Stewart Brand's Blog, page 120

Two Million & 1AD

Fossilization normally takes millions of years, but artist Austin Houldsworth has created a machine that he hopes will accelerate that process enough to take only a few months.  The piece is called Two Million & 1AD and it's located in Tatton Park in Cheshire, England.

The machine replicates the natural process of Petrification, which is a form of fossilisation where organic matter is replaced with minerals. It does this by saturating the water with an extremely high quantity of minerals in...

Digital Time Capsule Buried in Swiss Alps

In order to demonstrate digital impermanence, scientists from the European Planets Project deposited a time capsule containing five of today's most common types of digital objects into the Swiss Fort Knox data center. The time capsule contains a JPEG photograph, a message in Java source code, a short film in .MOV format, a web-page in HTML and a brochure in PDF.

According to the Planets website, the deposited box also included..

…conversion tools that were used to migrate the objects as...

Long Now at Exploratorium After Dark

Long Now has been invited to participate in the Exploratorium's After Dark event on Thursday June 3 from 6pm to 10pm.

The Exploratorium has generously offered complimentary tickets to Long Now members, please see your email for details.
Tickets for the General Public are $15, a year's After Dark pass $25, and admission is free if you are a member of the Exploratorium.

This monthly get-together is focused on the over 21 set and features special exhibitions, film screenings and lectures built ...

Climate Change and Accurate Timekeeping

Photo from the Catlin Arctic Survey Of Shrinking Polar Cap

One of the critical elements of the Clock of the Long Now to keep good time over ten millennia is the part of the clock that is synchronized to solar noon. We have several schemes that allow this mechanical synch from sunlight, but one of the questions that came up as we designed these systems, was how much we might expect solar noon to drift in 10,000 years.  We had already compensated for the earth's ~26,000 year precessional...

Maker Faire 02010

Long Now is pleased to be exhibiting a new working six foot diameter pendulum and Live Rosetta Scanning Station at O'Reilly Media's Maker Faire Bay Area Saturday and Sunday, May 22 and 23 at the San Mateo County Event Center.

Maker Faire is a two-day, family-friendly event that celebrates the Do-It-Yourself (DIY) mindset. It's for creative, resourceful people of all ages and backgrounds who like to tear the back off technology and make it their own. Each year several hundred creators, geeks...

Long Now Media Update

There is new media available from our monthly series, the Seminars About Long-term Thinking. Stewart Brand's summaries and audio downloads or podcasts of the talks are free to the public; Long Now members can view HD video of the Seminars and comment on them.

Watch the video of Nils Gilman's "Deviant Globalization"

Ed Moses Ticket Info

The Long Now Foundation's monthly Seminars About Long-term Thinking presents Ed Moses on "Clean Fusion Power This Decade"Wednesday June 16, 02010 at 7:30 pm at the Cowell Theater in San FranciscoLong Now Members can reserve 2 seats, join today!or you can purchase tickets for $10 each.

About this Seminar:
Finally achieving fusion energy may be closer than everyone thinks. Ed Moses is director of the National Ignition Facility (NIF) at Lawrence Livermore Labs. Focusing massive amounts of laser...

Rosetta Spotlight: Ormuri – a piece of Middle Eastern identity

Ormuri Description in the Rosetta Collection

"Language is identity," Darfur refugee Daowd I. Salih told the New York Times about a week ago. He was being interviewed for an article called "Listening to (and Saving) the World's Languages." As mentioned in this Rosetta Project blog post, the article discusses the amazing variety of spoken languages in New York City, and what residents are doing (or not doing) to preserve their native language.

One of the languages the article touches on is a

Long Now Media Update

There is new media available from our monthly series, the Seminars About Long-term Thinking. Stewart Brand's summaries and audio downloads or podcasts of the talks are free to the public; Long Now members can view HD video of the Seminars and comment on them.

Listen to the audio of Nils Gilman's "Deviant Globalization" (downloads tab)

Clay and Light

For thousands of years emperors, clerics, nobles and kings all over the world have erected slabs of stone called stelae as markers to indicate a boundary, either phsyical or temporal.  They commemorate battles won, loved ones lost, borders, holocausts, and laws.  Some stelae have been vital sources of information on past societies; many still stand after millenia.

Outside the Everhart Museum in Scranton, four ceramic stelae have been erected by an artist named Jordan Taylor.  The...