While we at Long Now are generally very earnest and diligent about our efforts in long-term thinking, we just can’t let a movie of this “quality” go by and not do SOMETHING… So on 3/11/02008 AD the staff and friends of Long Now will be attending this landmark piece of multi-milliennial retrospect. A few of us will wear gray Long Now baseball hats so that we can be found.

When? Tuesday, March 11th for the 8:00pm showing of
10,000 BC
at the Century San Francisco Centre (Bloomingdales mall)
835 Market Street, San Francisco, CA, 94103

Reviews and comments can be found at Rotten Tomatoes.

PS: Don’t come if you are expecting a quiet movie going experience :)

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 Due to the infinite wisdom of the US Legislators and President of 02005 we will again be experiencing “daylight savings” time a few weeks earlier this year.  While I am pretty ambivalent about the daylight savings time concept, I do think the only thing sillier than changing our clocks twice a year, is randomly legislating new times to do so.

As most of us remember, changing time bases and calendrics caused all kinds (of mostly unneeded) fuss around the turn of the last millennium.  And while it seems this new change was important enough to generate lobbying efforts from important cultural institutions such as the Sporting Goods Manufacturers Association, the National Association of Convenience Stores, and the National Retinitis Pigmentosa Foundation Fighting Blindness, I am still pretty confused as to why we are again wreaking havoc on the all pre-programmed EPROMs of the world.  This has been dubbed “The Year 2007 Problem.”

So this month all our pre-programmed digital watches, timed light switches and sprinkler systems will be running an hour off schedule.  Hopefully no life critical medical device will actually go too awry, and we can all settle in and wait for the Y10k mayhem.

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Through a fairly low power laser process some clever folks over at the University of Rochester have come up with a way to generate an intrinsic colored surface on metals. They can even get an extremely pure black. Why is this cool? For the Clock of the Long Now project we are always on the lookout for ways of coloring metal for parts of the clock in ways that wont fail over time. A process like this could be used on the dials, or even on metals that we need to absorb sunlight to give us temperature variation.

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I just got an update from David Rumsey that there will be a special event at the map museum in Second Life Thursday March 6th at noon PST.

MIT Tech Review is reporting that Long Now board member and mapping maven David Rumsey is launching his historical map collection in Second Life this week.

A new installation inside Second Life is bringing alive one of the world’s largest collections of antique maps. Called the David Rumsey Maps Island (registration required), the Second Life site is San Francisco map collector David Rumsey’s latest high-technology plan to share his collection with as large an audience as possible. (See “From Lewis and Clark to Landsat.”)

Rumsey has also given a talk in our Seminar series, and some of his collection is in the featured layers on Google Earth where you can see historical maps overlaid on modern geography.

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Our friend Scott Beale over at Squidlist has a write up on the winner of the History Channel’s City of the Future contest. The honors go to IwamotoScott Architecture’s Hydro-Net concept netting $10,000 for their win. While a lot of the ideas are pretty interesting the “hydrogen fueled hover cars” part sounds a little like Tomorrow Land to me. I assume everyone will be wearing white rayon uni-suits and lucite shoes as well.

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Since its launch in 2005, Google Earth has become a valuable tool for sharing information of global scale. Its accessible platform and wide distribution has led to a wealth of independently created “layers” exploring a huge variety of topics.

The Rosetta archive is by design an explicitly global collection, and by nature relevant to every human occupied corner of the world. With its own global focus, Google Earth makes an ideal showcase for our data. To explore this we’ve created pilot layers that bring out some of the cool ways we see our language data interacting with the Google Earth interface. At the moment the layers bring just snippets of our archive to the surface, and we’re excited to bring the full depth of our materials to bear in future collections.

The files highlight some of the most intriguing aspects of the Rosetta database. You can browse endangered languages of Africa and the Americas, listen to recordings, and explore our 3D representation of linguistic diversity in the urban centers of the U.S. west coast. Check the files out here.

As this is a pilot project, we look forward to hearing your comments and suggestions, and we’d love to hear ideas for future implementations.

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