It turns out that Borglum, the man behind Mt Rushmore, also built an underground area behind the giant presidential heads to be a “Hall of Records” (entrance pictured above).

“Into this room the records of what our people aspired to and what they have accomplished should be collected and preserved, and on the walls of this room should be cut the literal records of the conception of our republic, its successful creation, the record of its westward movement to the Pacific, its presidents, how the memorial was built and, frankly. Why.”

- Gutzon Borglum.

It was never completed past the first 70 feet, but a recent effort by the historical society placed a small cache of records there.  Rushmore is an interesting case where one man’s obsession (carving the mountain into presidential faces) later became a monument synonymous with national identity.  I had no idea there was a “library” like function also associated with it.

 Through our partnership with Applied Minds we were invited to include one of our materials on a NASA material experiment called MISSE on the International Space Station. We included a sample of commercially pure titanium, that was black oxide coated, and laser etched (pictured below).  This is the same material/process that we made the front side of the Rosetta Disk out of. Now we get to find out how well the disk would hold up if exposed to open space for several years…

This experiment is a continuation of sorts of the material research started back in 01984 with the Long Duration Exposure Facility that Kevin Kelly posted about earlier.

Terms of biocontainment

“I want to develop tools that make biology easy to engineer,” Drew Endy began. The first purpose is better understanding fundamental biological mechanisms through “learning by building.” The toolkit of Synthetic Biology starts with DNA construction and ascends through DNA parts, to devices, to standardized systems. An organism’s DNA code, and therefore the organism, can be digitally uploaded, stored, distributed, and downloaded. Life forms are programmable…

Read the rest of Stewart Brand’s Summary

 Kevin Kelly sent in this well organized site of US land art with spiffy icons, GPS coordinates and websites for each. (Spiral Jetty, Star Axis and Roden Craters icons shown above).

This is an updated post of one of my early blog entries here at the Blog of the Long Now.  Over the last couple years I have found even more amazing underground and stonework spaces. Since we hope to build the space for the 10,000 Year Clock underground, for the last 10 years I have been collecting references and images of the great, ambitious, and or inspiring underground spaces and stonework of the world (in some cases they are also lessons of what not to do). I thought I would list some of that collection here to share them, as well as ask for any recommendations or references you all might have. ( I continue to collect so please send along your favorites.)  You can click through most of the images below to collections of images or blow ups of the shown image.

• Cliff Path in China This may be the same one pictured below as the Stremnaya Rd.

• Svalbard Global Seed Vault

• Hang Son Doong cave in Vietnam

• Eski Kermen a medieval city-stronghold in the Crimea.
  

• Abandoned Turda Salt Mine of Romania

• Metoria Monestary in Greece
  

• Area 825 Underground Sub Base in Russia

• Cincinnati’s Abandoned Subway

• Etruscan Necropolis
  
• Napalm Caverns of Russia
  

  

• Crystal Caves of Mexico

• Data center in old nuclear bunker under Stockholm Sweden
  

  

• Church of St. George Lalibela, Ethiopia (wikipedia entry)

• Not sure of the origin of this one.  Looks South East Asian.

• 12th century underground church (France)

  

• Damanhur

• Subtropolis

• Salt Church near Bogota Columbia

• Lava Tube Cave, Lava Beds National Monument, Tulelake, California

  

• The Hall of Records at Mt Rushmore

  

• St Patricks well by DaVinci in Orvieto Italy

  

• Underground naval base in Sweden

  

• Underground Lakes

• The 800 year old salt mines of Poland

  

• The Stremnaya cliff road in Bolivia China

  

• Depth Scrapers!

• Anasazi Cliff Dwellings

  

(more…)

Long Now’s eponymous red wine by the Pelissero winery was recently reviewed by Robert Parker’s Wine Advocate.  Both the 2005 and 2006 vintages received “outstanding” ratings of 92.

