RE: Atheist "church" in London.
February 9, 2013 at 8:20 am
(February 4, 2013 at 2:20 pm)downbeatplumb Wrote: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-21319945
I thought the best part about being an atheist was not having to go to places like this.
Haha, we have a much better physicist at our church! Plus our priest isn't an atheist!!
(February 4, 2013 at 3:23 pm)Zone Wrote: The worlds very first computer was made in ancient Greece as well. It ran on clockwork and tracked the course of heavenly bodies, the year and the seasons.
![[Image: 061129_antiky_remade_hmed_1030a.grid-6x2.jpg]](https://images.weserv.nl/?url=www.ciceros-pillar.com%2Fclasses%2Fcomputer%2520literacy%2FTopics%2520of%2520Interest%2F061129_antiky_remade_hmed_1030a.grid-6x2.jpg)
They weren't too far from reaching an equivalent our Enlightenment era.
The Antikythera Mechanism is not a computer, it's totally wrong to say it is. It's a clock/calendar (yes, including an "astronomical calendar"). We do not know who invented it, thus we don't know whether it comes from Ancient Greece or Alexandria, Egypt. And both are equally likely.
Big Ben is far more impressive technologically and mechanically, it contains more gears/moving parts than the AM does, do you think that makes Big Ben a computer?
Also, it's entirely possible to construct an astronomical clock like the AM from water instead of gears. A Ctesibius water clock (clepsydra) could have been constructed to do exactly the same thing as what the AM achieves, do you think that would be a computer?
The world's first computer was made in 1936. Although Charles Babbage indeed invented the computer a full century earlier, he failed to ever build one, and his son Henry Babbage only ever built 6 demonstration pieces of the no. 1 difference engine, which in itself is not a computer (they simply served to demonstrate that the Babbage Engine would work as a computer if ever built).