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 Ed Moses’s “Clean Fusion Power This Decade”

The opening of SFMOMA Artist’s Gallery’s new show, Wondrous Strange: A 21st Century Cabinet of Curiosities is the impetus for an evening to explore ideas about time though art, whimsy, music and mechanics.

Artwork (from left to right) by Jo Ann Biagini, Sharon Beals and Michele Muennig

From 5:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. on July 22, 02010 join Long Now and the SFMOMA Artist’s Gallery as we open both venues and close off the adjoining street to delve deep into the Wunderkammer installation in the Gallery, the 10,000 Year Clock prototypes at Long Now and the Golden Mean, aka the Snail Car. There will be prizes for the best costumes so gather your time traveler gear – think late 18th through the early 20th century – and head our way! Musical accompaniment will be provided by punk band “The Grannies” and entertainment by the Burley Sisters burlesqueteers.

Its title derived from a line in Midsummer Night’s Dream, the show looks at the wondrous and the strange as propellants for the imagination of the viewer. Featuring works by more than a dozen Bay Area artists and including photography, sculpture, and painting, the exhibition explores themes such as evolutionary biology and history, progress and decadence, and the carnal and the intellectual. This contemporary version of the Cabinet of Curiosities provides a rich environment for the work of these 21st century artists who strive to reconnect us to the sources of wonder.

Long Now’s Executive Director Alexander Rose will be presenting a live webinar on StimulusTV.com.  The broadcast is hosted by Steven Latham and will last about 30 minutes.  Registration is free and open to the public.

What will happen in the next 10,000 years?
Tuesday, June 29th, 02010
4:00 – 4:30 pm PST
StimulusTV.com

photos by Contessa Trujillo

After its initial public appearance at this year’s Maker Faire followed by an evening at the Exploratorium, the escapement, circular pendulum and Clock face were installed at our Long Now Museum and Store at Fort Mason Center and can be viewed seven days a week – just check our website first for our hours.

About the escapement, circular pendulum and Clock face:

This pendulum and escapement represent a snapshot of our development process in timekeeping for the monument size clock. The dials in the center are non-functioning in this model and were used as a visual mock-up for a scaled up version. The function of the escapement is to both drive the pendulum and transfer the regular beat of the pendulum to the timekeeping elements of the Clock. This allows the Clock’s stored energy to ‘escape’ at a regular rate, thus advancing the drivetrain and displays in a manner that allows them to keep time.

This particular pendulum and escapement system is unique in several ways, one of which is likely obvious at a glance. The large ring around the face is actually a pendulum suspended on a specially designed flexure. With most pendulums, the weight is completely below the point of rotation and the distance between the two is what determines the period (the time between ticks). The ring configuration in this pendulum adds weight above the point of rotation, which causes it to swing more slowly than it would otherwise; the period is 10 seconds. By reducing the number of ticks the Clock will go through, the rate of wear can also be reduced.

The second unique element of this mechanism is in the small gear system above the pendulum; the escapement itself. Danny Hillis explains:

One problem with clock escapements is that there is normally some variability in the drive torque of the escape wheel, which can lead to variability in the energy applied to the pendulum. This can in turn lead to inaccuracies in the clock’s ability to keep steady time. One method of reducing this variability is delivering the impulse to the pendulum indirectly through an intermediate energy storage device that delivers a more constant impulse. For example, in a typical gravity escapement, the torque from the escape wheel is used to lift a weight to a fixed height, and the dropping of that weight delivers the impulse. This isolates the strength of the impulse from the torque applied to the escapement, but it does not solve the problem entirely, because the energy that must be removed from the pendulum to release the escape wheel may still depend on the torque applied to the escapement.

The two-phase detached escapement solves this problem by releasing the escapement wheel utilizing the residual energy of the falling gravity arm’s weight. This happens after the gravity arm has delivered its impulse to the pendulum. Because the interaction with the escape wheel only happens after the escapement has delivered its impulse, the escape wheel cannot affect intensity of the impulse. In the first phase, the pendulum releases the gravity arm, which is decoupled from the escapement and the falling gravity arm impulses the pendulum. In the second phase the gravity arm continues to fall until it becomes totally detached from the pendulum, and then the falling gravity arm releases the escape wheel, which restores the gravity arm to the initial position and the escape wheel continues rotating until it is no longer in contact with the gravity arm.

At the center of the pendulum is a prototype for the Clock’s face. Rather than hours and minutes, the face displays information about the movement of the sun, stars and moon. The outer ring is shows the movement of the sun; it rotates once per day, passing horizon indicators that show sunset and sunrise. Those horizon indicators change along with the seasons to show the progressive lengthening and shortening of days. The next ring into the center reveals the current phase of the moon and it will rotate along with the lunar cycle; all 32 phases of the moon are shown by this ring.

