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Written with Code Igniter in PHP. Fuelled by tea.
You know when you're in an elevator and you've gone up lots of floors in a single go, and the elevator decelerates as you approach your floor, and for a few seconds you feel lighter? I love that feeling. It's like you've finally figured out how to fly, and you're about to take off.
Unrelatedly, a question for the floor: I was reading this article about an ancient Greek analogue computer. The damn thing was thousands of years in advance of the previous earliest known analogue computer of equivalent complexity, which depending how you define these things was either in the 1640s by Pascal or not until Babbage's difference engine in 1822. Of course, there were earlier clockwork devices for predicting planets, notably the Chinese had one in 1000BC. So it wasn't, like, unprecedented. But still pretty amazing.
But the difference between the Chinese and Greek civilizations is that the Chinese one is still there, but the Acropolis is in ruins. So what happened to the ancient Greeks? Did their civilization collapse? Was there a famine? Why don't they rule Europe in science and technology now? Enlighten me about European history, folks.
All content is copyright © 2000-2008 Seldo.Com and licensed under a Creative Commons attribution-sharealike license. Remix away!
Comments
Carly
Broadly -
Alexander the Great created a ready made empire for the Romans to conquer.
Then the Romans got into the Christian thing which caused much burning of sciency things and converting of temples into churches.
They also collapsed into some kind of decadent sea of wine and incest.
michael, StE
The internet also seems rather confused as to when Su Sung lived. I think his clock dates from ~1000 AD during the Sung/Song Dynasty.
To paraphrase a .sig from ukglb passim: "Greece never had an empire. Rome never had a culture. Discuss."
Laurie
matt
The Greeks -- and it's not like they were a single unified whole, there were all sorts of subdivisions and they were spread over a fair area by the transport standards of the period -- had remarkable science and technology, but that wasn't the only thing going on. The wonder is how much survived when they were overrun, not the overrunning itself. That happens to everyone -- it will certainly happen to us.