Every day, some cretin drops his cell phone in the water.

Twenty-one hundred years ago, some Cretans dropped a fucking computer in the ocean.

Here is one of its gears, regular and radiographed:

By turning the gear mechanism, which included what Edmunds [a British astrophysics professor] called a beautiful system of epicyclic gears that factored in the elliptical orbit of the moon, a person could check what the sky would have looked like on a date in the past, or how it would appear in the future.

Epicyclic gears systems—explained here and here—are themselves celestial: They consist of “planet gears” that rotate around a “solar gear,” all for the purpose of increasing the output speed. They are also elegant. Here are some modern epicyclic gears:

It’s like a little metal solar system.

(In other wonderful science news: “Small nuclear war could severely cool the planet”.)