As reported on Laughing Squid SepiaTown is “A Collaborative Urban Time Machine”

SepiaTown lets you use your computer or mobile device to see what the very spot you’re standing on looked like decades or centuries ago.

A Google Maps mash-up, SepiaTown allows users to upload and geotag vintage photos of urban landscapes and then serves them up for others to view.  There’s even a “then/now” feature that juxtaposes the old shot with the current Street View:

Click the image above to see the Solar Beat page aand make sure your sound is turned on.

Solar Beat is a project by White Vinyl Designs that uses a virtual Orrery as a type of music box.  Turn on your sound and click the image above to see what type of music our solar system makes…  (thanks to Chris Baldwin for sending this in)

Death Bear visits clients in their homes and accepts love letters, old photos, anything they can't just throw away. The man behind the mask, Nate Hill, says he wants to create art that helps people. (Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times / March 18, 2010)

At The Long Now Foundation we spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to preserve information and artifacts from our increasingly ephemeral culture.  A piece in the LA TImes sent in this morning by board member Paul Saffo reminded me of a point that Brian Eno brought up at our first conference on digital preservation: the case for forgetting.

If we were able to save and recall absolutely everything, we have to remember that sometimes the past can be as stifling as it is informative.  Many great inventions for instance may never have been created if the inventors actually knew how many great minds failed before them.  But aside from innovation there is also the emotional side to memory.  This story about the Death Bear project reminds us that there is plenty that we may want to forget, and that by doing so we can liberate our future. (excerpt below)

And while most of his calls are from the lovelorn, others hint at tragedies greater than being dateless on Valentine’s Day.

One man gave Hill a photo of himself and his ex-girlfriend on a beach and said they had served in the Army together. Then he gave Hill his military dog tags. Finally, he handed Hill a bullet.

“He almost started to cry,” said Hill, whose clients know him only as Death Bear and never see his face. “I started walking away and started to break down. I thought maybe something happened to her. Maybe she got shot, maybe she killed herself.”

But Hill never presses clients for details. As a bear, his job is not to make conversation. (read the full article)

“Long Shorts” – short films that exemplify long-term thinking.  Please submit yours in the comments section…

Art project in progress A History of the Sky features lots and lots of time-lapse videos of the sky that are synchronized so that they’re all showing the same time of day.  Ken Murphy is the artist that created it and he hopes to one day manifest all the data he’s collecting as a video installation that’s always displaying the skies of the last 365 days.  The project was recently featured at the Exploratorium, but it’s still in a need of a home for the installation.

Here’s how it works.

If you’d like to see an installation in person, here are several upcoming opportunities:

• Maker Faire UK, at the Life Science Centre Planetarium, Newcastle UK: March 13-14, 2010
• Google I/O Conference After Hours Party, at Moscone West, San Francisco: May 19, 2010
• Bay Area Maker Faire, at the San Mateo County Event Center: May 22-23, 2010

Long Now has three events coming up over the next 8 days and we wanted to be sure you all had the right info for reserving tickets and making it out to all three.

• Long Now and Global Lives Project celebrates the opening of its first installation on Friday February 26th at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco.  The event is free, but you’ll want to RSVP so you can be sure to get in.  The installation will be up on Saturday and Sunday over the weekend as well.
  
• Beth Noveck on “Transparent Government”  Thursday March 4, 02010 at 7:30 pm at the Herbst Theater in San Francisco. Long Now Members can reserve 2 seats free, or you can purchase tickets for $10 each.

• Alan Weisman on “World Without Us, World With Us.” Wednesday February 24 (Thanks for coming this event went great)

Rosetta Project Director Laura Welcher recently took part in a segment on The History Channel’s Life After People series.

In an episode titled “Crypt of Civilization,” Laura discusses the Rosetta Disk and The 10,000 Year Clock.   

The central question of the series is “How long would it last?” The series explores various materials, systems and structures built by humans to determine their durability sans maintenance as well as natural systems and how they might flourish or decline without human intervention.

