Did Aliens build this computer? (Hint: no)

Great rejoicing among the children of the land today: School cancelled three days in advance. This not only means the winter break is extended, it means the first week back is shorter.

SCIENCE! Dogs poop in accordance with the invisible rays of the planet's magnetic field. Okay then. But what did ancient dogs do? Perhaps they consulted the The Antikythera Mechanism, news about which is making the rounds today. i09:

Because fools were afraid of it, or destroyed it to sell the metal parts. Does this mean scientists could have come up with clacking steam-powered mechanical calculation devices hundreds of years earlier. with Byzantium (not Constantinople) the Silicon Valley of its day? Hard to say, but the Romans would have loved computers. Any big administrative state finds them useful.

The article's comments promptly veer off in the expected direction:

One of the commenters actually uses that guy as a source for his arguments, which has a Mobius-strip logic to it. The commenter believes there was - oh, it's hard to say. Greys visiting earth a long time ago, helping humans build structures, that sort of thing. Anthropologists without the prime directive. Rather unimaginative, or careless: if you know you're shaping a culture just by showing up and lifting ten-ton boulders with your levitation wands, what can you learn? Primitives are impressed by magic. Well, yes. Anyway, the commenter points to web pages, you guys, so this is serious stuff. Including this one: Ancient City Found in India, Irradiated from Atomic Blast Hmm. Has to be true; it has ANCIENT TEXTS.

And Hister shall vex Venice. In other words, translation and context, pls. Or, for that matter, a primary source. There isn't any. There is, however, a debunking.

Meanwhile, in the world of serious archeology:

Brian Blessed's cheerful ruler, manipulated by his steely wily wife, was a great character, but you suspect that the dour, patient, unmovable Augustus of HBO's "Rome" was probably more to the point. More Science News of yore: : Matt Novak's Paleofuture reviews the Electrical Show of 1927.

Or, you could go to BuzzFeed for seriously informative material:

URBAN PLANNING While researching the location of the Mark Twain Cafe in Cairo, IL, I learned something new about Cairo: its downtown is a set for "The Walking Dead."

Some old photos of the city from 1989, when it was sliding fast but hadn't hit rock bottom, here.

ADVERTISING Clicked on one of those links at the bottom of a webpage, which is always a mistake. At Savory, "21 Creepy Old School Ads." Nothing creepy about them. What's unnerving is that people fall for this:

It's fake. Any idiot ought to be able to tell it's fake. Never mind the trypeface; what does wine have to do with it?

The "use of Schlitz to soften the blow of misfortune" campaign ran in the early 50s; here's the husband offered beer to deal with all the money his wife spent on hats.

Note how the pipe and slippers are laid out in advance. If we can't understand the context of something from 60 years ago, how can we be expected to understand an ancient computational instrument? How? Well, research, a grounding in history, and an ability to understand other cultures without applying our own values and preconceptions, but that's asking a lot.