This National Park Service spectrogram, from the Western Soundscape Archive, visually represents the sounds heard at a particular site over the course of 24 hours.

Sound is fleeting. Unless it is recorded while it occurs, it can never be heard again. As the earth evolves, species come and go, ecosystems change or are destroyed, and urban landscapes transform; when organisms and ways of life go extinct, their sounds disappear with them. We record music, lectures, and performances, but it is relatively uncommon to record our everyday activities and environment. There are, however, a few efforts to do just that.

High Country News recently published a profile of Jeff Rice, the founder of the Western Soundscape Archive. The archive hosts a growing collection of audio recordings of the flora and fauna of the Western United States.

The archive now represents close to 800 species — amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals — even some invertebrates. Scientists, educators, students and nature enthusiasts can download podcasts or stream audio files free of charge. Rice sees the loss of species and habitats as a driving force behind his work. “We are experiencing a new ‘silent spring’ across the globe and in our own backyards,” he says. “Not only is it a marker of what we’re losing on an important ecological level, but it’s also a loss of our heritage.”

The collection also provides access to National Park Service acoustical monitoring. These take the form of spectrograms–images that show, over 24-hour periods, the relative prevalence of bird songs and airplanes, crickets and cars. They provide information about a region’s biodiversity as well as the impact of anthropogenic noise on its ecosystems.

Aporee is another sound collection, but with a less specific sonic target. The aporee ::: maps project encourages people to record the sounds around them and upload them to the site. All recordings are plotted on google maps, where anyone can click on them to listen. The project is described on Aporee’s website:

It develops from the insight that it is basically impossible to map the complexity of todays [sic] public spaces. Against the background of an increasing awareness of spatial aspects in media and the popularity and presence of visual geographies like google maps, the idea was to connect sound and space, and to create a cartography which focusses [sic] solely on sound, and open it to the public as a collaborative project. Meanwhile it contains 1000s of recordings from numerous urban, rural and natural environments, showing the sonic complexity of these environments, as well as the different perception and artistic perspectives related to sound, space and places. Furthermore, it’s an exciting playground for experiments with sound and mobile media.

A sound archive could someday form a very engaging and informative part of a library dedicated to describing the human experience as it has evolved through time. Think of a museum exhibit on the ocean that includes short sound clips: rolling waves, the incessant squawking of seagulls, the call of an elephant seal. The portrayal instantly becomes more vivid, more real. For a future human to grasp what it meant to live in the 21st century, it could be quite useful to have a soundtrack with examples of car traffic, a busy farmer’s market, or perhaps even the soft chirping and buzzing heard in a pine forest on a sunny morning, out of earshot from human civilization.

Click here to hear the Western Soundscape Archive’s recording of a bark beetle (one species of which is responsible for the current epidemic that has killed vast swaths of trees in the Rockies).

Long Now’s Alexander Rose recently visited the Svalbard Seed Vault with Steve Rowell, who uploaded to Aporee this recording of a Svalbardian windstorm. Make sure you’ve got a warm blanket with you.

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/

UPDATE (4/23/02011)  Long Now’s  Laura Welcher found another instance of Long Now graffiti at the BART track support along the Ohlone Greenway in Berkeley (pic below):

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We heard last week that some “Long Now Graffiti” showed up on the sidewalk out in front of the Pixar animation studios in Emeryville California.  A friend just sent in pictures of it…  I assume no one wants to come forward to tell us more about it, but I would really love to know why it only goes to the year 10,000.  Why not 12011?

… and this one in Berlin:

These Victorian infographics take a beautiful, hand-drawn approach to the presentation of various geographic and astronomical data.  The image above was published in 1854 and compares various mountains and river systems side-by-side.

Don’t miss the Tableau de L’Histoire Universelle, which represents nations and empires as rivers flowing through history and plenty more at BibliOdyssey.

(thanks to a new member Marianna!)

This is my hands-down favorite clock for the iPad, and could well be the coolest astronomic/civil clock I’ve ever seen: http://emeraldsequoia.com/eo/

Emerald Observatory has everything a time geek could ever want, plus everything an astro geek would want, all in a stunningly elegant interface.

[decription below from Emerald]
Emerald Observatory displays a wealth of astronomical information all on one screen, in a unique but understandable format.

