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I had chanced upon an interesting article, "Decoding the world's first computer" a few months ago in a compilation of the best science writing for the last year. There, among a series of serious science writings, this had caught my fancy. What amazed me was the uniqueness of the find, how it was discovered and the thrill of how it was decoded. And if it had not been for two ferocious storms nearly 2,000 years apart, this amazing piece of history would never have been found. The year was 1901. A group of sponge divers sought refuge from a storm on the island of Antikythera in southern Greece. When the storm subsided a couple of days later, they decided to continue their search for sponges. On the second dive a spluttering wide-eyed Konstantis gathered his team and told them of a most amazing sight he had seen. Nestled nearly 50 metres from the shore and about at 150 metres deep was a shipwreck with an abundance of statues, sculptures, vases and other ancient treasures. It took them nearly two years to remove the findings in what was then an amazing salvage operation. Hundreds of lifesize statues of greek Gods, horses, elaborate sculptures, vases, bronze trinkets were found, brought to the surface, catalogued and shifted to the National Archaeological museum at Athens. Among the many smaller finds were broken clogged pieces of what looked like a machine. It had multiple gears, strange markings, and some text in ancient Greek. The three larger pieces went unnoticed for nearly half a century. They were lying in a box in the basement of the museum when Dr Solla Price chanced upon them in the mid-1950s. He was intrigued and fascinated by what he saw. The more he looked at the pieces, the more he marvelled at the creator. He could make out traces of gears with teeth smaller than a millimetre, and there were a number of these overlapping gears. His initital reaction was that it was some kind of astrolabe, an ancient instrument to locate the heavenly bodies. But the wreck had been accurately dated to the second century BC. It was most probably a merchant ship that had sunk in a severe storm. Nobody had these kind of machines back then. Dr Price set about recreating the rest of the machine from the knowledge he could get from the available pieces. By now further interest
had been generated and a series of subsequent dives, even by the great
French underwater explorer Jaques Costeau himself, produced little new
evidence. By the 1980s technology existed to to inspect the remains
without prying them apart. The latest in X-rays was used to understand
more of the machinery. The pieces were so delicate that they could not
travel, and so a team from the US with equipment in two large trucks
descended upon the Archaeological Museum at Athens to explore further.
The team was in for a surprise when the director of the museum
announced that by chance they had discovered another box in the
basement with the label "Antikythera", and it contained
another 82 smaller pieces of the mechanism, as it was now referred to.
The team set about recreating what was perhaps the world's first
computer.
I had over the months retold this story to wide eyed friends and tried to excite them to guess what all this machine could have done. The various scientific teams working on the project were coming to startling conclusions: The Antikythera mechanism was an instrument that could on any date determine the exact position of the sun, the moon, the known planets, their position in the constellations, and also the days left for the next Olympic games. The more they researched, the more astounding the conclusions were. The mechanism was following the Metonic calender i.e. 19 solar years coinciding with 235 complete lunar cycles. They could predict when the next lunar and solar eclipses would happen. Though I doubt that they could predict the path of the solar eclipse back then. They obviously knew that the universe was heliocentric, and could make allowances for leap years corrected upto minutes in a day. They knew that the orbits of the planets were not circular but elleptical ( a thought that became popular with Western civilisation many centuries later. Based on this knowledge, they allowed for the axis of the gears to have a play of less than a millimetre to give accurate predictions. The mechanism was not on my mind when we visited Athens last month. After doing the Acropolis and the pan-Athenaic stadium we walked all the way to the National Archaeological Museum. Lost in the wonders from ancient civilisations thousands of years ago, we went from room to room mesmerised by the richness of history. To take a break we went to the cafe in the basement courtyard and there at the base of the stairs were these large sculptures of horses and Greek Gods corroded by years of being under sea water, And the plaque next to them said "from the Antikythera wreck". My pulse had become fast as the story came back to me. To our delight we realised that that the mechanism was in the Bronze Room upstairs. We raced up and located the exhibit. And there in a dimly lit room under a spotlight in a glass case were the three large pieces. Dr Solla Price's replica was next to it. I was weak in the knees as I walked all around it. The green corroded bronze gears and wheels were clearly visible. I could even make out the notches and the writing in Greek. What was this doing on the ship that had been carrying it? What was the other cargo? Where was it heading? Was the Antikythera mechanism the only one ever built? What happened to this knowledge? A hundred questions but no real answers. And I remembered what I had read, that any comparable mechanical device appeared in Europe nearly 1,500 years later. Professor Michael Edmunds of Cardiff University who led the most recent study of the mechanism had said: "This device is just extraordinary, the only thing of its kind. The design is beautiful, the astronomy is exactly right. The way the mechanics are designed just makes your jaw drop. Whoever has done this has done it extremely carefully ... in terms of historic and scarcity value, I have to regard this mechanism as being more valuable than the Mona Lisa." Liquor gives a kick, but may also kick in unsafe sex
Alcohol consumption, especially heavy drinking, has long been associated with HIV incidence. However, there have been doubts about the cause-and-effect relationship, the journal Addiction reports.“Drinking has a causal effect on the likelihood to engage in unsafe sex, and thus should be included as a major factor in preventive efforts for HIV,” says Jürgen Rehm, professor in addiction policy at the Dalla Lana School Public Health, University of Toronto and the principal study investigator. The study summarises the results of 12 experiments that tested this cause-and-effect relationship in a systematic way, according to a Toronto statement. They found that alcohol consumption affects decision-making, and that this impact rises with the amount of alcohol consumed. The more alcohol that participants consumed, the higher their willingness to engage in unsafe sex.—IANS
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Alcohol