The 600 Years from the macula on Vimeo.

Member Trey Darley sent in this absolutely stunning video mapping show done for the 600th anniversary of one of the greatest clocks ON the planet:  The Astronomical Clock in Prague.  This was done a few days ago on October 9th. Worth watching all the way through.

Prague has a 600 year head start on The Clock of the Long Now, maybe they will be the first to reach 10,000…

BB reader Kerray says, “The people who worked on it are themacula.com, duber.cz and michalkotek.com, and the projection itself was done by avmedia.cz. Four months of work, 5000×1200 resolution, 2x Christie 18K HD projectors.” .

From Wikipedia, this schematic explaining what the various interlocking dials on the Prague Orloj represent.

(A lot of people documented it if you want to see other vantage points)

Quotes related to long-term thinking. A new series. Have a favorite quote? Share it with us in comments.

“We’ve got to start planning for the future and doing intelligent things, not the dumb things we’ve been doing. We are already in real trouble, but I like to liken it to a baseball game. Young people ask me, ‘Where do we stand?’ It’s the seventh inning. We’re down by two runs. The game’s not over. The game’s not over. We can still turn it around. We’ve gotta hold them right where we are by putting our best relief pitcher in, and we’ve gotta put three runs on the board in the last two innings. My first president of the Turner Foundation used to say, with a wink in his eye, ‘The situation is hopeless, but I could be wrong.’ If things are going to get turned around, young people are going to be the ones to do it, because my generation is worn out. We need a long-term plan for humanity. We need to be planning for a thousand years out.”
– Ted Turner

Discovery News has a feature in which astronomer Robert Hurt of NASA’s Spitzer Science Center uses space simulation software Starry Night to explain how Earth’s view of five major constellations will change over time, like Ursa Major:

“Stargazers of the future will look into a different night sky. That’s because the stars are constantly moving relative to each other. These shifts are nearly imperceptible during a person’s lifetime, but they add up over the centuries and millennia. This means that in, say, 50,000 years, many common constellations will have a very different shape.”

See the other four constellation shifts at Discovery News.

Image credit: Starry Night Education software/Discovery News

Stewart Dickson sent in this AP story today on Jericho celebrating it’s 10,000th anniversary.  While I always knew conceptually that Jericho was about 10,000 years old, it is pretty stunning to think of a city actually celebrating that anniversary, even if they didnt really know the date of its founding:

JERICHO, Palestinian Territories — The Palestinians on Sunday marked the 10,000th anniversary of the founding of Jericho, an oasis town in the West Bank that may be the world’s oldest city.

The date chosen for the anniversary — 10/10/02010 — was mostly symbolic.

The oasis town near the Dead Sea is one of the oldest cities in the world, with evidence of settlement dating back to 9000 BC and urban fortifications dating back to 7000 BC, predating Egypt’s pyramids by 4,000 years. [read on]

I just happened upon a call for extras (check it out if you’re based in San Francisco) for a film that will be part of a series of sci-fi shorts called Futurestates:

What will become of America in five, 25, or even 50 years from today? FUTURESTATES is a series of 11 fictional mini-features exploring possible future scenarios through the lens of today’s global realities. Immerse yourself in the visions of these independent prognosticators as they project a future of their own imagining.

A decade ago The Long Now Foundation spun off a project called All Species.  The goal was to document all the species on the planet in 25 years in an open archive for all.  That project was launched amidst the bursting of the dot com bubble, and it did not survive it. It also met a lot of resistance from scientists who did not see the value of freely sharing their data.  However several efforts and scientists that were associated with, inspired by, or just happened to be doing the same thing have continued on.  Today another decade long effort, the $650 million Census of Marine Life has published its results as public data.  And other direct offshoots like E.O. Wilson’s Encyclopedia of Life project and the Barcode of Life project march on.

It seems odd to think that we dont know all the species on our planet.  If we were to discover life on Saturn’s moon Titan for instance, you would think that the first thing we would do would be to catalog it.  Yet we are still discovering new species, genus and even families on our planet at a regular rate, even as the number is declining at an even more alarming rate.

We hope that as a generation of new scientists takes hold of academics, ones who grew up with resources like Wikipedia and the Census of Marine Life, that at some point we will have the All Species catalog.

Nature reports quantum computing researchers achieve “success at entangling three-circuit systems”.

“The entanglement of two or more qubits sets up a ‘superposition’ of states in which calculations can run in parallel — in principle allowing a quantum computer to race through problems that it would take a classical computer eons to solve. Such a quantum machine would require hundreds or even thousands of entangled qubits. The maximum reached so far is 12, but some of the systems that researchers are working with, including those depending on the spins of ions, may be hard to scale up.” [read the story]

While this is progress it does not look like we are on the road to having a commercially available 100 qubit machine by the end of 02010 as predicted on Long Bets:

“There will be a quantum computer with over 100 qubits of processing capability sold either as a hardware system or whose use is made available as a commercial service by Dec 31, 2010”

Looks like this is a good prediction, but just a few years off.