Published on Wednesday, July 14th, 02010 by Austin Brown
The European Space Agency has released an amazing new image of our universe, created by the recently launched Planck mission. The image above comes from Planck’s first detailed survey of the cosmic microwave background, the universe’s “first light.”
It is the light that was finally allowed to move out across space once a post-Big-Bang Universe had cooled sufficiently to permit the formation of hydrogen atoms.
Before that time, scientists say, the cosmos would have been so hot that matter and radiation would have been “coupled” – the Universe would have been opaque.
Planck is funded to create four of these surveys, each more precise than the last:
“We know that eventually as the data get better and better, what you end up getting to are the limitations of what you know about the instrument,” explained Professor Jaffe.
“And so, by running Planck for longer we can learn a lot more about the instrument itself and thereby remove a lot of the contaminating effects that are just because of the way it produces its noise.”
Published on Friday, July 2nd, 02010 by Contessa Trujillo
Atlas Obscura, “a compendium of the world’s wonders, curiosities and esoterica” in collaboration with Long Now has created a new category just for us called Long Now Locations.
The Long Now Locations serve as a compendium and ongoing collection of objects and places that exhibit long-term thinking, intended or not. Along with the character of Atlas Obscura, many of the Long Now Locations are also mysterious and curious in nature.
Ranging from items that were created with a long-term mindset and intention, as were the Oak Beams at New College Oxford, to items that accidentally survived and now serve as long-term examples, telling a story and giving important information regarding past civilizations and their knowledge and capabilities, like the Antikythera Mechanism.
We encourage Long Now supporters to explore the Long Now Locations collection and add your own experiences with places and items of long-term nature, and maybe even some examples of poor long-term thought or planning. Sign up with an Atlas Obscura to start contributing your stories.
Obscura Day 02010
In addition to Long Now Locations, on Saturday March 20 02010, Long Now collaborated with Atlas Obscura on the first, of what we hope will be many an Obscura Day. Taking part in a day of 80 events, expeditions, back-room tours and hidden treasures in 20 countries worldwide, Long Now’s Museum & Store opened our doors to over 80 Obscura Day explorers for an evening of merry-making and conversation around the Long Now and the 10,000 Year Clock.
After exploring the Musee Mechanique alongside owner Dan Zelinsky, the San Francisco Obscura Day party roved down along the historic Aquatic Park and over into Fort Mason where an after-party was held at the Long Now Museum & Store to close Obscura Day’s world-wide events and festivities.
Long Now and Atlas Obscura staff and guests gathered to mingle around prototypes of the 10,000 Year Clock of the Long Now. Amongst the Orrery, Chime Generator, and Tungsten Bobs. Alexander Rose, Executive Director of Long Now and Project Manager/Designer of the 10,000 Year Clock, gave an introduction to the clocks various prototypes. Clock engineers, Greg Staples and Paolo Salvagione were also in attendance to answer questions and give demonstrations of the various prototypes.
Here is a wonderful video and summary on the day from Atlas Obscura:
The day started with folks hiking out to an abandoned railroad tunnel Australia to see bioluminescent glow worms, and ended some 30 hours later with San Francisco obscuraphiles watching an amazing demonstration of parts of the 10,000-Year Clock at the Long Now Foundation. In between, we walked the lost River Fleet in London, visited amazing anatomical museums in Paris, Washington, Boston, and Philadelphia, toured the world’s largest treehouse in Tennessee, circumnavigated one of the largest holes in the world in Butte, made shiny mud balls in Albuquerque, and photographed an unbuilt suburb in the Mojave desert.
Want to be updated on future Atlas Obscura events and tours? Sign up here.
Published on Monday, May 10th, 02010 by Austin Brown
For thousands of years emperors, clerics, nobles and kings all over the world have erected slabs of stone called stelae as markers to indicate a boundary, either phsyical or temporal. They commemorate battles won, loved ones lost, borders, holocausts, and laws. Some stelae have been vital sources of information on past societies; many still stand after millenia.
Outside the Everhart Museum in Scranton, four ceramic stelae have been erected by an artist named Jordan Taylor. The four-ton blocks will sit in Nay Aug Park, marking the entrance to the museum, until they erode “and follow the watershed as far as the Chesapeake Bay, back to the lie of the land”. Rather than a king’s accomplishment or a claimed territory, they mark the absence of boundary, the dissolution of moment and material into matter and spacetime.
“I look forward to watching the stelae from season to season, year to year. They are sentinel. Yet we too share that role. We will keep watch over them, bearing witness to their transformation from art back into the earth.”
