Excerpt from Sebeok’s “Communication Measures to Bridge 10 Millennia” for the US Office of Nuclear Waste Management.

The Long Now Foundation’s time frame of 10,000 years is often compared to the time frame for storage of nuclear waste.  We have paid a good bit of attention to the various endeavors to store nuclear waste by multiple governments, have hosted representatives at our conferences, and have visited a few sites in person.

Today I received a note from reader Tony Burton who sent in an excellent reference to a paper by Thomas Sebeok [excerpted above]:

In this document (effective September 1981 and published in April 1984) Sebeok discusses problems of communicating the danger of deposits of nuclear waste over 10 000 years (the danger period chosen for such waste) and proposes the establishment of a “relay-system” of communization … with built-in enforcement mechanisms” - the so called “atomic priesthood”.

The report is available from United States National Technical Information Service (http://www.ntis.gov/) and may be downloaded or a hardcopy purchased here.

What is most interesting to me is that the solution he comes up with is similar to the ones discussed internally at Long Now.  That you must divide the 10,000 year time frame into generational chunks to make them tractable and contextual.   As near as I can tell he does not note that the site may be exhumed for re-processing, which both Peter Schwartz and Stewart Brand find likely.

He does also point out the utility of error correction codes in the ’story’ that is passed down to minimise the re-telling distortion entropy.  This idea reminds me of one Danny Hillis proposed in which one would actually not mark the site, but mark many other sites with clues, that once put together, would be a sort of test to be sure you understood the dangers — before revealing the location.

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Cathleen and I just returned from a week in Bhutan. We traveled among three cities and regions of Bhutan, staying with the Aman hotels. On the next to the last day near the town of Paro, we made the climb to Tiger’s Nest. In many ways it comes very close to what we have imagined for the walk to the clock. If you Google Tiger’s Nest you will get a picture of the end point, the local version of the Clock [of the Long Now].

It is a small monastery hung far up on a cliff overlooking a spectacular valley. It is where Padmasambava landed to meditate when he brought Buddhism to Bhutan in the seventh century; He arrived on a flying tiger which had recently been his Tibetan concubine. He meditated in a cave high on the mountain for four months then subdued the local demons and began the conversion of the Bhutanese. Getting there is at least a two hour climb from the valley floor at 7000 feet to the Tiger’s Nest at 10,000 feet. The trail is fine but steep. As you climb ever more vertical switchbacks the monastery appears and disappears in and out of the trees and the mists. Along the way you meet other trekkers some passing you and others coming down. Finally after two hours of a long slow climb to manage the pace of the altitude, one arrives at the beginning of the entrance to the Tiger’s Nest.

One is on a promontory of rock across a chasm from the monastery. The cliff drops a couple of thousand feet in front of you and in it are steps carved into its exposed face. No handrails and maximum terror. The fact that a young Bhutanese mother with a small baby wrapped around her came floating up the steps impelled us to the courage needed to navigate the steps back and down into the gorge separating us from the Tiger’s Nest. As we climbed back into the canyon suddenly a one hundred meter high water fall at the deep end of the canyon appeared immediately in front of us with our path traversing directly across it’s base. . Having made it down in front of the water fall the steps started back up toward the Tiger’s Nest once more…over 700 steps in all.

After removing one’s shoes one enters the Tiger’s Nest and climbs several levels within, visiting three temples and gasping at the view. High and deep inside is the cold cave where Padmasambabva meditated. You can feel the chill breath coming from the cave. The return journey is much faster, but equally dramatic.

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 In my research of large pendulums for the 10,000 Year Clock I came across the beautifully designed tuned mass damper in the Taipei 101 tower.  Basically really tall buildings are themselves massive pendulums, as they are built to sway in the wind and earthquakes.  However very tall buildings in earthquake zones need something to dampen this motion.

These mass dampers do that, and are used widely including the ones in the new buildings here in San Francisco that use baffled water tanks.  However the one pictured above is the first one I have seen designed with a high degree of aesthetics in mind…  It was clearly designed impress people on the building tour.  Below is a small animated image of how it counteracts building sway, it pretty much does what you do with your own weight when you are standing on a stool changing that light bulb and it starts to sway.

As pointed out in a couple of the comments there is an astounding video of this mass dampening pendulum in action as the recent earthquakes in China reached the Taipei tower.   One guy had the presence of mind to run in and video tape the pendulum in action…

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Stewart Brand sent me this link to one of the nicest web clocks I have yet seen. Make sure you do click through as the image above does not do the animated form justice. It is called Analogy by Jessson Yip.

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The folks at Radio Lab have produced a good piece on time in general. It covers a lot of materia, some of it more campy than informative, but had some new info for me at least.

 

• Spice Clock: A clock that tells you what time it is in the dark based on smells released during the night.
• Clock of Birds: A highlands people of Papua New Guinea use the songs of certain birds to determine the time of day.
• Clock of Flowers: Linnaeus carefully crafted a flower garden that had certain flowers that would unfurl at certain times of day to tell the time.
• Leif Inge produced an art installation of Beethoven’s 9th that was stretched to 24hours which sounds wonderful.

The piece ends with a discussion of how time is relative based on experience, and how the very best moments we remember in life have a feeling of a swolen now.

(Thanks to Kent Corbell, charter member 172, for sending this in)

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It is wonderful to see other modern craftsmen and artists working on machines like this again.  Eugene Sargent recently completed this beautiful Orrery commission for a client.  There is a very nice write up on the client’s web site as well as this fun video of it being produced.

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Wired is running a cool pictorial on the new amorphous metal making techniques. These “metallic glass” materials have some amazing properties for making long lasting structures. Back in 01997 or so we tested some of these metals as pendulum flexures (as seen above).  In fact there is still test pendulum hanging on one of these here at our museum. At the time however the techniques for making metallic glass limited the material to only very thin strips, and were still prone to spiral type fracturing which kept us from using it in torsional pendulums. It looks like this new technique has a kind of hybrid molecular structure, that works similarly to a composite, and stops that type of fracturing. Very cool. Cant wait to get my hands on some…

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Our good friends from The Science Museum in London (which houses our first clock prototype) have recently completed and shipped over their historic construction of Charles Babbage’s Difference Engine No.2 to the Computer History Museum here in California. There is a great video of it working and an explanation at Wired.com (also above, sorry about the advertisement). They are having a public opening on May 10th.

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I want to build a clock that ticks once a year. The century hand advances once every one hundred years, and the cuckoo comes out on the millennium. I want the cuckoo to come out every millennium for the next 10,000 years. If I hurry I should finish the clock in time to see the cuckoo come out for the first time.

~Danny Hillis, “The Millennium Clock“, 01995

As we at the Long Now are well aware, one thing about designing clocks is that, like any mechanical system, they can go wrong.

This 01953 sketch from Sid Caesar’s live-to-air weekly comedy program Your Show of Shows reminds us just how true that is.

The Baverhoff clock may be broken — but surprisingly, after more than half a century, the comedy still works.

(Link via Nerve.com)

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 This astonishing clock project was brought to my attention by Austin Brown via the Make blog… note in the image above the analog clock hands forming the word  FOUR in the lower right quadrant.

Dutch designer Christiaan Postma figured out how to arrange more than 150 analog clocks in such a way that at certain times, the hands line up to spell the words of the hour.

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