Long Now has been invited to participate in the Exploratorium’s After Dark event on Thursday June 3 from 6pm to 10pm.

• The Exploratorium has generously offered complimentary tickets to Long Now members, please see your email for details.
• Tickets for the General Public are $15, a year’s After Dark pass $25, and admission is free if you are a member of the Exploratorium.

This monthly get-together is focused on the over 21 set and features special exhibitions, film screenings and lectures built around a new theme each month. Exploratorium builders, scientists, artists and special guests provide an evening’s worth of entertainment from unusual exhibits, hands on art and science experiments, musical and artistic performances and more all while you are encouraged to enjoy some cocktails and socialize!

We’ll be bringing the working circular pendulum, escapement and Clock dial; Long Now staff will be on hand to demonstrate and explain our prototype.

The theme for the After Dark event on June 3rd is Time:

From seasonal cycles and perceptions of “the present” to calculations of satellite orbits, time is so much a part of our lives that we often take it for granted. Tonight we examine time’s many faces through activities and presentations featuring honeybees, jump-shot photography, a performance by Gamelan Sari Raras, and a tour of Einstein’s breakthrough ideas on space-time by Dr. Thomas Humphrey.

Explore antique timepieces with clockmaker Dorian Claire and The Long Now Foundation’s 10,000 Year Clock project; physicist Ron Hipschman will be on hand to reveal the science of carbon dating and the astronomy behind our calendar year. Horologic artworks, exhibits, and films await, inviting new encounters with this age-old fascination.

Photo from the Catlin Arctic Survey Of Shrinking Polar Cap

One of the critical elements of the Clock of the Long Now to keep good time over ten millennia is the part of the clock that is synchronized to solar noon. We have several schemes that allow this mechanical synch from sunlight, but one of the questions that came up as we designed these systems, was how much we might expect solar noon to drift in 10,000 years.  We had already compensated for the earth’s ~26,000 year precessional cycle, and the average rotational dampening of about a second per century, but it was not until Danny Hillis requested this paper from Astrophysicist Michael Busch that we appreciated how much climate change will play a role.

Many people bring up the recent earthquake and tsunami events that have altered the earth’s rotation, or even the filling of the Three Gorges Dam.  While those events have a theoretical effect, it is so minute that they are generally not detectable empirically.  Polar ice however is the real game changer, it could effect when solar noon is over 10,000 years by weeks not minutes or seconds.  Below is the paper by Busch for your reading pleasure…

Climate Change and the Clock
Michael W. Busch
2010 April 9

Based on a request from Danny Hillis for a check of the Clock’s accuracy requirements

There is now a consensus that the Earth’s climate is changing and that it can be greatly influenced by human activity. While we can argue about predictions of the particular form climate change will take, any changes in the climate will have important effects on the Clock.

The most direct effect will be power: the Clock’s core oscillator is powered by focused sunlight. Climate changes leading to frequent clouds over the site in the American Southwest would interrupt that supply. This is not likely to be fatal, since the Clock can operate for fifteen years without sunlight and even the cloudiest places on Earth have sunny days more often than that. But climate change will also affect the Clock indirectly, by disrupting its timekeeping.

The Clock keeps the oscillator calibrated by resetting it at local solar noon – the time of day when the sun is directly south as seen from the mountaintop – at the solstice. On cloudy days, the oscillator keeps running without being reset, and begins to drift away from the true time. However, again, unless the weather becomes implausibly bad at some point in the next ten millennia, the errors in the oscillator will not grow to an entire day before it is reset, and the overall count of how many days have passed will be correct. The problem is connecting the number of days the Clock has counted to the true amount of time that has passed. For everyday life, we treat days as being all the same length (86400 seconds from one solar noon to the next), but they are not. In addition to slight changes in the time of noon on each rotation of the planet since the Earth’s orbit is not quite circular, the length of the day is determined by how fast the Earth spins, and that changes slightly all the time (Hide & Dickey 1991). From day to day, some amount of angular momentum is transferred between the solid body of the Earth and the atmosphere. Adding angular momentum to the Earth makes it spin faster and makes the days shorter, and taking angular momentum away makes the days longer. Each year, a large amount of water moves from the equator to the high latitudes as snow and back again as water and water vapor. Moving mass from the equator to the poles means that the same mass can spin faster with the same angular momentum, and the days get shorter. The standard analogy here is a figure skater pulling his arms in to spin faster.