- Cara A. Sutherland, Executive Director, Everhart Museum
Published on Tuesday, April 20th, 02010 by Alexander Rose - Twitter: @zander
History of Major Contagion Map by Haisam Hussein
Long Now member #744 Jason Martin sent in links to a few maps by Lapham’s Quarterly each of which depicts a different view of deep time. Click on the maps shown here to see the larger versions.
Published on Wednesday, April 14th, 02010 by Austin Brown
Technology Review has an article up in which some physicists defend their clock-making chops. It seems they feel pulsars are getting more credit than they deserve in the public perception of accurate time-keeping:
So accurate are pulsar signals that when they were discovered, astronomers gave serious credence to the idea that they were evidence of intelligent life elsewhere in the Universe because they were unmatched by anything physicists could make on Earth. This has lead to the widespread belief that pulsars are the most accurate clocks in the Universe.
John Hartnett and Andre Luiten at the University of Western Australia want you know that’s no longer the case.
Today, the best optical lattice neutral atom clocks and trapped ion clocks have a frequency stability approaching one part in 10^17.By contrast, as more pulsars have been discovered, their timing stability has improved by less than an order of magnitude in the last 20 years. The best millisecond pulsars have a stability of only one part in 10^15 at best.
That means that terrestrial clocks can rightly be crowned the best clocks in the Universe, say Hartnett and Luiten.
Duly noted. It seems worth pointing out that the measure of accuracy in the article is expressed as a ratio without units – often you hear that an atomic clock will lose a second of accuracy only every 10 billion years or so. The author of this article avoids that, and maybe for good reason. Sometimes people told Long Now is building a 10,000 Year Clock react by asking, “Oh, like an atomic clock?” It seems that an occasional side-effect of using these long time units to illustrate the accuracy of atomic clocks is the implication that they will be around for eons.
The thing is, atomic clocks rely on vacuum-sealed chambers full of cesium atoms kept near absolute zero or similarly complicated mechanisms to make their extremely precise measurements. That kind of hardware requires a significant technological, economic and bureaucratic infrastructure to maintain. If you can imagine finding an atomic clock after the electricity failed that kept it running, you would have to recreate a lot of knowledge to understand what in fact it was.
The article goes on to discuss the difficulty of building a timepiece durable enough that its lifespan requires scientific notation to describe, and mentions Long Now’s attempt through the Clock of the Long Now. It’s in this endurance category, however, that pulsars maintain their dominance, as they’re likely to last quite a bit longer than anything humans have been able to build, even Long Now – we’ve been able to observe some that are thought to be around 200 million years old.
Published on Thursday, April 8th, 02010 by Austin Brown
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:
Published on Thursday, April 1st, 02010 by Austin Brown
Or: Techno-Archaeology and the Tale of the Whale-Oil Tapes
Researchers at NASA’s Ames Research Center recently were able to recover some very old and useful data. The Nimbus II satellite created a detailed mosaic of the earth’s cloud cover and heat radiation in 1966. Such old and detailed climate data is a boon to today’s researchers, but it wasn’t easy to come by. Indeed, the data was lost for quite some time due to the tapes on which it was recorded – the secret to their longevity was whale-oil, but it became unattainable in the 1980′s due to the cessation of commercial whaling. Since they couldn’t get more long-lasting tapes, NASA chose not to keep the old data, but rather to rewrite the tapes with newer data that they decided needed to be preserved for the long-term more than the old data that, when it was new, needed to be preserved for the long-term but, once it was old, did not. Some 200,000 tapes endured this fate.
What about the machines used to read the tapes? Perhaps it was a form of penance: many of them ended up being dumped into the ocean to create coral reefs. Fortunately, a team of techno-archaeologists working as the Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project have been working to track down old and lost copies of tapes like these, as well as restore the machines required to read them. Luckily, some of the Ampex tape drives made their way into the garage of a woman named Nancy Evans, an engineer from Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
TheLOIRPteam obtained $750,000 fromNASAand private enterprise and enlisted the assistance of a retired Ampex engineer. They cleaned, rebuilt, and reassembled one drive, then designed and built equipment to convert the analog signals into an exact 16-bit digital copy. “It was like dumpster diving for science,” says Cowing, co-team leader atLOIRP.
Published on Monday, March 15th, 02010 by Alexander Rose - Twitter: @zander
This artist rendering provided by the European South Observatory shows some of the 32 new planets astronomers found outside our solar system.
This article was sent in by Samuel Arbesman Research Fellow in Health Care Policy at Harvard Medical School. It was originally printed in the Boston Globe.
When people think of knowledge, they generally think of two sorts of facts: facts that don’t change, like the height of Mount Everest or the capital of the United States, and facts that fluctuate constantly, like the temperature or the stock market close.
But in between there is a third kind: facts that change slowly. These are facts which we tend to view as fixed, but which shift over the course of a lifetime. For example: What is Earth’s population? I remember learning 6 billion, and some of you might even have learned 5 billion. Well, it turns out it’s about 6.8 billion.
