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.

At the beginning of each year, John Brockman’s Edge poses a question to a long list (192 this year!) of thinkers and authors. The ensuing onslaught of insight is then published for us all to enjoy. This year he asks:

What is your favorite deep, elegant, or beautiful explanation?

Scientists’ greatest pleasure comes from theories that derive the solution to some deep puzzle from a small set of simple principles in a surprising way. These explanations are called “beautiful” or “elegant”. Historical examples are Kepler’s explanation of complex planetary motions as simple ellipses, Bohr’s explanation of the periodic table of the elements in terms of electron shells, and Watson and Crick’s double helix. Einstein famously said that he did not need experimental confirmation of his general theory of relativity because it “was so beautiful it had to be true.”

The full list is bound to include a few folks you’d like to hear from. Below is the subset of respondents that have crossed through the Long Now orbit:

Board Members:

• Stewart Brand discusses fitness landscapes.
• David Eagleman tells us that the brain isn’t an executive, but rather a team of rivals.
• Brian Eno wraps the whole earth in a bow and plays John Conway’s game of Life.
• Kevin Kelly reminds us we’re all star-stuff.
• Paul Saffo digs into plate tectonics.

SALT Speakers:

• Jared Diamond mixes equal parts sodium, potassium and squid, with electrifying results.
• Freeman Dyson reconciles quantum mechanics & gravity. Or doesn’t? It’s kind of hard to tell.
• George Dyson thinks it’ll be a long time before we’ve got one good explanation for everything.
• Juan Enriquez ruminates on what anthropomorphism illuminates and what it obscures.
• Matt Ridley recalls Crick’s metaphor of life as code.
• Martin Rees warns of another Copernican demotion.
• Clay Shirky takes us beyond memes.
• Nassim Nicholas Taleb explains hormesis.
• Carl Zimmer‘s elegant explanation is his favorite because it is wrong.

In 02009, economist Paul Romer presented to the Seminars About Long-term Thinking his idea for Charter Cities. Modeled on Hong Kong but stripped of the colonialism (ideally, anyway), Charter Cities are meant to bring the agility and creativity of start-ups to the world of governance.

The Economist recently published an article about a budding Charter City in Honduras:

In a nutshell, the Honduran government wants to create what amounts to internal start-ups—quasi-independent city-states that begin with a clean slate and are then overseen by outside experts. They will have their own government, write their own laws, manage their own currency and, eventually, hold their own elections.

This year the Honduran legislature has taken the first big steps towards the creation of what it called “special development regions”. It has passed a constitutional amendment making them possible and approved a “constitutional statute” that creates their autonomous legal framework.

A fair share of criticism is already being leveled:

And democracy will be introduced gradually. Only when the transparency commission deems that the time is ripe will citizens be able to elect the members of the “normative councils”—in effect, local parliaments.

This aspect of the plan is just one of those attracting heated criticism. Some find the explicit (if temporary) rejection of democracy repellent. Others detect a whiff of neocolonialism: gimmicks dreamed up in rich countries being foisted on poor ones.

These are early, preliminary steps and it will be many years before major changes take hold, but Mr. Romer and others are paying close attention to the implementation. Listen to Mr. Romer’s Long Now Seminar to see why he thinks it can work.

The math governing compound interest offers an enticing proposition to investors with patience and an eye for the distant future. A great piece in Lapham’s Quarterly surveys this siren’s call and some of the characters, fortunes and court cases wrecked on its shores:

‘A few years before [Benjamin] Franklin drafted his will, philosopher Richard Price rhapsodized in a sober treatise on the national debt, “One penny, put out at our Savior’s birth to 5 percent compound interest, would, in the present year 1781, have increased to a greater sum than would be contained in two hundred millions of earths, all solid gold.’

Thanks, Kurt!

Urban Renewal #4, by Edward Burtynsky

Researchers at the McKinsey Global Institute have been studying the process of urbanization – what works and what doesn’t – and argue in this article that the detrimental effects of rapid city growth are not directly the result of insufficient resources. Rather, they stem from management that is neither comprehensive enough nor farsighted enough.