For the Clock, these daily and yearly changes in the length-of-day average out and do not matter too much. But there are longer term and much larger changes in length-of-day. Mountain ranges get raised up and oceanic crust gets subducted, moving mass around. Earthquakes and the emptying and filling of lakes move around much smaller masses, which can also be estimated. The tides from the Moon and the Sun are slowly subtracting angular momentum and spinning the Earth down. These trends can be measured and estimated over millennia by comparing records of solar eclipses. Over the last 3500 years, the length of the day has increased by 84 milliseconds, give or take a few (Stephenson & Morrison 1995).

Having the length of day off by about tenth of a second may not seem like much, but over ten thousand years it adds up to a difference of several hundred thousand seconds (a few current days) between an estimate of the time based on how many days there have been and the true amount of time that has passed. The tide-produced natural change in the length-of-day can be predicted and corrected for in the design of the Clock. The Earth has been spinning down at a roughly constant rate for more than three thousand years. But climate change may change that.

One of the most dramatic climate change predictions is the possibility of large changes in the mass of the ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica. Doubling the mass of the ice sheets or completely melting them takes many hundreds of years, if the most extreme instances during the last ice age are a guide (Clark & Mix 2000), but that is far less than the lifespan of the Clock. Just as seasonal motions of water change the length-of-day, so does either melting the ice sheets into the ocean or freezing more ice into them (Trupin 1993, Wahr et al. 1993, Nakada & Okuno 2003). The ice sheets are near the poles. Melting the current ice sheets completely would move about 0.001% of the Earth’s mass from near the pole to much nearer to the equator (since the ice goes into the oceans), and increase the length of the day by roughly 1 second. Freezing out ice sheets comparable to the last glacial maximum would put four times that much mass near the poles, making the day about 4 seconds shorter.

The current Clock design calibrates the oscillator at the solstice. The time of the solstice is determined by the direction of the Earth’s rotation axis relative to its orbit around the Sun, and not by the length of the day. If the conversion from the day count to true time is off by more than about 20 days, the Clock won’t be able to connect the oscillator to the Sun, and the accuracy will rapidly decay. This is only of concern if there is a large change in the length-of-day that lasts for most of the Clock’s lifespan.

Since climate change is a chaotic process, and human decisions and actions in the next several centuries are very likely to have a significant effect on it, it is impossible to predict the length of the day to better than a second or so over the next ten thousand years. The inherent uncertainty in the future climate places a limit on the accuracy of the Clock. It can measure time to about ten parts per million, or a few weeks over ten thousand years.

References:

• Clark, P.U., Mix, A.C., 2001, Ice sheets and sea level of the Last Glacial Maximum, Quat. Sci. Rev. 21, 1-7.
• Hide, R., Dickey, J.O., 1991, Earth’s variable rotation, Science 253, 629-637.
• Nakada & Okuno, 2003, Perturbations of the Earth’s rotation and their implications for the present-day mass balance of both polar ice caps, Geophysical Journal International 152, 124-138.
• Stephenson, F.R., Morrison, L.V., 1995, Long-term fluctuations in the Earth’s rotation: 700 BC to AD 1990, Phil. Trans. Phys. Sci. & Eng. 351, 165-202.
• Trupin, A.S., 1993, Effects of polar ice on the Earth’s rotation and gravitational potential. Geophys. J. Int. 113, 273-283.
• Wahr, J., Dazhong, H., Trupin, A., Lindqvist, V., 1993, Secular changes in rotation and gravity: Evidence of post-glacial rebound or of changes in polar ice? Adv. Space Res. 13, 257- 269.