The center of the face shows the stars of the night sky. The face is intersected by six arcs collectively known as the rete. The wide arcs represent the horizon, so that above them the stars that can be seen at a given time are visible. Stars below those arcs will not be currently visible as they’re blocked by the planet you’re standing on. The four arcs that terminate near the center point towards the celestial north pole, the point around which we observe the stars rotating. Polaris is currently the closest star to that point, which is why we call it the North Star, but as the earth’s axis precesses, Vega will move closer to that position and become our “North Star” in about 13,000 years. On the Clock’s face, the rete rotates along with the earth to show the daily movement of the stars. To account for the axial precession, the black surface with the stars on it will turn around in a 26,000 year-long rotation.

The Long News: stories that might still matter fifty, or a hundred, or ten thousand years from now.

It’s obvious energy will be one of the great challenges of this century. But it’s possible to hope that the current BP oil spill might help prompt a broader conversation about possible alternatives.

Over the past few weeks we’ve been looking for stories about the future of energy, running a News Hunt with the help of social news site NewsTrust.

There was good news on many fronts – we found a lot of high quality journalism; we had great participation from a large number of NewsTrust and Long Now Foundation members, bringing in news sources from around the world; and finally, there was a surprising amount of good news in the news stories themselves, as you’ll read below.

To quote Alexander Rose: “Looking back over what came out of the Energy News Hunt I found that I learned not only more about energy, but a lot more about the way it is covered by the press. I am reminded how rare it is to see a story that contextualizes new energy technology in the overall picture. Crowd-sourcing is a tricky and nuanced business. NewsTrust did a great job framing and directing the efforts of its contributors to yield high quality stories.”

For an excellent summary of everything we learned, visit the NewsTrust blog here.

For a quick overview, here are some of the best recent news stories we found about the future of energy:

1. Solar: Here comes the sun

European dream of desert energy takes shape

The rise of big solar: growing pains

2. Wind: The answer, my friend

How Texas lassoed the wind

Bottled wind could be as constant as coal

3. Nuclear: The news on nukes

The future of nuclear power

The nuclear option is back on the table

4. Geothermal: I feel the earth move

Joining the energy underground: residential geothermal power systems

Using carbon dioxide to extract geothermal energy

5. Biofuels: What’s it all about, algae?

Algae to solve the Pentagon’s jet fuel problem

Exxon bets $600 million on algae biofuel despite doubters

6. Fusion: You are my sunshine

Laser fusion test results raise energy hopes

This machine might* save the world

7. Oil: Not all the news is good

Lasting menace: gulf oil-spill disaster likely to exert environmental harm for decades

Think gas is too pricey? Think again.

Finally, we’d like to thank the folks at NewsTrust for helping pull this together, particularly their terrific team: Fabrice Florin, Kaizar Campwala, Jon Mitchell, Beth Wellington, and Mike La Bonte. We invite you to visit http://newstrust.longnow.org, where you can join NewsTrust to comment on stories yourself.

Imminent fusion power

All the light we see from the sky, Moses pointed out, comes from fusion power burning hydrogen, the commonest element in the universe—3/4 of all mass. A byproduct of the cosmic fusion is the star-stuff that we and the Earth are made of.

On Earth, 4 billion years of life accumulated geological hydrocarbons, which civilization is now burning at a rate of 10 million years’ worth per year. In 1900, 98% of the world’s energy came from…

Read the rest of Stewart Brand’s Summary and download the audio podcast here.

Attendees at The Academy of Science debate whether or not to try the water from 02030

Long Now Research Fellow – Stuart Candy (along with cohorts) recently presented the Plastic Century futures project at the Academy of Sciences in San Francisco. The project gives you the option of drinking water from decades ranging from 01910 (no plastic) to a hypothetical 02030 (mostly plastic).   After sampling each  I found them all to be fine except for 01960 which was a bit bitter for some reason…

“Long Shorts” – short films that exemplify long-term thinking.  Please submit yours in the comments section…

Information Pioneers: Ada Lovelace from Information Pioneers on Vimeo.

This is a nice intro to Ada Lovelace, the first computer programmer who wrote programs for Babbage’s mechanical computer. While this computer is similar to the binary mechanical computer used in the first 10,000 Year Clock prototype, Babbage’s computers are decimal based.

Dinosaur Comics, June 11th 02010, (click for full size)

Same images every time but different words, what a stupid comic right?  Wrong. Dinosaur Comics are super awesome.  This particular one is awesome in a Long Now way.  Enjoy.

There’s a great story bouncing around – a shoe was found in an Armenian cave.  Not just any shoe, of course.  It’s about five and a half thousand years old.  It’s the oldest leather shoe ever found, predating Ötzi the Iceman‘s footwear by about 300 years.

It is objects like this that always remind us when doing a lot of research around materials for the Clock, that given the right environment (in this case freezing) just about any material could last 10,000 years.

(via New York Times)