Saturday, January 29, 2011

Read and Think!

Folks,

From Penn Gillette. Remarkable reasonableness:

"If you want to become an atheist, I always recommend reading the Bible from beginning to end. Not a guided system of reading it, but just read the whole thing, and I think if you do, you come out being an atheist. I don't think you have to do anything special. I think at the end of a book about hatred, slavery, horrible acts towards women, crazy contradictory laws, and the jealous nature of this God, I think it's apparent that it was written by crazy people for political reasons. "


S



Antikythera Legos!

Folks,

This picture is of what is likely the oldest computer on Earth. It's a set of gears and cams designs to predict, with extraordinary precision, the positions of the stars and planets, back about 100BCE, by the Greeks. Then it was lost in a shipwreck, only to be found 2,000 years later.


Some clever folks with Lego blocks built a working model of the thing. Here's how it works.

S