“Crypt of Civilization” focuses on time capsules, vaults and other attempts to create long-lasting caches of materials or data.  Laura explores some of the unique challenges in designing artifacts like the Disk and Clock to last thousands of years while the show’s producers vividly illustrate them.

You can watch the series on its website (though the “Crypt of Civilization” episode isn’t available yet).

Dedicated to bringing together video documentation of the daily lives of disparate global citizens, the Global Lives Project celebrates the opening of its first installation on February 26th at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco.  This opening is sponsored in part by the Long Now Foundation through a grant from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.

The Global Lives Project’s World Premiere installation will be on view at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts from February 26 – June 20, 2010! The exhibit is part of an artist residency that will evolve over four months. We will be showing, for the first time ever, our series of ten 24-hour videos of daily life from around the planet.

Join Global Lives, Long Now and the YBCA for the opening night celebration on February 26th from 7:30pm to 11:30pm.  There will be a cash bar and music from San Franciscans Kid Kameleon, Chief Boima, and Tinker.  Global Lives producers and directors will be there to discuss the project.

The event is free, but you’ll want to RSVP so you can be sure to get in!

As you may remember, Longplayer is a project by Jem Finer: a composition designed to last 1,000 years.  Along with a live performance of portions of the composition last year, a Long Conversation was held that lasted for 12 hours:

In parallel with a live performance in the Roundhouse’s Main Space, the Artangel Longplayer 2009 Conversation took place in the Studio Theatre. Writer Jeanette Winterson began and ended the 12-hour talking marathon of twenty leading writers, filmmakers, scientists, academics and technology activists, inspired by the philosophical implications of long time.

MP3 audio of that conversation is now available.

Those of you in the general vicinity of Berlin should check out the next round of the Long Conversation at the Transmediale Futurity Now! Festival on February 5th.  The following evening (Feb. 6th) will feature presentations by Bruce Sterling and our very own Alexander Rose on the topic of Atemporality.

Great piece in the Washington Post on the future of ancient books in Timbuktu.

“A sort of ancient-book fever has gripped Timbuktu in recent years” as outsiders encounter large, family-owned collections of ancient manuscripts which remain in private hands. at the same time, Timbuktu’s residents “hope to lure the world to a place known as the end of the Earth by establishing libraries for visitors to see their centuries-old collections of manuscripts.”  For those who do not sell their collections privately, small libraries are in bloom across the city.

Yet with instructions from ancestors to preserve ancient books within families, there is a reluctance to place them in libraries currently being built for the very same purpose. “Many owners refuse to part with their books… but they struggle to raise funds to restore or display them.”

It is interesting that that so many families were able to preserve these manuscripts for so long.  What caused this culture of long term preservation?

Consider the Library of Alexandria, which Stewart Brand covers in Clock of the Long Now. It experienced at least four fires, two from “collateral damage” by Ptolemy VIII (88 B.C.E) and Julius Caesar (47 B.C.E.), and two from religions on the rise (Christianity and Islam).

The ability to preserve these books over many centuries so far rests with families intent on honoring and adhering to requests from ancestors, a rather small and fragile model compared to the infrastructure needed to build a great library. Yet it is possible that a family with instructions from ancestors is, in some sense, a better library than a library itself.

Six hundred years ago, Timbuktu was packed with university students (at about 25,000, the size of a modestly large mid-western university these days) and a constant flow of merchants. It was a nexus of trade and intellectual life on the continent which then slowed. Perhaps because it did not intersect with the dramatic tension between three continents, like Alexandria, it was less prone both to collateral damage *and* the request by military or religious leaders to dispose of books not relevant to the prevailing winds. In any case, this slowing may well have ensured greater preservation over time.

It’s also confirmation that a library in the middle of a continent–away from the intersection of countries, military conquests and ascendant religious movements–is a really good idea.    With “ancient-book fever” now in Timbuktu, some combination of library and family models will have to preserve them.

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.