Ben Keating sent me a link to this nifty IBM project called History Flow for tracking community edited documents on line life. My bet is that time-line projects like this are going to become more commonplace in the web 2.0 world.

history flow is a tool for visualizing dynamic, evolving documents and the interactions of multiple collaborating authors. In its current implementation, history flow is being used to visualize the evolutionary history of wiki* pages on Wikipedia.

 

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Stewart Brand sent in this spiffy UCLA project that uses historical interactive maps of Berlin through time. This is part of a larger trend I have seen from many governments and municipalities to use modern geographical information systems (GIS) to not only create maps of what is there, but to add the time element to create a much deeper now.

• Historical Maps in Google Earth
• Virtual Berlin
• Westport Ireland
• China
• Philadelphia

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 Red Orbit is reporting that what may be the oldest recording of the human voice known has been reproduced with the help of some folks at Berkeley Labs.  They started with paper representations of the French “phonautographs”…

The U.S. experts made high-resolution digital scans of the paper. According to First Sounds, scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California converted the scans into sound waves using technology developed to preserve and create early recordings.

“It was magical, so ethereal,” said Giovannoni. “It’s like a ghost singing to you. The fact is it’s recorded in smoke. The voice is coming out from behind this screen of aural smoke.”

This is a nice example of preservation working though an analog original, converted with digital technology and back again to analog sound.  Analog / digital hybrid preservation model seems to always have legs.

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Clay Shirky and Brian Eno recently spoke on The Power of Networks in London.  You can listen to the complete audio from a link here, and some video snippets here.

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Stewart Brand was quoted in this weekends NY Times piece on how the many X Prizes seem to be driving many areas of innovation (automotive, space travel, genomics etc).   Peter Diamandis the director of the X Prize Foundation will be speaking in our Seminar Series in September on this exact issue…

The complexities of creating the auto prize illustrate a wider problem of how to come up with ever more novel tests of human ingenuity over time. Mr. Brand of the Long Now Foundation predicts that contests will soon pursue “things we truly think of as impossible.”

Mr. Brand’s wish list includes machines that defy gravity or that allow us to read the minds of other people.

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 Due to the infinite wisdom of the US Legislators and President of 02005 we will again be experiencing “daylight savings” time a few weeks earlier this year.  While I am pretty ambivalent about the daylight savings time concept, I do think the only thing sillier than changing our clocks twice a year, is randomly legislating new times to do so.

As most of us remember, changing time bases and calendrics caused all kinds (of mostly unneeded) fuss around the turn of the last millennium.  And while it seems this new change was important enough to generate lobbying efforts from important cultural institutions such as the Sporting Goods Manufacturers Association, the National Association of Convenience Stores, and the National Retinitis Pigmentosa Foundation Fighting Blindness, I am still pretty confused as to why we are again wreaking havoc on the all pre-programmed EPROMs of the world.  This has been dubbed “The Year 2007 Problem.”

So this month all our pre-programmed digital watches, timed light switches and sprinkler systems will be running an hour off schedule.  Hopefully no life critical medical device will actually go too awry, and we can all settle in and wait for the Y10k mayhem.

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I just got an update from David Rumsey that there will be a special event at the map museum in Second Life Thursday March 6th at noon PST.

MIT Tech Review is reporting that Long Now board member and mapping maven David Rumsey is launching his historical map collection in Second Life this week.

A new installation inside Second Life is bringing alive one of the world’s largest collections of antique maps. Called the David Rumsey Maps Island (registration required), the Second Life site is San Francisco map collector David Rumsey’s latest high-technology plan to share his collection with as large an audience as possible. (See “From Lewis and Clark to Landsat.”)

Rumsey has also given a talk in our Seminar series, and some of his collection is in the featured layers on Google Earth where you can see historical maps overlaid on modern geography.

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This week Shell oil published an article by their president Jeroen van der Veer about how he sees the future of energy through 02100. It is surprisingly non-corporate and shows how at least one of the largest oil companies in the world views the coming energy and environmental shortfalls. Most surprising to me is he concludes with an outright call for governments to institute a global carbon capture and trade system…

By 2100, the world’s energy system will be radically different from today’s. Renewable energy like solar, wind, hydroelectricity, and biofuels will make up a large share of the energy mix, and nuclear energy, too, will have a place. Humans will have found ways of dealing with air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions. New technologies will have reduced the amount of energy needed to power buildings and vehicles.

Indeed, the distant future looks bright, but much depends on how we get there. There are two possible routes. Let’s call the first scenario Scramble. Like an off-road rally through a mountainous desert, it promises excitement and fierce competition. However, the unintended consequence of “more haste” will often be “less speed,” and many will crash along the way.

The alternative scenario can be called Blueprints, which resembles a cautious ride, with some false starts, on a road that is still under construction. Whether we arrive safely at our destination depends on the discipline of the drivers and the ingenuity of all those involved in the construction effort. Technological innovation provides the excitement.

(more…)

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Wired’s Blog has a nifty piece on the two millennia old Demascus steel process replete with quotes from a Nobel laureate and Neal Stephenson:

Damascus swords — sharp enough to slice a falling piece of silk in half, strong enough to split stones without dulling — owe their legendary qualities to carbon nanotubes, says chemist and Nobel laureate Robert Curl.

The blades used so-called wootz steel, smelted with a technique developed 2000 years ago in India, where craftsmen added wood and other organic debris to their furnaces. The resulting carbon-laced steel, hard but flexible, was soon celebrated across the ancient world.

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We have been researching long lasting magnetic properties for use in the Clock of the Long Now. Magnetite or lodestone is a naturally occurring magnetic material that has been known for at least two millennia. These materials have held their magnetism even over geologic time scales which makes them interesting for potential use in the Clock. We could potentially use them for actuating/holding without touching thus eliminating wear. I just came across this article on a new property some nano-tech engineers came across when they super cooled magnetite and made it change states into a conductor. I like that such an old material is finding new use in the nano-tech world…

With engineers looking to exploit novel electronic materials for next-generation computers and hard drives, phase transitions between insulating and conducting states have become an increasingly hot research topic in physics and materials science in recent years.

The debate about the causes and specifics of magnetite’s temperature-driven phase change has simmered much longer. Natelson said physicists have long sparred about the possible underlying physical and electronic causes of the phase transition. The discovery of this new voltage-driven switching provides new clues, but more research is still needed, he said.

“The effect we discovered probably wasn’t noticed in the past because nanotechnology is only now making it possible to prepare the electrodes, nanoparticles, and thin films required for study with the precision necessary to document the effect,” he said.

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