Long Now is pleased to be exhibiting a new working six foot diameter pendulum and Live Rosetta Scanning Station at O’Reilly Media’s Maker Faire Bay Area Saturday and Sunday, May 22 and 23 at the San Mateo County Event Center.

Maker Faire is a two-day, family-friendly event that celebrates the Do-It-Yourself (DIY) mindset. It’s for creative, resourceful people of all ages and backgrounds who like to tear the back off technology and make it their own. Each year several hundred creators, geeks, artists and scientists come together to share their creations with tens of thousands of enthusiastic visitors. Last year about 80,000 people visited over the 2 day event.

Long Now will be bringing a visual prototype of the 10,000 Year Clock dials assembled with a working escapement and six foot diameter pendulum. This Pendulum ticks about once every 10 seconds, and the escapement is a novel design. The Live Rosetta Scanning Station will show real time book and document scanning with a chance for Maker Faire participants to give it a try themselves.

Tickets can be purchased online. There is limited parking and often significant traffic in the area, so we recommend you take public transit. If you are planning on coming to Maker Faire this year, please stop by the Long Now booth – #165 in the Expo Hall – and say hello!

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 Nils Gilman’s “Deviant Globalization”

The Long Now Foundation’s monthly Seminars About Long-term Thinking

presents Ed Moses on “Clean Fusion Power This Decade”

Wednesday June 16, 02010 at 7:30 pm at the Cowell Theater in San Francisco

Long Now Members can reserve 2 seats, join today!

or you can purchase tickets for $10 each.

About this Seminar:
Finally achieving fusion energy may be closer than everyone thinks. Ed Moses is director of the National Ignition Facility (NIF) at Lawrence Livermore Labs. Focusing massive amounts of laser light for a billionth of a second, the NIF is expected to demonstrate ignition of a fusion reaction (more energy out than in) for the first time in the coming year, followed by the prospect of a prototype machine for generating continuous clean energy by the end of this decade.

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Ormuri Description in the Rosetta Collection

“Language is identity,” Darfur refugee Daowd I. Salih told the New York Times about a week ago. He was being interviewed for an article called “Listening to (and Saving) the World’s Languages.” As mentioned in this Rosetta Project blog post, the article discusses the amazing variety of spoken languages in New York City, and what residents are doing (or not doing) to preserve their native language.

One of the languages the article touches on is Ormuri, a language of multiple dialects spoken in small regions of Afghanistan and Pakistan. According to the Ethnologue, Ormuri has only about 1,050 speakers. The New York Times article reveals a plan to canvass New York City for speakers of Ormuri in order to learn more about the language and the cultural information it holds.

Languages with small speaker populations are quickly dying out, and the data they contain (whether it be linguistic, historical, or cultural) is important enough to merit a concerted effort at saving them. Ormuri is a perfect example, especially in the political and economic environment of our time (read: the complex tangle that is our current Middle Eastern relations).  The Rosetta Project‘s database in the Internet Archive contains a detailed description of Ormuri, including a history of its speakers: where they came from, who their ancestors are, and how their language has co-evolved with those around it to become what it is today.

In my mind there is nothing that illustrates a culture’s unity so much as its language. It allows people to build social relationships, conduct business transactions, and express to fellow humans everything they hold dear. What’s more, as any good anthropologist knows, learning the language of a culture is one of the most important steps an outsider can take to gain the trust and respect of its people.

What does this have to do with an obscure Afghan language, or with Darfur refugees? Only this: if we intend to successfully navigate the conflicts of the modern global world, it is absolutely necessary to understand and relate to the people with whom we intend to work. The Middle East in particular, Afghanistan being an illustrative example, is culturally very foreign to the West; its people have lived for centuries in small, autonomous groups that hold to varied, often contradictory beliefs. The fact that so many of these groups have their own language, like Ormuri, is telling of their relative isolation, and gives clues to how they live their lives.

