Sounds fun. Meanwhile, my COVID normal that same weekend was a chest x-ray that made the doctor nervous, so he sent me to the ER to see if I had pneumonia or a clot in addition to the positive COVID test from earlier in the week. I did not, but the new normal is not fun.

It’s Australia, so the trade-off is that you get to have COVID under control, but an occasional infant is carried off by a flying fox, dingo, or drop bear.

Sounds like the old saw, the medium is the message, may apply. 

“My soul congealed,” said the igneous petrologist forlornly upon losing the trail of the solidifying magma.

I thought it was Cleveland rocks.

There are a number of reasons for it.

http://hist.science.online.fr/antikythera/DOCS/FLORENCE2009/byzantine-sundial.htm

I think it’s a combination of factors. Scarcity of necessary resources is a big one. Then there’s the craftsmanship involved.. For a complex mechanical object like the Antikythera mechanism to be made using the techniques available everyone involved had to have the highest skills, from the miner selecting the ore to…

To be honest from a historical perspective the likelihood of items like this surviving antiquity are few and far between there is very little that we know about these societies let alone troves of artifacts that are lost to the sands of time. It is not unlikely that this device was unique but it is also not outside…

It’s the only known built example to have survived the upheavals of the past two thousand years. This sort of technology appears magical, even impossibly-complex to modern eyes, but there are examples of these devices and devices utilising similar technology through history. Archimedes was known to have built at least…

Not this device per se, but the Greeks had machines and crude technology.

Now think about what other technology may have been lost in ancient history.

The wreck it was recovered from was filled to the brim with statues, coins and valuable artefacts suggesting they were one of a kind exhibits being sent to Rome for a triumphal parade as war prizes. Something this complex wouldve been hugely expensive and as much of a novelty to the Romans as it is to us.

I looked it up shortly after I commented and it is different. I’m excited to see him continue the project finally.

This is actually a different paper than the one Chris, of Clickspring fame, worked on. You can read the other paper here:

You can watch the progress of a person building a replica of the Antikythera Mechanism based on this research on the ClickSpring Patreon.

I would have thought that where they got that from is, the eggs from this thing were supposed to be pretty big (16 in. long or so), making them the “Baby Huey” of eggs. When they discovered the fossil in China, it was named “Beibeilong Sinensis”, which meant “baby dragon from China”, so I could see how they tied in…

My paleontology understanding mostly comes from field trips to the Field Museum many many years ago, whatever’s on PBS nature shows, and George here. However, I did watch Saturday morning cartoons as a yout. Please note: The Three Stooges (live short subject films) may have been on on Sundays. With that said, this…