Surfing the web this morning, I found two really interesting things.
The first is something called Antikythera Project
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The other interesting thing I found out today, is the jungles of the Yucatan are probably not natural, but like human agriculture and gardins going wild since the Mayan civilization collapse.
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I love both of these stories and because I'm terrible, have started using them to annoy the technophobes in my life (who, somehow, have thus-far escaped the tender mercies of my neuro-disrupter and re-assignment to the hydrocarbon lakes of Titan). You see hippie bastards! We've long built computing machinery and re-worked nature on a massive scale to suit our needs. Hell, the Mayans were jungle sculpting Blade Runners.
Excerpts and links for the curious...
World's First Computer Displayed Olympic Calendar
The world's first known scientific instrument plotted the positions of celestial bodies nineteen years into the future -- and as an added bonus, it kept track of upcoming Olympics.
"The maker took information about astronomical theories, and made a machine that could predict the future," said Tony Freeth, co-author of a study to be published in Nature this week. "And it would tell you, as a bit of an add-on, what Olympic games would be in progress at the time."
A dictionary-size assemblage of 37 interlocking dials crafted with the precision and complexity of a 19th century Swiss clock, the machine was recovered in 1900 from a shipwreck off the Greek island of Antikythera. Scientists dated it to 150 BC.
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<http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/07/worlds-first-co.html#more>
Yucatan Jungles Are Feral Maya Gardens
The jungles of the Yucatán peninsula look as wild as a forest can: dense, lush and filled with dozens of varieties of trees. It certainly doesn't look cultivated in the way that Iowa does. But research suggests that the landscape was intensely managed before the Maya civilization collapsed over a thousand years ago, and that what we see as "wild" bears the marks of thousands of years of human intervention.
"The species you see in Yucatán jungles are Maya village community garden plants that have gone feral. That isn't the forest that was there before humans landed in the Americas," said Christine Hastorf, an archaeology professor specializing in long-term human-plant relationships at Berkeley.
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<http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2007/10/yucatan-jungles.html>
NASA Confirms Liquid Lake on Saturn Moon
PASADENA, Calif. -- NASA scientists have concluded that at least one of the large lakes observed on Saturn's moon Titan contains liquid hydrocarbons, and have positively identified the presence of ethane. This makes Titan the only body in our solar system beyond Earth known to have liquid on its surface.
Scientists made the discovery using data from an instrument aboard the Cassini spacecraft. The instrument identified chemically different materials based on the way they absorb and reflect infrared light. Before Cassini, scientists thought Titan would have global oceans of methane, ethane and other light hydrocarbons. More than 40 close flybys of Titan by Cassini show no such global oceans exist, but hundreds of dark, lake-like features are present. Until now, it was not known whether these features were liquid or simply dark, solid material
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<http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2008-152>
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