During its recent gravity assist flyby, the Rosetta craft was mistaken for an Earth-threatening asteroid! From Sky and Telescope:

“The spacecraft was unknowingly ‘discovered’ on November 7th by astronomers in Arizona scanning the skies for Earth-threatening asteroids. They dutifully reported the 20th-magnitude blip in their images to the Minor Planet Center here in Cambridge, and the next day the MPC announced that the newfound object, now designated 2007 VN84, would have a close brush with Earth…

An observant Russian skygazer named Denis Denisenko was the first to point out that 2007 VN84 was, in fact, Rosetta. The connection had been missed apparently because no one from the European Space Agency had bothered to update the MPC as to Rosetta’s recent whereabouts. And so on November 9th the Cambridge clearinghouse issued an Editorial Notice to declare that ‘The minor planet 2007 VN84 does not exist and the designation is to be retired.’”

Well, maybe we’ll keep the designation around… to refer to Rosetta’s 15 minutes of minor planetary fame!

This years winner of the National Watch and Clock Collectors People’s Choice award is a clock made of wood that uses a binary movement by David Holmes. It is a very cool design and a totally different take on the use of binary systems in a clock than Danny Hillis‘.  You can see a WMV video of it in operation. Apparently they are made to order and sell in the $5000 range, you can also see more on how it works here.

  The German art group Robotlab has re-purposed an industrial robot to “hand” write a Martin Luther bible.  While in this instance there is not much feeling in the characters, one could easily imagine an algorithm that randomly introduces small errors to make it feel more hand made.  Wouldn’t it be great to be able to order “manuscripts” of your favorite books on demand?

Principles against panic

“Everything looks like a failure in the middle.” Any new enterprise, Kanter explained, encounters roadblocks. As the obstacles multiply, the situation looks hopeless. That’s when deeply held principles and and the long view are most needed to get you past the panic.

To characterize America’s current winter of discontent she quoted Woody Allen: “One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.” Panic leads to abandoning principles, and that is how successes end.

Kanter commends three principles in particular for renewal of the faltering American enterprise…

Read the rest of Stewart Brand’s Summary

Get out your telescopes!

From www.spaceweather.com:

“Europe’s Rosetta spacecraft is rapidly approaching Earth for a close flyby on Nov. 13th. The gravity assist maneuver, bringing the probe only 5301 km above the Pacific Ocean, will fling Rosetta toward its 10-year destination: Comet 67/P Churyumov-Gerasimenko. Amateur astronomers with mid-sized backyard telescopes and CCD cameras can observe the approach; Rosetta is a 18th magnitude speck of light in the constellation Lynx: ephemeris.”

Paolo Savagione (lead engineer on our Clock Project) sent in this nifty video of a 1000 year forestry-clock idea in France. We have talked about ideas like this for the 10,000 Year Clock, but this is the first simulation of such an idea I have seen. I think however that there might be more successful ways to use this idea that would be as interesting in the moment as they would be in time lapse.

In the recent New Yorker is an excellent article by Grafton on creating the Universal Library with our modern digital tools. (sent in by Long Now member Bryan Campen) Most interesting is its historical survey of the universal library idea, which reminded me of Alex Wright’s work. The article shows how fraught with pitfalls this idea is and does a good job of teasing out which of those perils may or may not be helped by the mass digitization and web accessibility of data.

The rush to digitize the written record is one of a number of critical moments in the long saga of our drive to accumulate, store, and retrieve information efficiently. It will result not in the infotopia that the prophets conjure up but in one in a long series of new information ecologies, all of them challenging, in which readers, writers, and producers of text have learned to survive.

While it can’t compete with 4,000 year-old Bristlecone Pines, a clam that lived for between 405 and 410 years was found in waters off of Iceland by scientists from Bangor University’s School of Ocean Sciences. The researchers can determine the age of a clam by counting the rings of its shell much like the rings of a tree. This one, at just over 400 years old, appears to be the oldest individual animal known to science. Other exceedingly old clams have been found before and the record set by this one could conceivably be beaten in the future, but this particular clam has been verified as the oldest known.

Researchers hope to learn much from these exceedingly hardy little organisms. First and foremost is how they are able to resist aging as well as they do. But also, studying the differences between the rings of the animal’s shell can, like trees, tell us many things about changes in the climate and the environment over the organism’s lifespan.