Cause and Effect

In six-degrees fashion: Somebody at Reuter's wrote about UFOs. Jake quoted them at VoteJake. I disliked the bias in the article he quoted, and responded to Reuter's complaint desk. Since I was all fired up, I also posted here. Within minutes, some reporter on Network World came here and read my blog post. They mentioned their blog in my comments. At the time, the link didn't work (it just gave coded garbage) but 20 minutes later they had a post on their blog debunking UFOs. I posted a rebuttal to it. In the rebuttal I mentioned Antikythera Mechanism as an example of how our view of the world keeps getting challenged by additional data over the years. I immediately hit refresh, and saw some other random person had already posted a link to article, on Network World, about Antikythera in the next comment. Which brought me back to this topic and this blog.

Last week, I mentioned in a post about the Antikythera Mechanism. It's basically an incredibly complicated clockwork machine that tracks the 200+ month cycles of lunar eclipses, plus movements of the planets, etc. You'd need a lot of very detailed knowledge of our solar system to build it. Things you could only know if you had a telescope or lifetimes to observe (one of the cycles calculated by it takes 19-years to occur once).

Surprisingly, it dates back to 100 BC, and was found at the bottom of the ocean near greece. Our modern understanding of history is that the ancient greeks didn't have that level of knowledge about the solar system. But there it is, telling us the Ancients knew a lot more than we're willing to accept.

Learn more atNetwork World and the BBC.

Deus Ex Chronomachina

My friends can attest, I have a strong love for time-travel. And yet, a badly botched time-travel story can hurt the brain like few other things in fiction. And so I squealed, half with mind-numbing fear, half with delicious anticipation, when I saw the ad two nights ago for this -->


And it lead to a google search, with a few interesting results...

The Big List - links to 670 different time-travel movies and tv episodes. I got some giggles out of their harsh (and accurate) single-sentence reviews of Enterprise. Check out their 12-clock video review system. This is hosted, FYI, by the company that makes the Continuum RPG.

A year old BBC News article about The Antikythera Mechanism an intricate device found in an ancient roman shipwreck for tracking the movements of the planets and the moon. It's an out of place artifact, this technology shouldn't have existed for 1,000 years. Yet there it is. What else has been lost to the sands of time?

Spoiler Alert Wikipedia entry about the Terminator show in question. Says it was filmed in Albuquerque. Makes me wonder if that's the production that kept screwing up traffic so bad downtown back in January. I remember riding very slowly past some film crew several times at the beginning of the year.