[HN Gopher] Researchers home in on possible "day zero" for Antik...
___________________________________________________________________
Researchers home in on possible "day zero" for Antikythera
mechanism
Author : dangle1
Score : 98 points
Date : 2022-04-11 14:29 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (arstechnica.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (arstechnica.com)
| ElephantsMyAnus wrote:
| How do we know it wasn't already an antique when the ship sank?
| voldacar wrote:
| Do we know anything at all about the creators of this device,
| other than that they were Greek? Where was it made? What kind of
| tools did they use to do the machining? How large was the
| workshop or factory where it was manufactured? Who was the target
| customer, how much did it cost?
|
| Since we have only one device like this and it was found under
| rare circumstances (shipwreck), it seems like you could do a
| Bayesian analysis to get a rough order of magnitude estimate of
| how many of these were built.
| gus_massa wrote:
| > _What kind of tools did they use to do the machining?_
|
| There is a nice serie of videos by Clickpring partially
| building a copy. He used tools that he guess were available at
| that time. It's more a good guess by a current expert than a
| 100% accurate historically based list of tools, but it looks
| like a good guess.
|
| Main part, building the device:
| https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZioPDnFPNsHnyxfygxA0...
|
| More details about the tools:
| https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZioPDnFPNsGnUXuZScwn...
| forinti wrote:
| It was probably made by Archimedes:
|
| https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/an-ancient-greek-...
| voldacar wrote:
| Thanks, that's an excellent article. I'm still not really
| convinced that Archimedes made it, as it would be a massive
| coincidence for the only device we found to be the same one
| described in a book by some notable figure. It seems
| plausible that Archimedes may have created the original
| design, though.
|
| I assume that the average person who encountered one would
| have been very impressed, so I find it really surprising that
| we don't have more texts that at least mention the existence
| of these devices.
| upsidesinclude wrote:
| Your assumption about average people might be giving undue
| credit. Average people werent literate. They might not have
| any use for a calendar or know about astronomy if they even
| believed in the constellations as something other than
| godly.
|
| Very few people were in the circles of the highly educated.
| With many other intricate, rare instruments throughout
| history, the case is that they were commissioned by the
| extraordinarily wealthy from the most notable scholars and
| inventors
| voldacar wrote:
| Sorry, I meant the average educated person who might
| write a book. It just seems strange that we have only one
| reference to the device in all surviving classical
| literature
| dmurray wrote:
| Only circumstantially: we can guess that it was made by Greeks
| and we know a fair bit about their economy and bronze working
| ability from other historical sources. But if this had never
| been discovered, a reasonable guess for how many mechanisms of
| this sophistication existed would be zero.
| q3k wrote:
| > Do we know anything at all about the creators of this device?
| Where was it made? What kind of tools did they use to do the
| machining? How large was the workshop or factory where it was
| manufactured? Who was the target customer, how much did it
| cost?
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BLBDKmFG90U
| robonerd wrote:
| Cicero wrote of similar devices and attributed them to
| Archimedes.
|
| However, maybe that attribution is similar to attributing the
| light bulb to Edison. We don't know who Archimedes might have
| been working with, who's shoulders he might have been standing
| on, etc.
| divbzero wrote:
| At first I misread that as _"zero day" for Antikythera
| mechanism_. That would be a tough one to patch.
| queuebert wrote:
| Me too! I thought it was a late April Fool's joke.
| brimble wrote:
| Oh wow. I looked at it probably a dozen times and read it that
| way every time, until I read your post and tried again just
| now.
| an_account_name wrote:
| CVE-205BC-00001
| ezekg wrote:
| I spent a minute looking at the title and your comment thinking
| "but that's what it says..." then I realized "zero day" != "day
| zero"
| gnulinux wrote:
| This thread show how non-linear and non-deterministic reading
| is. Many people including me seems to have read "day zero" as
| "zero day" I wonder how our brains process text such that an
| out-of-order interpretation is possible. Probably helps that
| "zero day" is a common phrase (I'd argue "day zero" is pretty
| common too!)
