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A comment on Device Might Be England's Oldest Dated Scientific Instrument.

Re:Device Might Be England's Oldest Dated Scientific Instrument by lamerose on Friday December 15, 2023 @01:05AM (#38651469)
The article makes this sound a bit like a lamer, English version of the Antikythera mechanism. In reality it's just a quadrant, i.e., a portable sundial relying on gravity for alignment, and it's only a decade older than the next oldest specimen.
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Re:Device Might Be England's Oldest Dated Scientific Instrument by trompetenaccoun on Friday December 15, 2023 @02:42AM (#38651939)
That's just one side. On the other it has a dial for calculating the Easter date.
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Re:Device Might Be England's Oldest Dated Scientific Instrument by NeoTar on Friday December 15, 2023 @03:26AM (#38652176)
I sometimes wonder if advanced mathematics in Western Europe would have a survived without the need to calculate the date of Easter!
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Re:Device Might Be England's Oldest Dated Scientific Instrument by 082349872349872 on Friday December 15, 2023 @08:38AM (#38654050)
A colleague of mine started his career as a computer scientist in the then-Soviet Union. He was reading western papers that were using Easter calculation as an example of a non-trivial computation that "everyone knows", and wound up traveling all the way to a big library in Moscow before he found a book that gave him an independent source of the details.
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