Big wheels

In linking to this I should confess that until very recently I hadn't heard of the Antikythera mechanism myself. Both the machine and my previous ignorance of it are hard to believe, in retrospect. Sure, the mechanism might suffer through today's jaded standards because you couldn't hook it up to other like contraptions to create an Athenian internet. Although that would no doubt make an entertaining alternate history novel. But it did work, in ways that took decades to understand at all, and that we still might not have entirely gotten. It must be that such long distances in time have obscured not only the differences, but also the similarities.