| [deleted]
| white_dragon88 wrote:
| It involves a sledgehammer
| jordemort wrote:
| Antikythera: Only one hole in the default install, in a heck of
| a long time!
| ufo wrote:
| "Closed; Won't Fix"
| dmurray wrote:
| Now to complete the historical record we just need to fill in the
| 65 million year gap between the last day of the dinosaurs and the
| first day of the Antikythera mechanism.
| dylan604 wrote:
| such shortsightedness on your part. what about the ~13.5
| billion (how do you spell that like Sagan pronounced it?) years
| before the dinosaurs existed of the rest of the universe for a
| "complete" historical record? ;P
| jeffro_rh wrote:
| Bloom County taught us that it is spelled "Billyuns"
| VistaBrokeMyPC wrote:
| You might appreciate Dimitri Martin parodying Sagan, if you
| haven't seen it already. https://youtu.be/fYo-OdQ-5ic
| dylan604 wrote:
| actually, i just tried watching, but it was just not for
| me. i find that with a lot of funny or die stuff though. i
| find some of it damn funny, and other stuff just roll my
| eyes and stop watching. it's a matter of taste, and this
| particular example just seemed over produced and lazy at
| the same time. specifically the actor's performance
| lilyball wrote:
| > _Others have made independent calculations and arrived at a
| different conclusion: the calibration date would more likely fall
| sometime in the summer of 204 BCE, although Voulgaris countered
| that this doesn 't explain why the winter solstice is engraved so
| prominently on the device._
|
| Any chance someone engraved it on the device _after_ it was
| built?
|
| Alternatively, why does something engraved on the front
| necessarily have to be involved in the device calibration? Maybe
| they put that on there simply because it's a yearly important
| event that is related to astronomy?
| criddell wrote:
| Has the mechanism been completely documented?
|
| It seems similar to a clockwork mechanism and there are some
| wonderful explainer pages on mechanical clocks[1]. Something like
| this for the Antikythera mechanism would be really helpful.
|
| [1]: https://animagraffs.com/mechanical-watch/
| shakna wrote:
| > Has the mechanism been completely documented?
|
| To put it simply: No.
|
| To put it in more words: The most recent and accurate model of
| how it is expected to have worked is from just last year [0].
| We have had working models produced in the real world, and have
| had computer simulations as well, but they have involved best-
| guesses at some parts here and there. However, even that model
| has a major flaw - it depends on the Greeks having access to a
| technology (hollow tubing of a particular accuracy), that we
| have no evidence that they did.
|
| [0]
| https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/mar/12/scientists-m...
| cormullion wrote:
| There's an iOS app which simulates it. Playing with the
| Antikythera mechanism on an iPhone certainly spans some
| history...
| jabroni_salad wrote:
| I love every story that comes out of this thing, particularly
| because I like watching machining videos and have enjoyed
| Clickspring's work for some time. I wonder how many other
| historical artifacts like this have potential discoveries
| attached to them if only a tradesmen will try to fool around with
| it in his garage.
| robinduckett wrote:
| How any article on the subject can omit Clickspring's build is
| beyond me
| dotancohen wrote:
| > "This is a very specific and unique date," Voulgaris said. "In
| one day, there occurred too many astronomical events for it to be
| coincidence. This date was a new moon, the new moon was at
| apogee, there was a solar eclipse, the Sun entered into the
| constellation Capricorn, it was the winter solstice."
|
| That's not a lot of coincidences, some of them are dependent. For
| instance, a solar eclipse can _only_ happen during a new moon.
| And the Sun enters a new constellation every month, the winter
| solstice defines the first day of a new month. The fact that a
| solar eclipse occurred exactly during the winter solstice is
| about 100:1 (there are at least two solar eclipses every year),
| and exactly the fact that a solar eclipse happened at a lunar
| inflection is about 15:1 (twice per month). So it's still a once
| in 500 year event, but not nearly as outstanding as the article
| makes it seem. Every day some once-in-500-year event or another
| occurs in astronomy.