• Times of rise and set for the Sun, the Moon, and the 5 classical planets
• Times of the beginning and ending of twilight
• Heliocentric orrery (display of the planets in orbit around the Sun)
• Altitude and azimuth for the same bodies (one body at a time)
• Current phase and apparent orientation and relative size of the moon
• Current regions of day and night on a world map
• The Equation of Time, solar time, UTC time, and sidereal time
• Month, day, year, and leap-year indicator
• Daily alarm
• Displayed times are synchronized via NTP to “atomic clock” standard
• Uses iPad location, or the latitude and longitude may be set manually

A setting is available to allow the display to stay on continuously.

Tap on the display to move forward by a month, day, year, or minute.

If you are having any trouble with the application whatsoever, please see our FAQ on the support page listed below and then contact us through that page if your problem is not resolved. We take pride in responding promptly to all support email requests.

Ask Media Productions created this report on the San Francisco Fire Department’s unique ladder shop. While most cities have moved on to lighter, less-expensive aluminum ladders, San Francisco’s tight, windy streets lined with electric bus-lines demand sturdy, non-conductive douglas-fir. That wood is given 15 years to age in the ladder shop before it’s shaped into planks and rungs and can be maintained for decades afterwards – the Department’s oldest ladder still in use was originally built in 1918.

Inside the Ladder Shop at the San Francisco Fire Department from AdamKaplan on Vimeo.

(via Laughing Squid)

Climate change continues to demand solutions, but a unified global response remains elusive. Even among those who want to address the issue, debate about how rages on. We could cut consumption, increase alternative energy production, develop fusion power, implement population control, seed the atmosphere, block the sun… For every proposed solution, there is a counter-argument, an opportunity cost, or unintended consequences. And those don’t even begin to address the questions of how climate change itself will actually manifest – what kinds of changes and disasters will we have to mitigate with new technology, mass migration, or cultural and behavioral re-training?

Exploring all these interacting forces and possibilities might be a bit overwhelming, but if it also gets your creative, geoengineering juices flowing, there’s a video game you might want to look into. An Oxford based game design studio called Red Redemption will soon release Fate of the World, in which you as the player control a global environmental agency and play out the next 200 years:

Fate of the World is a dramatic global strategy game that puts all our futures in your hands. The game features a dramatic set of scenarios based on the latest science covering the next 200 years. You must manage a balancing act of protecting the Earth.s resources and climate versus the needs of an ever-growing world population, who are demanding ever more food, power, and living space.

The head of Oxford’s Climate Dynamics Group, Dr. Myles Allen has contributed to the climate modeling the game uses and Red Redemption are making a conscious effort to design this game as an engaging educational tool. By providing access to academic-quality climactic models in a strategic game format, they hope to better inform the public about the challenges climate change presents, as well as get people focused on finding solutions based on the best evidence available.

Just saw this video of how European borders have been redrawn over the last millennium.

UPDATE: The original video was taken down, this one is from Centennia the company that made the software that made it called the “Historical Atlas 2010″, this version is less cool because its a screen capture but you get the idea.

10 centuries in 5 minutes Thanks to our friends over at Atlas Obscura for posting.

Long Now founding board member Brian Eno has released a new album called Small Craft on a Milk Sea.  Recently he gave two great interviews on his creative process, one you can listen to over at NPR, and the other you can read over at Pitchfork.  I highly recommend listening and reading to both interviews in the their entirety, but I was especially taken with his answer on how to create music that is truly new:

“Imagine it’s the year 2064 and all digital music has been destroyed in a huge digital accident, an electromagnetic pulse or something like that. So, all we know about the music between 2010 or 2030 is hearsay. There don’t exist any recordings. We’ve read about a kind of music that existed in the suburbs of Shanghai in 2015 to 2018, and this music was played on–” then you specify a group of instruments– “was played on, say, industrial tools, such as steel hammers, and augmented with samplers and various electronic versions of some Chinese instruments. And it was intensely repetitive and played at ear-splitting volume,” for example. So, we then, taking that brief, try to imagine what that music would be like, and we try to make it.

10,000 Years of star motion Credit: NASA, ESA, and G. Bacon (STScI)

There is an interesting bit of astronomy published over at PhysOrg.com sent to me by way of Danny Hillis and Tom Shannon.  Apparently astronomers focused Hubble on a certain region of Globular Cluster Omega Cantauri several times over 4 years.  They were then able to calculate how each of those stars will move in the next 10,000 years.  You can see a video of this after the jump on their site here.  It reminds me of our recent blog piece on how the constellations will change over the next 50,000 years.  All of this is of interest to us on the Clock project as one of the main references we use is an image of the night sky for one of our slowest moving dials.  We have to choose stars that do not move very much over the next 10,000 years to use as a good reference in the 26,000 year precessional cycle.