky. Now span this out over a thousand years, and watch as we slowly sink deeper into a technological slump. Then add in 5000 more years. We’d either be drawing on the walls of caves, or we’d have recovered to some extent. Perhaps like the Greeks did, with their ancient calculator? At the very least, it’s something interesting to think about.

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Lastly, I present a music video that you’ll probably still be humming or singing for the rest of the day, and possibly for the next several days too:

Catchy, eh?

JAB

4 Responses to “AND THE COFFEE PERCOLATOR GOES "WHEE"”

  1. Allan D'Angelo

    For some reason, that video was highly enjoyable.

  2. nathan

    Okay, first, they made no mention of a hole in the calculator where the oricalcum goes, so it couldn’t possibly be Atlantian, like a certain hulking machine that I want to drive to work.

    Second, I spit in the general direction of your dial-up-unfriendly youtube links.

  3. Allan D'Angelo

    Fuck you. The song is still stuck in my head!

  4. nick

    Just the fact that the greeks existed, with as much technology as they posessed way back when, seems amazing. Think of how advanced we’d be if christianity and feudalism hadn’t gotten in the way.

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