| oh_sigh wrote:
| I think it would be less likely than 1-in-500, because even
| though there are multiple solar eclipses per year somewhere on
| earth, you would need to look at a the likelihood of a solar
| eclipse at a fairly specific part of the Mediterranean.
| PeterisP wrote:
| > there are at least two solar eclipses every year
|
| That's only if you consider them globally, as a solar eclipse
| (especially a partial one) covers only a small part of Earth. A
| single particular location e.g. Ancient Greece would see a full
| solar eclipse roughly every 360 years and some kind of partial
| eclipse roughly once a century, so that's quite a big
| difference, making a solar eclipse exactly during the winter
| solstice _in Greece_ a very rare once in a 10000 year event.
| TheBlight wrote:
| >He concluded that the device was specifically designed to model
| "epicyclic" motion in keeping with the ancient Greek notion that
| celestial bodies moved in circular patterns, called epicycles.
| (This was pre-Copernicus, so the fixed point around which they
| moved was believed to be the Earth.)
|
| Slightly tangential, but the whole pre/post-Copernicus narrative
| seems unlikely to be true to me. At least I find it difficult to
| believe it wasn't until the 16th century that someone worked this
| out and everyone prior was of some woefully mistaken (yet
| suspiciously Christian-aligned) view that the Earth was the
| center of the universe.
| robonerd wrote:
| Earth being the center of the universe makes a lot of sense in
| a naive way, it doesn't _feel_ like the earth is moving. Sat in
| this chair, I feel as though I am at rest, and when I look at
| the sky long enough, I see that the stars are moving.
|
| And even with Copernicus's insight, he was still missing some
| key details which made it harder to believe he had the general
| idea right. Copernicus modeled the solar system using circular
| orbits, not elliptical orbits. To fit the observed data to this
| model, he needed epicycles, just as the geocentric model
| required.
| TheBlight wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aristarchus_of_Samos
|
| We even have record of someone reasoning this out of simple
| observations nearly 2000 years prior. This suggests to me it
| was known (at least by intellectuals) for a very very long
| time.
| miltondts wrote:
| Yep, this narrative is highly questioned in this book:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucio_Russo#The_Forgotten_Revo...
|
| If I'm not mistaken, there is quite a bit of evidence that they
| knew the correct model was with the Sun in the center and they
| only used epicycles because it was easier to calculate with the
| tools they had (compass etc).
|
| EDIT: I think the argument is at section "10.12 Seleucus and
| the Proof of Heliocentrism" of the book.
| lmkg wrote:
| That's pretty funny, because a book I read about the
| Copernican revolution says that the prevailing attitude among
| astronomers during Copernicus' period was the exact
| _opposite_. Namely that Heliocentrism was not generally
| promoted or accepted as an accurate model of the heavens, but
| did gain acceptance as having a few computation advantages.
|
| In particular, it removed the need for a particular _type_ of
| epicycle called an _Equant_. Ironically, the Equant somewhat
| resembles Kepler 's second law, meaning it arguably is a
| better approximation of reality than Copernicus' circles-only
| Heliocentric model.
|
| I'm not sure I can find the exact book. There's, like, _so
| many_ books about Copernicus on Amazon. This is my best
| guess: https://www.amazon.com/Book-Nobody-Read-Revolutions-
| Copernic...
| leephillips wrote:
| Could be Thomas Kuhn's _The Copernican Revolution_. In any
| case, it's a great book.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| This book is awesome if only because it made me realize that
| some of these ancients like Seneca were actually giant
| pompous twats.
| TheBlight wrote:
| Interesting. Thanks for the link I'll check it out.
| whatshisface wrote:
| There was no difference between heliocentric and geocentric
| models (except for philosophical arguments based on false
| premises) until Newton invented physics and the idea of
| planets spiraling around through space became clearly
| impossible due to inertia. Pre-F=ma there could not have been
| any way to know what was at the "center" because the
| conceptual tools for privileging a non-rotating frame of
| reference over rotating ones had not yet been developed.