Does this imply that the future will be one of massive megalopolises spread across the globe? Theoretically, the answer is yes—there is no limit to the size of cities. In practice, however, the growth of most urban centers is bound by an inability to manage their size in a way that maximizes scale opportunities and minimizes costs. Large urban centers are highly complex, demanding environments that require a long planning horizon and extraordinary managerial skills. Many city governments are simply not prepared to cope with the speed at which their populations are expanding.

Theoretical physicist Geoffrey West spoke at The Long Now Foundation’s SALT series in July of 02011 and discussed how cities tend to become more efficient and productive as they grow, and that they do so at an exponential rate. The challenge, as he described it, is that cities have to innovate faster and faster in order to keep up with superlinear growth. So how can city governments cope? The authors of the McKinsey Global Institute article, Richard Dobbs and Jaana Remes, outline four principles to guide the leaders of quickly growing metropolises:

First, successful cities need sufficient funding to finance their running costs and new infrastructure. Sources of funding could include monetizing land assets and levying property taxes, sales taxes, or user charges. Second, cities need modern, accountable governance; many large successful cities, including London and New York, have opted for empowered mayors with long tenures and clear accountability. Third, cities need proper planning that spans a 1- to 40-year horizon. Finally, all cities should craft dedicated policies in critical areas such as affordable housing.

Roger Pielke Jr. made an observation on his blog recently regarding the past decade’s rapid increase in commodity prices and the classic debate between optimistic Cornucopians and pessimistic Malthusians. In 01990 ecologist Paul Ehrlich – who has spoken at The Long Now Foundation’s SALT series – lost a decade-long bet to economist Julian Simon. In 01980, Simon had predicted that prices (of just about everything) would continue to fall as the human population increased. They tracked the price of five metals over the course of the next ten years, and they all became less expensive.

Since the beginning of the millennium, however, prices have risen fairly steadily. In August of 02011, The Economist noted that current prices of the five metals chosen for the Ehrlich – Simon bet exceeded 01980 prices. Had the bet lasted for three decades, rather than one, Ehrlich would have won.

What Pielke points out, however, is that if we zoom out even further and look at The Economist’s records since 1845, the last decade’s spike in prices could be interpreted as one more blip in a long-term trend of Cornucopian price decreases. Or is the global economy showing the first signs of a long-in-coming collapse, as predicted by Malthusians?

Long-term bets such as the $1,000 wager between Simon and Ehrlich can place people’s predictions about the future out in the open for public scrutiny and comment – encouraging those who would speak to think carefully before they do so. One project of The Long Now Foundation, Long Bets, provides a forum for long-term bets and discussion. On the site, you can view current bets, place your own, or challenge someone else’s prediction.

With thousands of languages and writing systems used all over the world, making computers and the web widely accessible has taken a herculean effort, with much yet to be done.

One of the main tools used in the expansion of the web’s global reach is Unicode – a database of over 193,000 characters from 93 different writing systems and the standards for using and representing them.

Unicode is maintained by The Unicode Consortium, which sponsors a conference each year to share knowledge and discuss the future of Unicode.

This year the Internationalization and Unicode Conference will be held October 17th – 19th in Santa Clara, CA.

Long Now’s Dr. Laura Welcher will be delivering a keynote presentation on Tuesday October 18th of her work on The Rosetta Project, a publicly accessible digital library of human languages, and The Language Commons:

The Rosetta Project shares the Unicode vision of a world where people can use communication technology on their own terms – in their own language.

According to World Internet Statistics, over 80% of all web communication is in about ten languages, with over half in either English or Chinese. The remaining 20% represent “everyone else” including about 400 languages with speaker populations above 1 million, which collectively comprise about 95% of everyone on earth.

Because of essential technologies like Unicode, we are poised to see this breadth of human languages flourish online and on mobile devices, providing for these languages a critical new domain of language use in the modern world. I will present several efforts underway at The Rosetta Project including the “Language Commons” that rely on Unicode as an essential technology in building the multilingual Web.

