RE: Atheist "church" in London.
February 9, 2013 at 9:02 pm
(This post was last modified: February 9, 2013 at 9:08 pm by Aractus.)
(February 9, 2013 at 12:19 pm)Zone Wrote: There's a calender on there but it was used to calculate data not just display a date and time. This would make it a computer albeit a clockwork computer.Zone, it wasn't used to calculate any data - I don't know how to make that any clearer to you. It had a yearly calendar, it had a lunar calendar, and it appeared to also contain solar calendars, it's just a calendar, that's it.
Quote:It's generally agreed that the technology used was way ahead of it's time.By who's standards was it used "ahead of its time"? It uses the same gears that Archimedes used for an odometer 100 years previously, but just more of them. Thus we already knew the technology existed at the time, but until we found the AM we didn't know that such "complicated" calendars existed. It would have been very expensive, but there's nothing about it that is out of place for Greece/Egypt at the time I'm afraid.
Quote:"Believed to operate by crank and containing inter-meshing gears, the mechanism could be used to calculate eclipses and moon cycles. The technology was comparable to astronomical clocks that only appeared some 1,600 years later."1. It's not truly a clock, it's a calendar. It doesn't contain its own timing mechanism, if it used one it would have been connected to an external water-dripping mechanism.
2. It does not perform any calculations. It doesn't calculate moon cycles, it tracks the lunar cycle - that's a calendar not a computer.
3. It is not a computer and cannot be described as a computer.
4. It doesn't even contain "clockwork" as you claim it does, it only contains gear wheels. I don't know why people describe the AM as clockwork, clockwork needs to at least contain springs or another mechanism to enable to device to run according to its own "clock", the AM doesn't contain this, it only contains the gears, it was either a hand-operated calendar, or the calendar ticked over using a water-based external "clock" mechanism, in either case in and of itself it isn't even clockwork.
5. It isn't "ahead of its time". Archimedes already invented the gears required to make it work, all it needed was an engineer to design a gear-based calendar that would accurately keep track of the relevant cycles to be displayed on the calendar.
Just because you read it on Wikipedia doesn't make it true.
A wind-up toy car is clockwork since it runs on its own when you let it go. It's more complicated then could have been made in ancient Greece/Egypt at the time of the AM. Do you think a wind-up toy car performs calculations and is a computer?
For Religion & Health see:[/b][/size] Williams & Sternthal. (2007). Spirituality, religion and health: Evidence and research directions. Med. J. Aust., 186(10), S47-S50. -LINK
The WIN/Gallup End of Year Survey 2013 found the US was perceived to be the greatest threat to world peace by a huge margin, with 24% of respondents fearful of the US followed by: 8% for Pakistan, and 6% for China. This was followed by 5% each for: Afghanistan, Iran, Israel, North Korea. -LINK
"That's disgusting. There were clean athletes out there that have had their whole careers ruined by people like Lance Armstrong who just bended thoughts to fit their circumstances. He didn't look up cheating because he wanted to stop, he wanted to justify what he was doing and to keep that continuing on." - Nicole Cooke
The WIN/Gallup End of Year Survey 2013 found the US was perceived to be the greatest threat to world peace by a huge margin, with 24% of respondents fearful of the US followed by: 8% for Pakistan, and 6% for China. This was followed by 5% each for: Afghanistan, Iran, Israel, North Korea. -LINK
"That's disgusting. There were clean athletes out there that have had their whole careers ruined by people like Lance Armstrong who just bended thoughts to fit their circumstances. He didn't look up cheating because he wanted to stop, he wanted to justify what he was doing and to keep that continuing on." - Nicole Cooke