|
| Also, a heliocentric model still requires epicycles if the
| orbits in the model aren't elliptical.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| I've wondered about that: Why privilege that frame of
| reference? It seems more intuitive and easier to work with,
| but do we have a better reason than that?
| whatshisface wrote:
| In a rotating frame of reference, forces appear in the
| equations that are proportional to the distance from the
| center. They are the forces necessary to make an object
| which is stationary in a non-rotating frame go in a
| circle in the rotating frame. Those forces do not
| correspond to springs, gravitating bodies or any physical
| phenomenon, and are called "fictitious forces." Non-
| rotating frames of references make those forces go away,
| and that is why they're special.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| Ibn Shatir had most of it right except the heliocentric part.
| Tusi contributed a step but didn't take the last conceptual
| leap.
| YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
| The theory that the Earth was the center of the universe dates
| from at least the time of Ancient Greece and is probably more
| ancient. There's nothing Christian about it, in fact Christian
| scholars probably took the idea from Ancient Greeks, whom they
| revered (particularly the Platonists).
|
| There were certainly heliocentric models of the universe
| proposed before Copernicus, but Copernicus' one was the more
| well-developed. In some cases we don't even have a model, as
| such, just some third-hand accounts mentioning that someone
| thought the sun must be in the center of the universe.
|
| I suspect the most famous example of that is Aristarchos of
| Samos, for whose heliocentric theory we only know via a very
| brief and poorly detailed passage in Archimedes' The Sand
| Reckoner:
|
| _You [King Gelon] are aware that "universe" is the name given
| by most astronomers to the sphere, the centre of which is the
| centre of the earth, while its radius is equal to the straight
| line between the centre of the sun and the centre of the earth.
| This is the common account (ta graphomena), as you have heard
| from astronomers. But Aristarchus brought out a book consisting
| of certain hypotheses, wherein it appears, as a consequence of
| the assumptions made, that the universe is many times greater
| than the "universe" just mentioned. His hypotheses are that the
| fixed stars and the sun remain unmoved, that the earth revolves
| about the sun on the circumference of a circle, the sun lying
| in the middle of the orbit, and that the sphere of the fixed
| stars, situated about the same centre as the sun, is so great
| that the circle in which he supposes the earth to revolve bears
| such a proportion to the distance of the fixed stars as the
| centre of the sphere bears to its surface._
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heliocentrism#Aristarchus_of_S...
|
| So it's not that there weren't heliocentric models of the
| universe before Copernicus, just that they didn't really catch
| on, I guess.
| TheBlight wrote:
| >There's nothing Christian about it
|
| My point was maybe this had something to do with why it
| "didn't really catch on." Given how viciously the idea was
| attacked by the Roman Inquisition as being heretical it was
| probably not the first time the church encountered the
| concept.
|
| IIRC, monks were the predominant scribes in the western world
| pre-printing press. If intellectual ideas didn't conform to
| religious canon they could've theoretically been nearly
| completely erased via censorship only to be "newly
| discovered" by Copernicus etc.
| jsrjenkins wrote:
| Copernicus himself was a Catholic priest and a Canon. The
| first opposition to his works was actually from Protestant
| thinkers.
| TheBlight wrote:
| Right. So he would've been acutely aware of the
| implications of his work and how it might be received.
| Maybe that's why he didn't publish his book until 2
| months prior to his death over a decade after completing
| the first manuscript. AFAIK Protestants are Christians.
| YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
| Oh, sorry, I misunderstood. Yes, I think on that you're
| probably right. See what they did to Gallileo, after all
| (and maybe also Giordano Bruno, though that's not clear).
|
| I don't reckon it was an easy job to be an astronomer in
| those days...