Rosetta’s description of Ormuri tells the story of its peoples’ interactions through Ormuri’s morphology. By studying the languages Ormuri had contact with and how these influenced its words, we can begin to create a web of social and economic interaction that would show the connections and dissociations between groups in the area. For example, Ormuri has many morphological similarities to Pashto, a common language in the region of Waziristan where Ormuri is spoken. Ormuri pronouns are strikingly similar to their Pashto equivalents, and many scattered words share similarities, like “wife,” “glitter,” and “to sit down.” Pashto has also phonetically influenced Ormuri, replacing some traditional Ormuri allophones with similar Pashto ones.

Ormuri has also sustained contact with Persian, which is evident in many morphological changes that mimic the latter: loss of gendered nouns, simplification of plural nouns, and reduction of irregular past participles.  Analyzing this data led the author, Georg Morgenstierne, to doubt the previous belief that Ormuri speakers descend from Kurds, and provided evidence for further theoretical investigations.

The very existence of this kind of knowledge is what Rosetta is all about; by preserving minority languages and stressing their importance, we hope to contribute vital insights into the lives of their speakers, insights that can be put to good use in surprising places. After all, you never know who you’ll meet on the New York City subway.

[A note of introduction: this is my first post as an intern with the Rosetta Project. I will be working with Rosetta for three months, building the collection in the Internet Archive and continuing to spotlight Rosetta material on this blog.]

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.

Listen to the audio of Nils Gilman’s “Deviant Globalization” (downloads tab)

For thousands of years emperors, clerics, nobles and kings all over the world have erected slabs of stone called stelae as markers to indicate a boundary, either phsyical or temporal.  They commemorate battles won, loved ones lost, borders, holocausts, and laws.  Some stelae have been vital sources of information on past societies; many still stand after millenia.

Outside the Everhart Museum in Scranton, four ceramic stelae have been erected by an artist named Jordan Taylor.  The four-ton blocks will sit in Nay Aug Park, marking the entrance to the museum, until they erode “and follow the watershed as far as the Chesapeake Bay, back to the lie of the land”.  Rather than a king’s accomplishment or a claimed territory, they mark the absence of boundary, the dissolution of moment and material into matter and spacetime.

“I look forward to watching the stelae from season to season, year to year. They are sentinel. Yet we too share that role. We will keep watch over them, bearing witness to their transformation from art back into the earth.”

- Cara A. Sutherland, Executive Director, Everhart Museum

Our newest board member and recent Seminar speaker David Eagleman has published his very Long Now Mothers Day essay over at Slate.  Happy Mothers Day to the long line of Mothers who brought us all here!

In honor of Mother’s Day, I’m going to spend five seconds thinking about each woman in the proud line of matriarchs who brought me here.My mother left a biology career to become a politician and a painter. She gave up cigarettes in her 30s, shoulders unreconciled issues with her father, and is unable to operate any video player newer than a VCR. The soup cans in her pantry are always in neat alignment. She is tall and striking, and was once cast in a commercial to play Cleopatra.

At the five-second mark I turn to thinking about my maternal grandmother. She became a locally famous grower of roses when her husband invested in oil fields and lost the bet. She died in her late 60s, drifting in a deep dementia and believing that she was standing in the snow-covered barn of her childhood.

At 10 seconds I consider my great-grandmother. Her beauty stopped traffic when she was younger, and she struggled for two-thirds of her life with the slow fading of that power. She wore makeup and expensive clothing and clung through two husbands to the habits of pretty women. She was terrific at playing the harmonica.

My great-great-grandmother (great² grandmother) was… (continued over at Slate)

Last night Stewart Brand was on the Colbert Report talking about his most recent book. Stewart is quick to point out that Whole Earth Discipline is a book full of opinions that Long Now as an organization does not take sides on, but the end of this interview does mention Long Now and the Clock. Enjoy!