Ancient Greeks Help Explain The Rioting Of Modern Britons
Dr. Mark A. Wolfgram writes a fascinating letter to the Financial Times:
Sir, The August 17 commentaries by Richard Florida (“The inchoate rage beneath our global cities”) and John Kay (“Why the rioters should be reading Rousseau”), as well as the excellent Financial Times series on “The Squeezed Middle”, are all making important observations about a similar social, economic and political factor — inequality. Inequality is a fact of human societies built on hierarchies. We come to accommodate ourselves to different levels of inequality, as long as we feel that our society, overall, is at some level just.
In a recent academic work, “A Cultural Theory of International Relations”, Richard Ned Lebow goes back to ancient Greek thought on human motivations and argues that we need to reintegrate their notion of spirit into our understanding of human behaviour. The Greeks argued that humans are motivated by both appetite (the pursuit of material…
Apple Engineer Re-Creates 2,000 Year Old Greek Computer … With Legos
Andrew Carol, a software engineer for Apple, has re-created a 2,000 year old Greek computer, the Antikythera Mechanism, using Legos. Ancient Greeks created this device around 100 B.C. to predict astronomical events, such as eclipses.