| throw0101a wrote:
| > _The theory that the Earth was the center of the universe
| dates from at least the time of Ancient Greece and is
| probably more ancient. There 's nothing Christian about it,
| in fact Christian scholars probably took the idea from
| Ancient Greeks, whom they revered (particularly the
| Platonists)._
|
| It should be noted that the Ancient Greeks did consider the
| idea of the Earth moving, but there was no empirical evidence
| for it. Specifically no parallax as even Aristotle wrote in
| _De Caelo_ (II.14):
|
| > _Again, everything that moves with the circular movement,
| except the first sphere, is observed to be passed, and to
| move with more than one motion. The earth, then, also,
| whether it move about the centre or as stationary at it, must
| necessarily move with two motions. But if this were so, there
| would have to be passings and turnings of the fixed stars.
| Yet no such thing is observed. The same stars always rise and
| set in the same parts of the earth._
|
| * http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/heavens.2.ii.html
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Heavens
|
| Bradley noticed stellar aberration in ~1728:
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Bradley
|
| Giuseppi Calandrelli finally directly measures parallax in
| a-Lyrae in 1806.
| YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
| Very good point.
|
| In general, the way I understand it is that most of what
| the ancients believed about the universe was based on
| empirical observations. They didn't just come up with some
| arbitrary theory, they had observations and they were
| trying to explain them. The epicyclical model persisted all
| the way to Copernicus (whose model also had epicycles) just
| because it was so good at predicting future observations.
|
| I think their main axiomatic assumption that was based on
| their metaphysical beliefs, rather than actual
| observations, was the assumption that the luminaries must
| move on circular orbits. Again, to my understanding, they
| had a mechanistic view of the universe that demanded order
| and symmetry, and they just couldn't imagine how a planet
| would move in any other orbit than a circle- hence why they
| were mystified by the apparent "retrograde" motion of the
| planets and had to come up with epicycles to model it.
|
| The combination of their axiomatic belief in a mechanistic
| universe and the limited observations they could make with
| the naked eye conspired to keep them from a better model.
| adrian_b wrote:
| Some of the Ancient Greek philosophers believed that the Sun,
| and not the Earth, is in the center. For example Aristarchus of
| Samos and Seleucus of Seleucia.
|
| However, the main problem with most of the achievements of the
| Ancient Greek Philosophy is that, unlike for logic and
| mathematics, for theories about natural objects they did not
| have good methods to determine which of several alternative
| theories is right.
|
| So in the natural sciences there are a lot of questions about
| which some Ancient Greek philosophers have guessed the correct
| answer while others have guessed wrong.
|
| Now we know who was right and who was wrong, but at that time
| this was non-obvious and in most cases the popularity of the
| alternative explanations was determined more by the rhetoric
| skill of their supporters than by their agreement with the
| observations of nature.
|
| Even when the agreement with observations was actually checked,
| the methods of measurement were seldom precise enough to allow
| a non-ambiguous decision between 2 theories.
|
| This also applies to the heliocentric theory and the geocentric
| theory. Both theories had their supporters, but in the end the
| geocentric theory became the main theory for almost 2 millennia
| because it happened to be the theory chosen by Hipparchus and
| then improved by Ptolemy.
|
| Ptolemy made a more detailed kinematic model of the movements
| of the bodies in the Solar System, which agreed better with the
| observations of the planets than all the earlier models, so
| those were abandoned until Copernicus revived the heliocentric
| model.
| FastMonkey wrote:
| I was going to make a similar comment, but you phrased it
| better than I could have. It's easy to say in hindsight that
| X knew Y, but there's a big difference between knowing
| something and just suspecting it.
|
| In fact, at the time the evidence for many models was equally
| strong. So, based on the limited available evidence of the
| day it actually would have been incorrect to believe too
| strongly in any model, even the one that we now know to be
| better than the others.
| TheBlight wrote:
| >so those were abandoned until Copernicus revived the
| heliocentric model.
|
| I'm skeptical the previous heliocentric ideas were truly
| organically abandoned. More on that in my other comment:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30991734
| ngcc_hk wrote:
| The actual truth is not that heroic. But we want hero.
