Wednesday, July 30, 2008

Greek Eek!

As if The Antikythera Mechanism wasn't already mysterious enough...

I hit the page linked above randomly via Stumbleupon, and scanned it briefly. It's from July 2007.

I shit ye not, no more than 60 seconds later, my RSS reader pinged with a new headline from the BBC.

I am now very, very spooked...

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

That's funny :-)

I had no idea when I wrote the article about a year ago that it was going to become so popular with Stumbleupon users about a month before the BBC and the New York Times wrote about it having a possible connection to the Olympic Games, which is also within a month of the 2008 Games starting. Coincidental huh?

IZP said...

The mechanism popped up a few months back as one of the most read articles in the Guardian daily emai, I clicked the link and it was the original story from its discovery in 2006. It was almost as if a bunch of people somewhere on the web had suddenly all got excited about it all at once (I like to think on some newsgroup about Atlantis, maybe in a Bonekickers writing conference at Twycross, who knows).

I perpetuated its web prominence by emailing it to that Jac Rayner, who also likes unlikely old stuff, I said the story was like episode 1 of Planet of Fire but making sense (being a girl she doesn't appreciate the very specific thing of beuaty that is Planet of Fire episode 1).

Anyhow, I've now come to conclusion that interest in the mechanism comes in a series of predictable waves encoded within the device itself.
Another surge of inexplicable interest is due next April, I reckon.