I love the History Carnival.
I love this post about research into the Antikythera Mechanism.
The mechanism was found in the early 1900s. It was found when some sailors sheltered from a storm off the island of Antikythera. They went sponge diving, but one of the divers returned to the ship and told the captain of the corpses he’d found on the sea bed. The other divers went to confirm his story and found the wreck of a Roman vessel which sunk in the first century BC. The corpses were bronze and marble statues, some of which can be found in the National Museum of Greece today. Along with these finds were recovered some cogs congealed by rust into lumps.
The device was throughly investigated by Derek de Solla Price and his conclusion was startling. The device may have looked like clockwork, but it was no clock. Instead he argued it was an analogue computer, used for calculating the position of the sun, moon and planets against the celestial sphere.
Very cool.
You have to check out the Tangled Bank blog carnival.
And Last but not least you can’t surf the carnivals without at least one stop at the latest Harry Potter Carnival which has the next movie trailer (due for release July 2007.)
