In the land before time, when dinosaurs and Romans and a young John S. McCain roamed the Earth, there was a nation whom unto others was like a shining white city upon a hill, and yea, in that blessed land there were olive trees and grapevines and a slow lazy sun overhead, and the Oracle up in her Delphic mountains did look down upon the people of Helen, and did mutter, rant and gabble gibberish under the influence of vapours, and she did feel satisfied. Her Hellenic people were the Greeks; the City was Athens, and the Time was 212 years Before Christ. Even back in those early days, they had seen it all before; they had been there, and done that.
Our own era has stoked our ego as an old lady does a cat, and purr in our own hubris, but we are pur-blind to believe that we know more than the ancient Greeks and the Coptic scholars. Charles Babbage and his first vaunted computer are mere plagiarizing whipper-snappers, to say nothing of the Great Mimic Turing. The real inventor of the computer: why, it was Archimedes, of course.
Wheel of Fortuna
poq draws your attention to the legendary Antikythera Mechanism, which does – well, we don’t quite know what exactly. But under the guidance of Ptolemy, it was said to read the stars and predict the solar eclipses. Perhaps there were many dozens of these. Perhaps together, they would make voices that would rise up in an intangible, smoke-like mass, in a great Babylon of noises and times and thoughts, in, one might even call it, an ancient Greek Cloud.
