virtuosity Navigating the site:
Arnold Pacey
"Achievement and aspiration, progress and purpose were all part of the public meaning of technology."
Pacey argues that "to understand technology, we occasionally need to acknowledge and be aware of personal experience."
"Many commentators on technology regard discussion of ideals, values, or meaning in technology as futile because they are inherently subjective."
pp. 2-3.
Pacey shows how music is the origin of technological virtuosity, as opposed to Pursell's arguments that the development of language in prehistoric culture was responsible for exaptation in tool use and technological virtuosity.
1. Music, Sources of Technology
6. Exploration, Invention and the Remaking of Nature
8. Knowledge Pregnant with Evil
Periods in history by tool's used.
Eratosthenes of Cyrene, Libya
276 BC - 194 BC
Eratosthenes was a Greek mathematician who is famous for his work on prime numbers and for measuring the diameter of the earth.
He noted the differences in the length of the shadows at different latitudes along the Nile River at noon. The shadow's cast at Alexandria and Aswan (Syene) separated by hundreds of miles are not the same length when the sun is overhead at noon. Eratosthenes estimated the size of the Earth to be 28,500 miles in circumference.
As you can determine, the actual circumference is 24,901.55 miles (40,075.16 kilometers) at the Equator, but, if you measure the Earth through the poles the circumference is 24,859.82 or (40,008 kilometers). His figure is fairly close to the more accurate figures known today.
His virtuosity lay in mathematics and formulating the size of the earth and its distances to the sun and moon and using lines of longitude. Since 500 BCE the Pythagorean thinkers taught that the Earth was a sphere (as opposed to a disc), but Eratosthenes put numbers and dimensions to this imagery.
Tools of Toil: what to read. Tools are historical building blocks of technology.
Week Two: Pursell question and the story of Prometheus
Postman–Tech | Postman–Television | Pursell | Pacey–Meaning | Pacey | Taylor | Head | Tenner | Eberhart | Snow | Kaku