|
| The path is the church did accept we watch from earth but every
| heaven body revolve around the sun except us. Catholic use this
| model and very accurately beat the Muslim and the Hans (do not
| want to use chinese as the fight started in yuan dynasty,
| Mongolian and Tibetan etc are not Hans) in the Far East
| precisely of these tables based on actual observation.
|
| This comes from a guy x then his student called kepler pointed
| out ... Newton use Kepler not just a Copernicus model only.
|
| The key is Copernicus is only partially right as the orbit is
| NOT as he said. It is not circular. and in fact he did not have
| the details and hence might as well not exist and might not
| affect the history. That is why his book is ok for many decades
| after publishing. It is only of the models. And not exactly
| right like others. the actual path is those who have
| calculation and a detailed accurate projection which Copernicus
| did not have.
|
| That revolve around the earth model worked. Not Epicircie.
|
| In truth even today if you observe the sky from earth you
| cannot just have a solar model. You have the earth factor as
| well (like the earth minor movement around its axis abd hence
| North Star change from vega to polar then back to vega). Just
| solar modal is not right.
|
| Now whilst the looking thru telescope did disturb the
| worldview. It does not matter.
|
| And it is the attitude of Galileo that is more an issue. The
| pope is his friend you know well before he is a pope. Teasing
| him as a joker does not work in those days.
|
| I am not saying C and G is totally wrong. I just say if they
| were more careful (like C publish his only after his death).
| And G accept the practical model of using sun as a centre based
| on actual observation and do not write satire ... instead
| proposing a model that incorporates elliptical orbit, earth
| role etc but everything revolve around the sun except the earth
| (then do something about it gradually).
|
| Anyway that is not the history of hero we read. We want drama.
| We want ...
| Natsu wrote:
| > At least I find it difficult to believe it wasn't until the
| 16th century that someone worked this out and everyone prior
| was of some woefully mistaken (yet suspiciously Christian-
| aligned) view that the Earth was the center of the universe.
|
| That was because we do not perceive the Earth moving, but we
| see the stars move. Nobody could answer objections like why we
| don't go flying off the Earth if it's spinning. Yet any idiot
| could take a ball, put a rock or something on it, spin the ball
| and show you what happens. Why is the Earth itself somehow
| different? It's like how they knew that stellar parallax should
| exist, but nobody could measure it, which caused heliocentrism
| to be lacking evidence for quite a long time because the stars
| are just that far away that it's tiny.
|
| If you go to the average person now, I think you'll find that
| most people who accept all this science can't even give full
| explanations for why.
| nestorD wrote:
| Here is a great write-up on the subject of the transition to
| the heliocentric model:
| https://tofspot.blogspot.com/2013/10/the-great-ptolemaic-sma...
|
| One key element is that heliocentric models where just not as
| good at making predictions. It took new data for them to
| finally get to a dominating position.
| udev wrote:
| I read it as in researched found zero-day vulnerability to
| Antikythera mechanism.
| intrasight wrote:
| Same, and honestly that would make for a good story too - as in
| SciFi. The builder of the mechanism. purposefully adds an error
| in order to change the trajectory of human history.
| whatshisface wrote:
| "When the mainspring is overwound, the mechanism will begin
| to drill holes in the floor of the cargo hold..."
| cleansingfire wrote:
| Nice! Callback to the old folktale Why the Sea is Salt
|
| https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/8933
| dylan604 wrote:
| So is that just an overlooked bug or "works as designed--
| closing" type of bug? Was this thing designed as a trojan
| horse/sabotage to take down one ship? Was this just some
| overworked craftsman that didn't realize he left the torque
| setting too high from a previous project? Intent matters
| dotancohen wrote:
| Closing as not reproducible. We haven't heard back from any
| of the testers that have tried to reproduce it.
| echelon wrote:
| This is such a fun narrative hook. It immediately draws
| parallels to Asimov's Foundation, but has Greco-steampunk
| vibes.