Long Now encourages a 10,000 year perspective, but if that just isn’t enough zeroes for you, check out FutureTimeline.net, a site that literally goes Beyond 10,000:

Welcome to the future! Here you will find a speculative timeline of future history. Part fact and part fiction, the timeline is based on detailed research that includes analysis of current trends, projected long-term environmental changes, advances in technology such as Moore’s Law, future medical breakthroughs, and the evolving geopolitical landscape. Where possible, references have been provided to support the predictions. FutureTimeline.net is intended to be an ongoing, collaborative project that is open for discussion – we welcome ideas from scientists, futurists, inventors, writers and anyone else interested in the future of our world.

As a resource for science, technology and futures thinking, the site is chockfull of links and ideas. Just as an example, did you know that in about 3,000,000,000 AD, our own Milky Way may begin to merge with Andromeda?

When it comes to  society’s propensity for compromisingly short-term thinking, not even the scientific community is immune. A recent post on John Horgan‘s blog at Scientific American discussed a few of the trends responsible for the hastiness (and resulting shoddiness) of too much of our scientific activity. Among the trends is an overemphasis on ‘popular’ research topics, which statistician John Ioaniddis has shown leads to more inaccurate publications.

The likelihood that a claim will hold up, he argues, is inversely proportional to the initial attention that it gets from other scientists and the media. Large, fast-moving, “hot” fields, which can yield large financial payoffs, tend to have the worst records.

Thankfully, the primary subject of Horgan’s post is not fast-paced failure, but an interesting effort to promote slower, better science. A group of scientists based in Germany have published “The Slow Science Manifesto,” which praises the essential nature of “accelerated science of the early 21st century” but scolds those who demand that scientists constantly produce research with immediate practical application and clear meaning and intention. “Science needs time,” they assert, “to think.”

Science needs time to read, and time to fail. Science does not always know what it might be at right now. Science develops unsteadi­ly, with jerky moves and un­predict­able leaps forward—at the same time, however, it creeps about on a very slow time scale, for which there must be room and to which justice must be done.

The Manifesto concludes: “We cannot continuously tell you what our science means; what it will be good for; because we simply don’t know yet. Science needs time.” This statement corresponds neatly to a sentence from a chapter (titled, not incidentally, “Slow Science”) in Stewart Brand’s book The Clock of the Long Now: “Rigorously collected old data keeps finding new uses.” Brand proposes that the Long Now Library could help facilitate the kinds of long-term projects that produce large useful data sets by helping scientists overcome the obstacles that stand in the way of such endeavors. Perhaps the authors of The Slow Science Manifesto would agree with his analysis:

…in light of their great accumulative value, why are long-term scientific studies so rare? Well, (1) they’re not about proving or disproving hypotheses, the coin of the scientific realm; (2) they don’t generate quick papers, the coin of a scientific career; (3) they bear no relation to scientific fashion, where the excitement is; (4) they’re not subject to money-making patent or copyright; (5) the few that exist usually die when their primary researcher dies; (6) they’re extremely difficult to maintain funding for; and (7) ever growing archives are an expensive hassle to service and keep accessible.

The Long Now Foundation has, in fact, already had the opportunity to support a long-term scientific project. In 02008 the Nevada System of Higher Education received funding from the National Science Foundation to study climate change in the Great Basin. As part of the study they needed to install permanent climate monitoring stations over a wide range of elevation levels and ecosystem types, and the Long Now Foundation’s property in Nevada provided some key locations for constructing stations. If the project overcomes the challenges and pressures that drove a group of frustrated scientists to publish their Slow Science Manifesto, it will one day become a valuable bank of ‘rigorously collected old data,’ and future scientists will continue to use and reuse it for purposes that, quite frankly, we’ve never even dreamed of.

The World Maker Faire opens for the second time this weekend – the 17th and 18th – in Queens at the New York Hall of Science. Maker Faire is organized by O’Reilly Media as a celebration of the spirit that’s been kindled by their Make Magazine.

O’Reilly Co-founder Dale Dougherty sat down recently with New Yorker, blogger and maker, Anil Dash to discuss the DIY movement and ‘making’ as a cultural force.

Anil Dash provided his perspective on the social context of making, the maker movement, and what he calls “the long slow make.” In this conversation, Anil characterizes the “Long Slow Make” as a persistent, flexible, and forward-looking ethos exemplified in the Washington Monument, NASA, cancer research, and New York’s 2nd Avenue Subway.