A little while ago Clock designer and Long Now founder Danny Hillis came across this podcasted radio show by former president Thomas Jefferson.  We were all surprised to find him giving radio broadcasts given he passed away in 01826 (on the 4th of July I might add).  But what was most surprising was to find that one of his episodes discussed the Clock of the Long Now (Listen to the MP3).  Danny listened with great interest as Jefferson discussed our project, clocks and time in general, and decided to send in a letter.  And just the other day Jefferson discussed the letter at length on the show (Listen to that MP3).  As you would expect, Jefferson has an encyclopedic knowledge of new and old world technology, clocks and mechanica.  It makes for fun listening, happy holidays.

Tunnel Boring Machine daylights at Yucca Mountain

Back 02002 Peter Schwartz wrote a great piece about our visit to the Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste site.  We often refer to it as “the other 10,000 year project”.  However 10,000 years is just the legally binding time congress set forth.  They actually have a design problem that spans millions of years.  This week several people have sent me this excellent write up in BLDG BLOG that features a Q&A with one of the technical architects of the project.  Most interesting to me were all the geeky technical details about material choices, climate, and engineering… an excerpt:

At Yucca Mountain we took the attitude that, since we basically have a dry mountain in a dry area with very little rainfall, we would use a material that can stand up to oxygen being present. The material we selected was a metal alloy called Alloy 22. Our design involves basically wrapping the stainless steel packages, in which we would receive the spent fuel, in Alloy 22 and sticking them inside this mountain with a layer of air over the top. What we know is that when water moves through rock or fractured materials, it tends to stay in the rock rather than fall—unless that rock is saturated. Yucca Mountain is unsaturated, so water ought not be a major issue for us at Yucca Mountain—yet it is.

We have to worry about future climates, because, right now in Nevada, we are in a nine year drought—and, basically since the last Ice Age, we have been in a 10,000-year drought. 80% of the time, if we look a million years into the past, we have, on average, twice the precipitation we have now. Most of the past is—and the future will be—wetter and cooler. Which is nice for Nevada! [laughs]

We have updated our online store with some new items for the holiday season…

Brian Eno’s 77 Million Paintings is a generative art piece that will take thousands of years to fully take in – the software slowly layers and combines several hundred original paintings in an ever-evolving kaleidoscopic experience.  You can also hear experiments by Mr. Eno for the Chime Generator on “January 07003“. Pick up a Long Now embroidered twill baseball hat or a 100% cotton screen-printed T-shirt (printed locally by Ape Do Good of San Francisco) featuring CAD drawings of Long Now prototypes.  We also have short-sleeve button down embroidered work shirts.  And don’t forget to check out the Rosetta Disk DVD, a simulation of viewing our actual Rosetta Disk under a microscope that includes linguistic data on over 1,500 human languages.

We have meaningful gifts for anyone on your list, as we work hard to ensure that the wide variety of items in our store represent the ideas we promote. Visit our store at Fort Mason in San Francisco, 7 days a week, or check us out online.

Global warming seems to be speeding up the growth of the longest living organisms we know of.  Bristlecone pines can live for almost 5,000 years and the information stored in the growth of their rings is a treasure trove of climate data.  Because their growth is a function of the weather, analyzing the size of the rings they develop each year can tell us what that period’s climate was like.

At an elevation of 12,000 feet, where almost no rain falls, temperature is the driving influence on tree growth, while lower down, rainfall is the strongest factor in tree growth, Salzer said in an interview.

Matthew Salzer,  Malcolm K. Hughes and a team of dendrochronologists from the University of Arizona have just published a paper in which they explain that the outermost rings of Bristlecones – the most recent ones – tend to be significantly larger than most of the earlier ones.  In the last 50 years, the trees have been growing faster than they did in the previous 3,700.

Salzer has done work on Mt. Washington for his studies and shared data with Long Now.  The information from the trees on the future Clock site has provided Long Now with a helpful understanding of the area’s climate dating back several thousand years.

The current study is an indication that climate change is affecting these trees and the delicate ecosystems that support them.  This high-altitude temperature change has significance for more than the Bristlecones and the local environment, however.  The mountains this phenomenon is documented in are an important source of snowmelt for much of California and Nevada:

Hughes said that increasing temperatures high in the mountains could have significant effects elsewhere. In many areas of the western U.S., mountains are a key source of water for farms and urban areas at lower elevations.

“If the snow melts earlier, the mountains won’t be able to hold onto water for as long,” Hughes said. “They won’t be as effective as water towers for us.”

John Goodman is an engineer that admires intuition, a reluctant artist who enjoys elegant approximations. His best known creation,
The Annosphere, was recently showcased at the Cambridge Science Festival in Massachusetts, where he lives and works.

The Annosphere tells time, but more usefully, it presents time. It shows you sunrise and sunset, the start of spring and the winter solstice. It lets you see on your desk what you can’t see in the world: the steady pace of time, the subtle day to day changes in sunlight and shadow, the cycles that run through each year.

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Early on in the Clock project we saw that of all the modern timepiece companies few were doing truly new things.  One of the rare exceptions was Ulysse Nardin.  Once we completed the first Clock prototype in fact we hosted Ludwig Oechslin their chief design innovator for several months here in San Francisco to evaluate our Clock which was very instructive.

Long Now member and alumni Camille Davila sent me a note about a recent development at Ulysse Nardin, a cell phone that is charged by an offset weight swinging around from the ambient motion of the owner.  This is an adaptation from mechanical self winding watch technology of course, but it is very cool to see it crossing over into other personal electronics. You can see more on this on their website here.

 Greg Baiden the underground engineer working on the Clock Project, just sent in these great photos of the new bookcase that he had made for his office.  On either side of the bookcase are amazingly well detailed stained glass reproductions of the planet tracking Orrery we completed in 02005 (detail image below).  Apparently there is now a desk in the works that includes inlay and stained glass of the Clock dial.  Cant wait to see that…

Long Now Clock engineer Paolo Salvagione sent in this excellent write up by fellow horological geek Alex Doak of Watchismo of his trip to see Big Ben ring in its 150th year.  It includes a link to animated “how Big Ben works” that is one of the best clock descriptions I have seen.  Most interesting to me of course were the descriptions of the stoppages and challenges involved:

Stoppages are rare, but the most notable are:

2007: the longest suspension of the hour strike (Big Ben) since 1990. Big Ben’s famous ‘bongs’ were silent for seven weeks in 2007, allowing essential maintenance work on the clock mechanism to take place. From 11 August to 1 October, an electric system kept the clock moving, but Big Ben, the name for the Great Bell, and the quarter bells were quiet. This was the final phase of a programme of planned works to prepare for the Great Clock’s 150th anniversary in 2009.

October 2005: The clock mechanism was also suspended for two days in to allow inspection of the brake shaft.

Over the years, the clock has been stopped accidentally on several occasions – by weather, workmen, breakages or birds. The most serious breakdown occurred during the night of 10 August 1976 when part of the chiming mechanism disintegrated through metal fatigue, causing the mechanism to literally explode under its own immense forces, dropping its weights to the base of the Tower with a noise that the policeman on duty initially reported as being an IRA bomb. The Great Clock was shut down for a total of 26 days over nine months – the longest break in operations since it was built – until it was fully repaired.

I found this reference (via Engaget) to a nicely executed limited edition articulated hand clock.  I continue to be amazed at the breadth of solutions to showing the time…