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.”

(BBC via Brian Eno)

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.

image courtesy of michaelz1 on flickr

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.

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

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.

Telling Tales Map by Haisam Hussein

The Art of Knowing graphics by Joyce Pendola

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.

(Where Is the Best Clock in the Universe? – Technology Review)

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:

]]> http://blog.longnow.org/2010/04/08/lost-landscapes-of-google-maps/feed/ 2 http://blog.longnow.org/2010/04/01/dumpster-diving-for-science/ http://blog.longnow.org/2010/04/01/dumpster-diving-for-science/#comments Thu, 01 Apr 2010 11:47:37 +0000 Austin Brown http://blog.longnow.org/?p=1856 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.

The LOIRP team obtained $750,000 from NASA and 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 at LOIRP.

- NASA Lunar Science Institute

(via Metamodern)

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.

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.

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

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.

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!

Below appears a set of images of a 2009 work called “E Pluribus Unum” — “Out of many, one” (an important U.S. motto).

Jordan’s website explains:

This large scale mandala depicts the names of one million organizations around the world that are devoted to peace, environmental stewardship, social justice, and the preservation of diverse and indigenous culture.

The actual number of such organizations is unknown, but Paul Hawken’s “Blessed Unrest” project estimates the number at somewhere between one and two million, and growing. If the lines in this piece were straightened out, they would make an unbroken line of names, in a ten point font, twenty seven miles long.

Of course, to read the statistics is one thing; actually to image them is another. This remarkable visualisation helps bring home the scale of social transformation, at the institutional level, which we are currently undergoing.

Paul Hawken’s Seminar About Long-term Thinking that deals with the themes of Blessed Unrest can be found here.

[Images: Chris Jordan]

Global warming seems to be speeding up the growth of the longest living organisms we know of.  Bristlecone pines can live for almost 5,000 years and the information stored in the growth of their rings is a treasure trove of climate data.  Because their growth is a function of the weather, analyzing the size of the rings they develop each year can tell us what that period’s climate was like.

At an elevation of 12,000 feet, where almost no rain falls, temperature is the driving influence on tree growth, while lower down, rainfall is the strongest factor in tree growth, Salzer said in an interview.

Matthew Salzer,  Malcolm K. Hughes and a team of dendrochronologists from the University of Arizona have just published a paper in which they explain that the outermost rings of Bristlecones – the most recent ones – tend to be significantly larger than most of the earlier ones.  In the last 50 years, the trees have been growing faster than they did in the previous 3,700.

Salzer has done work on Mt. Washington for his studies and shared data with Long Now.  The information from the trees on the future Clock site has provided Long Now with a helpful understanding of the area’s climate dating back several thousand years.

The current study is an indication that climate change is affecting these trees and the delicate ecosystems that support them.  This high-altitude temperature change has significance for more than the Bristlecones and the local environment, however.  The mountains this phenomenon is documented in are an important source of snowmelt for much of California and Nevada:

Hughes said that increasing temperatures high in the mountains could have significant effects elsewhere. In many areas of the western U.S., mountains are a key source of water for farms and urban areas at lower elevations.

“If the snow melts earlier, the mountains won’t be able to hold onto water for as long,” Hughes said. “They won’t be as effective as water towers for us.”

The European Space Agency’s Rosetta probe made its final flyby of the Earth on Friday in order to fling itself off towards its target: Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko.

Launched in 02004, Rosetta has made several planetary flybys in order to gain the velocity necessary to approach and eventually orbit the comet so that a small landing craft can touchdown upon and sample some of the comet’s material.  Scientists hope that a better understanding of the make-up of a comet will be like a key that will unlock many secrets about the formation of the planets and the development of our solar system.

Included on the craft is one of the early Rosetta Disks produced by Long Now.  The highly durable, format-independent linguistic archive will survive as long as the craft continues to orbit Comet 67P.  Unlike the Voyager Disks, this terrestrial artifact will remain in our solar system orbiting the comet, which is orbiting the Sun and will continue to do so until it runs into something (which could be quite a while).

You can see lots of great photos and amazing animations on the Rosetta blog, run by the ESA.  In addition, there was a lovely little piece in the Guardian highlighting the mission’s long-term nature:

The scientific pay-off from Rosetta could be huge. But contemplate the generosity of vision that made the mission possible. Some of those who lobbied for Rosetta will have died by the time the first results are delivered. Some young scientists who will build their careers on the data from Rosetta were not born when the mission was conceived. If, as Harold Wilson famously observed, a week is a long time in politics, Rosetta is a reminder that we can also think on a celestial timescale.

The Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics is holding its 10th anniversary Quantum to Cosmos Festival this month in Waterloo, Ontario.  The 10 day extravaganza has the theme this year of “Ideas for the Future” and seeks to “take a global audience from the strange world of subatomic particles to the outer frontiers of the universe.”

They’ve got lots of great lectures that are free to view online, including several by speakers in our seminar series:

• Stewart Brand will be on The Agenda with Steve Paikin Friday night to discuss science’s evolving role in society and on Saturday he’ll be giving his own lecture on his Ecopragmatist Manifesto, Whole Earth Discipline.
• Peter Diamandis spoke on Sunday about the X Prize Foundation.
• Neal Stephenson spoke with Lee Smolin and Jaron Lanier about using fiction as a window into science and he’ll be joining Tuesday night’s panel on The Agenda with Steve Paikin to discuss our increasingly wired lives.

There are many other scientists and thinkers on the schedule, and each of these lectures will become available online shortly after the live event, so keep checking back on the full list to see what’s new.  (A play button will appear on the icon for each event once the video is released.)