|
| I might have to steal your idea.
| YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
| Greco-steampunk certainly makes sense. In ancient times,
| Greeks were considered master automata makers:
|
| _Robots were so prevalent in the imaginative and material
| culture of the Greek-speaking world that they were seen as
| emblematic of Hellenistic culture by others. Buddhist
| legends focused on north-eastern India from the fourth and
| third centuries BCE recount the army of automata that
| guarded Buddha's relics, built with knowledge smuggled from
| the Graecophone world. In one version, which features both
| killer robot-assassins and robot-guardians, a young man
| travels in disguise to the land of the Yavanas (Greek
| speakers) to learn the art of automaton-making, a secret
| closely guarded by the yantakaras (automaton makers) there,
| knowledge that he then steals to make the artificial
| guards. We find stories of automatic warriors guarding the
| Buddha's relics in Chinese, Sanskrit, Hindu, and Tibetan
| texts. Additionally, mechanical automata also appear
| elsewhere in the Chinese historical record: for example, at
| the court of Tang ruler Empress Wu Zhou (c.624-705 CE)._
|
| https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-ancient-history-of-
| in...
|
| Nowdays, we're better known for our army of civil servants
| guarding state pensions :/
| echelon wrote:
| There is such rich kindling in this post that it sets my
| imagination on fire. Thank you for sharing!
| YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
| If you end up writing something I'd love to read it :)
| raldi wrote:
| Like _2001,_ except instead of a buried monolith, aliens
| planted a mechanism that, when X-rayed and simulated on a
| computer, breaks an AI out of the simulation and onto the
| internet
| intrasight wrote:
| This scared me a bit as one of the apps on my iPhone is
| in fact an Antikythera simulator.
| intrasight wrote:
| Be my guest - I've too may ideas already ;)
| [deleted]
| Aardwolf wrote:
| Same, but then I thought that zero days don't matter for non-
| networked devices like this one
| dotancohen wrote:
| So did my grandpa, until the day he and his pacemaker walked
| through the security checkpoint at Schiphol.
| IncRnd wrote:
| It's taken a little over two thousand years, but researchers
| have finally uncovered an exploit in which EMF fluctuations
| emitted from a nearby NVIDIA card, which is in the process of
| calculating DOGECOIN, can rewrite the Antikythera EPROM.
|
| Dr. A. Medes, the project's head researcher from Kythera
| University said, "the real breakthrough was decoding the
| instruction set of the RISC Antikythera in order to understand
| what the ancient JTAG interface was telling us".
|
| Google verified the device no longer has Android security
| updates available.
| tabtab wrote:
| Damned Roman hackers!
| GEBBL wrote:
| I did too!
| pfdietz wrote:
| Me three!
| jsnell wrote:
| > "In one day, there occurred too many astronomical events for it
| to be coincidence. This date was a new moon, the new moon was at
| apogee, there was a solar eclipse, the Sun entered into the
| constellation Capricorn, it was the winter solstice"
|
| Solar eclipses by definition happen on a new moon, so that's not
| much of a coincidence. "The sun entering capricorn" is just
| arbitrary bullshit, not a precise measurement, but surely it has
| to either always fall on the solstice or never? Eliminate those
| duplicates, and it is looking a lot less impressive.
| pluc wrote:
| It's "hone in" not "home in"
| ntrz wrote:
| Merriam-Webster says 'hone in' is an "acceptable but far less
| common" variant of 'home in'. I think either one works.
| pluc wrote:
| Merriam-Webster also says 'irregardless' is a word so maybe
| don't let them dumb down a language because they say it's
| okay
| LadyCailin wrote:
| Dictionaries are descriptive, not prescriptive, first of
| all, and second of all, you are not the arbiter of the
| language either.
| singlow wrote:
| But in this case `home` is the correct verb. As a verb it
| has the same meaning as in the phrases homing pigeon or
| homing missile. Home-in is the older (by citation) and more
| common phrase, with hone-in probably being used due to
| mishearing home-in, although they could have both arisen
| independently.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| Hear, hear.
