Keeping time, it turns out, is a messy business. In order to satisfy science, religion, and sometimes ego, our calendar has changed quite a bit throughout history. This video by Jeremiah Warren tells the story up to now.

Since we can’t predict what changes might be made in the future, the 10,000 Year Clock has been designed to keep track of the cycles of the Sun, the Moon, the planets and the constellations – things even the largest of egos will have trouble changing.

Happy new year to all…

derDon1234 created a compilation featuring some of the important events of the last 100 years (2911-1011) in 10 minutes.

via Laughing Squid,  The Awesomer, BuzzFeed & MPViral.com

Phillip Mendonça-Vieira captured the front page of the website of the New York Times every few hours from September 2010 to July 2011 and made a video of all those images. As far as historical documents go, it’s a hypnotic view into a particular period of time.

On what we might learn from this he says:

Having worked with and developed on a number of content management systems I can tell you that as a rule of thumb no one is storing their frontpage layout data. It’s all gone, and once newspapers shutter their physical distribution operations I get this feeling that we’re no longer going to have a comprehensive archive of how our news-sources of note looked on a daily basis. Archive.orgcomes close, but there are too many gaps to my liking.

This, in my humble opinion, is a tragedy because in many ways our frontpages are summaries of our perspectives and our preconceptions. They store what we thought was important, in a way that is easy and quick to parse and extremely valuable for any future generations wishing to study our time period.

He also did one for the BBC!

La Chaussettologie is a short film created by Yann Benedi & Celine Desrumaux for an event called Challenge Your World. La Chaussettologie translates roughly, I’m told, to Sock-ology.

It was the Long Short for Peter Kareiva’s SALT called Conservation in the Real World.

Here’s a beautiful time-lapse of a pulsing, breathing, flowing superorganism:

Mindrelic – Manhattan in motion from Mindrelic on Vimeo.

(via stellar)

This video documents Australian designer Marc Newson’s (Ikepod) modern take on the hourglass in the Glaskeller factory at Basel, Switzerland. It was directed by Philip Andelman and was featured as part of our “Long Shorts” series of short films that convey long term thinking. This Long Short was screened at Tim Flannery’s “Here On Earth” SALT.

The Hourglass from Ikepod on Vimeo.

This timelapse of a flight between San Francisco and Paris was created by Beep Show, and is composed of photographs taken roughly every two miles of the entire journey. It was featured as part of our “Long Short” series of short films that convey long term thinking. This Long Short was screened at Ian Morris’ “Why the West Rules – For Now” SALT.

SF to Paris in Two Minutes from Beep Show on Vimeo.

A History of the World in 100 Seconds from Gareth Lloyd on Vimeo.

Thanks to Long Now research fellow Stuart Candy for sending this in:

Many wikipedia articles have coordinates. Many have references to historic events. Me (@godawful) and Tom Martin (@heychinaski) cross referenced the two to create a dynamic visualization of Wikipedia’s view of world history. Watch as empires fall, wars break out and continents are discovered.

This won “Best Visualization” at Matt Patterson’s History Hackday in January, 2011. To make it, we parsed an xml dump of all wikipedia articles (30Gb) and pulled out 424,000 articles with coordinates and 35,000 references to events. Cross referencing these produced 15,500 events with locations. Then we mapped them over time.

More information and datasets: ragtag.info/​2011/​feb/​2/​history-world-100-seconds/

This timelapse is from the film TimeScapes, by the photographer Tom Lowe. It includes shots of bristlecone pine trees, which can live for nearly 5,000 years. It was featured as part of our “Long Shorts” series of short films that convey long term thinking. This Long Short was screened at Rachel Sussman’s “The World’s Oldest Living Organisms” SALT.

Timescapes Timelapse: Mountain Light from Tom Lowe @ Timescapes on Vimeo.

This video, which uses words and meaning to stitch together a series of otherwise unrelated shots, was created by Everynone in collaboration with WNYC’s Radiolab and National Public Radio. It was shown as part of our “Long Short” series of short films that convey long term thinking. This Long Short was screened at Lera Boroditsky’s “How Language Shapes Thought” SALT.

WORDS from Everynone on Vimeo.