This time lapse and other footage of driving from San Francisco to the site of the Long Now 10,000 Year Clock in September of 02009 was produced by Sustainable Media. The audio was recorded in interviews on site and shortly after the trip. This 5 minute edit was made as part of our “Long Short” series of short films that convey long term thinking. This Long Short was screened at Stewart Brand’s “Rethinking Green” SALT.

The Big Here – trip to the Long Now Clock site from The Long Now Foundation on Vimeo.

The Long Now Foundation is pleased to announce our new website.  (If you’re seeing this update in a reader, click through to see whats new.)

One of the biggest changes we’ve made is on the Seminars section.    We’ve given each Seminar its own individual page where you’ll be able to download content, read more about the speakers and their efforts, and (if you’re a member) post your thoughts on the lecture as a comment.

We’ve also increased the opportunities for social interaction around Long Now projects and ideas.  Check these out on the Community page.  And if you’re not already a Member, consider joining our 2,100 person strong, globe-spanning community of long-term thinkers.

Be well,
Long Now Staff

Via BoingBoing this morning comes a wonderful ambient music generating clock of the stars.  Jim Bumgardner created this piece and explains it thusly:

To make this, I downloaded public data from Hipparcos, a satellite launched by the European Space Agency in 1989 that accurately measured over a hundred thousand stars. The data I downloaded contains position, parallax, magnitude, and color information, among other things.

I used this information to plot the brightest stars, and cause them to revolve about Polaris (the North Star) very slowly, as the stars appear to do. Like the night sky, this is a sidereal time clock — it takes nearly 24 hours for the stars to fully rotate. You’ll notice some familiar constellations, such as the Big Dipper in there. As the stars cross zero and 180 degrees, indicated by the center line, the clock plays an individual note, or chime for each star. The pitch of the chime is based on the star’s BV measurement (which roughly corresponds to color or temperature). The volume is based on the star’s magnitude, or apparent brightness, and the stereo panning is based on the position on the screen (use headphones to hear it better).

Enjoy!