If you are interested in how similar devices might have been made 100s and 1000s of years ago you should check out the latest videos on the Clickspring Youtube Channel [1]. Chris is building a copy of the Antikythera mechanism (mostly) without using modern tools and he is doing a stellar job.
The quality of his videos and his attention to detail is _amazing_! If you are into this kind of stuff you will most likely end up binge watching his whole channel over the weekend.
I see him using a mill and lathe multiple times. He even uses a CNC at least once in part 5. All the machinery he uses would have been something available to a machinist in the 50s. He's not using a plasma cutter but he's using relatively modern tools that an ancient greek bronzesmith couldn't even dream of.
I think he just uses the Mill and the CNC to speed things up, but some parts (like the gears) he does completeley by hand with a file even though he could do it way faster and more precise on a mill.
To clarify the headline: this is the earliest astrolabe _for maritime use_ _yet found_, dating to AD 1495-1502. Astrolabes in general go back to classical times. I guess the headline is getting at that distinction with the phrase "navigation tool", but it didn't become clear to me until I read TFA.
It's not a great headline given many navigational tools vastly predate this. E.g. the (arguably) most obvious maritime navigational tool being the compass:
> The compass was used in Song Dynasty China by the military for navigational orienteering by 1040–44,[15][28][29] and was used for maritime navigation by 1111 to 1117
Please don't just link to your blog instead of making a comment here.
At the very least, summarize your post and link to the extrapolation. "This is specifically a marine astrolabe for determining latitude from the elevation of a specific star, not a generic astrolabe with many other functions. It's also not the earliest navigational tool. These names and distinctions are important, and getting them wrong is indicative of damaging, incorrect click-bait journalism.
I go into more detail on my blog: [link]"
Yes, I should have summarized, but it's not my blog, just one I read. So I was just being lazy, posting as I went out through door to work, not trying to get clicks on my site or something.
On a shipwreck, huh? That's an interesting place to find a new and effective navigational tool. The boat carrying it should, in theory, be less likely to become a shipwreck.
I wonder where else we can apply this observation?
In the use of ECC memory, maybe? Or when analyzing web analytics, perhaps: if your site traffic only shows a small percentage of mobile users, you might choose not to optimize for mobile browsers. But instead there could be a problem with the source of your observation: Just like the archaeologists who discovered this marine astrolabe aren't observing both successful and unsuccessful sailors at that time in history, you're looking at the subset which has shown up on and used your site, and who have analytics enabled. It could be that mobile users aren't showing up in your "shipwrecks" because they're quickly bouncing from your difficult-to-use site or because their search engine can see that your site isn't optimized and it doesn't recommend you to them.
> The boat carrying it should, in theory, be less likely to become a shipwreck.
Alternatively, only a few boats would have had one, and the ones that did were using them to strike out further afield than their less well-equipped contemporaries. Since they could be more confident about their location, they could venture further from land and might get caught by storms more easily.
> The boat carrying it should, in theory, be less likely to become a shipwreck.
The sea is a cruel mistress. Ships regularly get wiped out despite state-of-the-art navigation. I would suspect that the vast majority of shipwrecks throughout mankind's history has little do with navigation and everything to do with the inherent danger of the open ocean.
The Portuguese first sailed and reached India in 1498 (Vasco da Gama). This ship (nau in Portuguese) left Lisbon in 1502. It was part of the second voyage of exploration from Portugal to India.
I spent last Sunday's lunch explaining to my girlfriend the revolution that being able to compute your longitude was (I could not help myself). There were prizes offered by the trading companies and governments to whomever would devise a reliable way to determine one's longitude.
Conceptually, it's interesting that longitude is mostly useful only if you know your latitude (that's because 1degre of change in longitude does not translate to the same distance traveled whether you're at the equator or at the pole.)
It's storytelling. You can't possibly be expected to have genuine passion for the art and science behind every interesting story in the world... Otherwise the only stories that get told will be PhD dissertations.
Your friends must be better story tellers than mine! Second-hand stories tend to be pretty stale in my experience. Bad enough when people try to tell about something they heard happened to Joe, worse when they try to tell about something technical that happened centuries ago.
Stories like the Longitude story can be told outside academic dissertations - by people like Dava Sobel, though, not really by Fred who's just read her book.
So you're saying that no lay person can share interesting facts during casual conversation? You must be an expert on something to casually talk about it at lunch? Nonsense. This is one of the sillier things I've ever read on HN.
It's one thing to share some interesting facts and point people to the book. No-one's going to object to that! But I think it's a bit different if someone spends an entire lunch "explaining" the contents of a book they've just read.
Sometimes interesting stories or explanations one reads about then wishes to convey to someone else may require more than a few minutes to convey. It seems that was the case here.
It's not a matter of arrogance, pseudo-intellectualism or anything else. It's a matter of wanting to share interesting things one knows.
I think this varies massively between different situations. There are definitely good motives for sharing facts, and there are definitely bad motives for sharing facts. It is _sometimes_ a matter of arrogance and pretend intellectualism. Probably most of us have worked at a place where "that guy" was always trying to show off his knowledge. I got the impression that this was one of those times, but I could be wrong easily enough, and I've apologized to the original commenter in a cousin comment.
The phrase "I explained about longitude" paints a very different picture in my head to "I told my friends about this great book about longitude", but maybe that's just me.
Not everyone is a great storyteller... But when someone starts off with: "Here's something really interesting I read the other day, let me try share it with you" -- isn't it kind to listen and engage?
I guess I was seeing a big distinction between telling your friends _about_ this great book you've read, and telling the story yourself, as if you were the expert, as if you, rather than the author, had done the research and formed the narrative. I got the impression that LiamMcCalloway had done the latter, because he said he "explained" to his gf about longitude (and doesn't mention the book at all). If you start to "explain" to people on the basis of having read one book, that's being a know-it-all. Yes, this is an uncharitable reading of LiamMcCalloway's post, but I don't think I quite pulled it out of thin air. LiamMcCalloway, if I've got you wrong and you are in fact an intellectually honest person, I apologize without reservation!
If I don't make any more replies, it's because some people who don't like the tone of my original post are taking the opportunity to downvote everything I say.
If you are interested in how similar devices might have been made 100s and 1000s of years ago you should check out the latest videos on the Clickspring Youtube Channel [1]. Chris is building a copy of the Antikythera mechanism (mostly) without using modern tools and he is doing a stellar job.
The quality of his videos and his attention to detail is _amazing_! If you are into this kind of stuff you will most likely end up binge watching his whole channel over the weekend.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCworsKCR-Sx6R6-BnIjS2MA