Or, imagine you are considering relocating to another city. Not recognizing the slow change in the economic fortunes of various metropolitan areas, you immediately dismiss certain cities. For example, Pittsburgh, a city in the core of the historic Rust Belt of the United States, was for a long time considered to be something of a city to avoid. But recently, its economic fortunes have changed, swapping steel mills for technology, with its job growth ranked sixth in the entire United States.
These slow-changing facts are what I term “mesofacts.” Mesofacts are the facts that change neither too quickly nor too slowly, that lie in this difficult-to-comprehend middle, or meso-, scale. Often, we learn these in school when young and hold onto them, even after they change. For example, if, as a baby boomer, you learned high school chemistry in 1970, and then, as we all are apt to do, did not take care to brush up on your chemistry periodically, you would not realize that there are 12 new elements in the Periodic Table. Over a tenth of the elements have been discovered since you graduated high school! While this might not affect your daily life, it is astonishing and a bit humbling.
For these kinds of facts, the analogy of how to boil a frog is apt: Change the temperature quickly, and the frog jumps out of the pot. But slowly increase the temperature, and the frog doesn’t realize that things are getting warmer, until it’s been boiled. So, too, is it with humans and how we process information. We recognize rapid change, whether it’s as simple as a fast-moving object or living with the knowledge that humans have walked on the moon. But anything short of large-scale rapid change is often ignored. This is the reason we continue to write the wrong year during the first days of January.
Our schools are biased against mesofacts. The arc of our educational system is to be treated as little generalists when children, absorbing bits of knowledge about everything from biology to social studies to geology. But then, as we grow older, we are encouraged to specialize. This might have been useful in decades past, but in our increasingly fast-paced and interdisciplinary world, lacking an even approximate knowledge of our surroundings is unwise.
Updating your mesofacts can change how you think about the world. Do you know the percentage of people in the world who use mobile phones? In 1997, the answer was 4 percent. By 2007, it was nearly 50 percent. The fraction of people who are mobile phone users is the kind of fact you might read in a magazine and quote at a cocktail party. But years later the number you would be quoting would not just be inaccurate, it would be seriously wrong. The difference between a tiny fraction of the world and half the globe is startling, and completely changes our view on global interconnectivity.
Mesofacts can also be fun. Let’s focus for a moment on some mesofacts that can be of vital importance if you’re a child, or parent of a child: those about dinosaurs. Just a few decades ago, dinosaurs were thought to be cold-blooded, slow-witted lizards that walked with their legs splayed out beside them. Now, scientists think that many dinosaurs were warm-blooded and fast-moving creatures. And they even had feathers! Just a few weeks ago we learned about the color patterns of dinosaurs (stripes! with orange tufts!). These facts might not affect how you live your life, but then again, you’re probably not 6 years old. There is another mesofact that is unlikely to affect your daily routine, but might win you a bar bet: the number of planets known outside the solar system. After the first extrasolar planet around an ordinary star made headlines back in 1995, most people stopped paying attention. Well, the number of extrasolar planets is currently over 400. Know this, and the next round won’t be on you.
The fact that the world changes rapidly is exciting, but everyone knows about that. There is much change that is neither fast nor momentous, but no less breathtaking.
Samuel Arbesman is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Health Care Policy at Harvard Medical School. He is a regular contributor to Ideas. He has started a new website devoted to mesofacts, which can be found at mesofacts.org.
Published on Wednesday, March 10th, 02010 by Austin Brown
“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.
Published on Friday, March 5th, 02010 by Alexander Rose - Twitter: @zander
A pillar at the Gobekli Tepe temple near Sanliurfa, Turkey. (photo: Berthold Steinhilber/Laif-Redux)
The good folks at Atlas Obscura pointed me to this fantastic story on an archaeological find near the Syrian Border in Turkey that pushes back the date of great stonework, and in effect the beginning of known civilization, by many millennia. (snippet below)
Standing on the hill at dawn, overseeing a team of 40 Kurdish diggers, the German-born archeologist waves a hand over his discovery here, a revolution in the story of human origins. Schmidt has uncovered a vast and beautiful temple complex, a structure so ancient that it may be the very first thing human beings ever built. The site isn’t just old, it redefines old: the temple was built 11,500 years ago—a staggering 7,000 years before the Great Pyramid, and more than 6,000 years before Stonehenge first took shape. The ruins are so early that they predate villages, pottery, domesticated animals, and even agriculture—the first embers of civilization. In fact, Schmidt thinks the temple itself, built after the end of the last Ice Age by hunter-gatherers, became that ember—the spark that launched mankind toward farming, urban life, and all that followed.
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