|
| So is Merriam-Webster now going to say "here, here" is
| equivalent and acceptable?
|
| Legalizing a hearing mistake is not the same thing as
| adjusting to usage changes.
| rhacker wrote:
| I suspect "hone in" is from "honing a craft" so hone in
| is like improving something. I would rather "home in"
| being for things like getting closer to being correct and
| "hone in" being for getting better at something.
| colanderman wrote:
| "Hone in" is the "irregardless" in this case.
| ntrz wrote:
| As far as all the sources I can find say, 'hone in'
| originated as an error for 'home in', but has become
| widespread enough to be considered an acceptable variant.
| If one of them is being let in erroneously by the nasty
| descriptivists at Merriam-Webster, it'd be 'hone in'. But
| either one gets the meaning across, so I don't see the
| issue.
| unsupp0rted wrote:
| "Irregardless" is a word. You just used it, so do millions
| of others, and when they use it I know exactly how to
| understand it.
| IncRnd wrote:
| The word appears in dictionaries, which document usage,
| but the word is nonsensical. "Irregardless" is used to
| mean "regardless", which is a far better choice of word.
| irregardless (adj.) an erroneous word that,
| etymologically, means the opposite of what it is
| used to express; probably a blend of irrespective and
| regardless, and perhaps inspired by the colloquial
| use of the double negative as an emphatic. [1]
|
| [1] https://www.etymonline.com/word/irregardless
| unsupp0rted wrote:
| English would be a lot more compact if we removed all the
| nonsensical and previously-nonsensical words.
|
| Start with the auto-antonyms:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auto-antonym
|
| * Cleave can mean "to cling" or "to split apart".
|
| * Clip can mean "attach" or "cut off".
|
| * Dust can mean "to remove dust" (cleaning a house) or
| "to add dust" (e.g. to dust a cake with powdered sugar).
|
| * Fast can mean "without moving; fixed in place",
| (holding fast, also as in "steadfast"), or "moving
| quickly".
|
| * Ravel can mean "to separate" (e.g. threads in cloth) or
| "entangle".[11] Sanction can mean "approve" or
| "penalize".
|
| * Table can mean "to discuss a topic at a meeting"
| (British English) or "to postpone discussion of a topic"
| (American English).
| [deleted]
| LgWoodenBadger wrote:
| Similar to bone and debone, ravel and unravel, and
| countless others I'm sure.
| UncleSlacky wrote:
| Literally!
| pfdietz wrote:
| It's a perfectly cromulent word.
| macintux wrote:
| Unlike "inflammable" which is virtually guaranteed to
| confuse.
| UncleSlacky wrote:
| "Inflammable means flammable? What a country!" - Dr Nick
| Riviera
| sethammons wrote:
| > let them dumb down a language
|
| If you've not seen it, I highly encourage this 6 minute
| take by Stephen Fry on Language:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7E-aoXLZGY
|
| And besides, while you may be honing a blade or skill, my
| Homing Pigeon is homing in on home.
| [deleted]
| SigmundA wrote:
| So are there honing pigeons and honing missiles?
| thechao wrote:
| Honing pigeons sound cute; honing missiles sounds awfully
| close to some sort of clockworkian attempt to sharpen
| millions of bayonets in one go.
| happimess wrote:
| I always check google's ngrams for questions like this, and
| their corpus shows "home in" being far more common going back
| as far as 1800.
|
| https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=home+in%2C+hon...
| rhacker wrote:
| I was also annoyed but apparently both are accepted and "home
| in" even more so.
| colanderman wrote:
| You can "home in on" a target, or "hone" a concept. "Hone in"
| is not recommended usage.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| I was just about to say how thrilled I am that they did NOT say
| "hone in."
|
| It's "home in." Merriam-Webster's next change will probably say
| "it's a doggy-dog world" is acceptable.
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(page generated 2022-04-11 23:01 UTC)