Antonio Galloni says,

The 2005 Long Now possesses awesome richness, nuance and detail. A blend of Nebbiolo and Barbera, it sweeps across the palate with tons of dense, layered fruit. The wine’s considerable richness covers the tannins nicely, but there is plenty of structure underneath. This is a gem from Giorgio Pelissero.  Anticipated maturity: 2010-2018.

and

The estate’s 2006 Long Now (Nebbiolo, Barbera) is a massive, powerful wine. With some time in the glass its voluptuous dark fruit gradually comes forward, enhanced by overtones of minerals, spices, toasted oak and menthol. This remains a very reticent, brooding wine in need of several years of bottle age, yet it is very promising.  Anticipated maturity: 2011-2021.

The Pelissero winery is a 3rd generation winery in the Piedmont area of Italy that has been growing wine grapes for several millennia.  They are traditionally known for their Nebbiolo and Barbera grapes.  The Long Now wine is their first blend of the two grapes, and we were honored that they named it after our project.  The labels are printed with archival inks on acid free paper and the corks are flame marked “Long Now”.

Pelissero’s Long Now wine can be purchased at various online wine merchants such as Vinfolio or International Cellar.  The Long Now Store page lists outlets in California carrying the wine.  Some of the older vintages have received similar ratings and recent in house tests here at Long Now confirm they are maturing wonderfully :)

In a remote region of India, students at the Adivasi Academy are working to save their tribal languages, and through their languages, their tribal cultures and knowledge as well. They certainly have their work cut out for them — many of the students have had to devise writing systems for their historically unwritten native tongues only to embark on the herculean task of developing dictionaries, grammars and other major reference works (consider that Noah Webster’s dictionary was the product of decades of work — and a dictionary is but one part of these students’ undertaking.)

The term adivasi refers to the indigenous people of India, who belong to remote tribal groups and speak many different dialects. These languages are rapidly being engulfed by urban languages with greater economic utility and prestige. One student, Kantilal Mahala, a speaker of the Kunkna [Konkani] language remarked, “In my village, people who move ahead speak only Gujarati. They feel ashamed of our language.” But documentation projects like these can help change perceptions, raising the prestige of the language and its speakers through a new written standard and medium for wider communication — this, and the fact of the Academy’s very existence, which affirms ‘we are here, and we are worth this effort.’

• Read the original article on the Adivasi Academy in The New York Times
• Visit the Adivasi Academy website
• See the documentation we have on Konkani and related languages in The Rosetta Project archive

The final technical hurdle of the Rosetta Disk Project has finally been overcome.  (See Kevin Kelly’s write up of this project here) We are distributing three of the disks to their owners this month and have two remaining of this first edition.

We now have both the sides of the disk micro-etched.  The front human eye readable side (pictured above) was a challenge as it had etching that went from very large to the very small.  The eight outer spiraling texts start with characters about a centimeter high and end up with characters a few hundred microns high.  And the language names surrounding the earth image were small enough we had to get a special engravers style font made in Germany to make sure they would stay legible.  This side of the disk was etched into commercially pure titanium that was coated with a black oxide coating.  This coating was then etched through with an eximer laser by a micro-etching company Norsam Technologies.  One of their challenges was etching the center of the letters as well as the outlines.  They had to create a crosshatching pattern for the 10 micron wide eximer beam to pass back and forth over the fill areas.  Each one takes over 36 hours to etch.

Each of these are mated up with the other micro etched side of the disk with over 13,000 pages of language translations in a stainless bezel.  (see below)

Each of the five first edition disks are going to still two of these remaining for any donor Rosetta Project donors of at least $25,000 (Contact Laura if interested in future editions).  They each come in a protective stainless and glass spherical protective case.  We are now working on more economical versions that we can more widely distribute.  We have already produced a DVD version with all the content and a Java based viewer to view it in a kind of “virtual magnifying” glass format.

 When you open the case and lift out the disk, there is a space underneath which holds a strip of stainless and a stylus to allow each generation who owns that Rosetta disk to mark down their ownership (pictured at the top of this post).

It took us eight years to get to this point.  Whew.