Besides the canonical Bristlecone Pine, there are many other organism on earth that will outlive you. Photographer Rachel Sussman has been traveling around the world to find and photograph them. I’m surprised by the number and variety of long-lived organisms. I very much like that she includes the low lifes — lichen and so forth. You can keep up with her investigations with her intelligent blog.

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 Kent Corbell sends in this wonderful website, the Atlas Obscura.  A crowd-sourced, yet curated collection of the worlds most wondrous treasures.  As a collector of such places I was amazed to find many many new sites to me.  Including a clock museum in Austria that apparently has a 8820 year clock, a site in the wilds of north east India that has bridges made of living tree roots, and a 92 foot tall aeolian wind harp nearly in my back yard… amazing.

This ultra time-lapse simulation of tectonic drift shows how dynamic our home planet it. The clip portrays the most recent 400 million-year geological history of the continents of Earth, and a prediction of its next 250 million years, all in 70 seconds. I love the way New York comes crashing into London in the far future. (Thanks, Stewart Brand)

Good things can be done over long times. Oxford University, with its multi-century history and perspective, is one of the few institutions to support very long-term projects. Oxford University Press will this year release a book that has taken almost 45 years to finish. It’s the world’s largest thesaurus — and includes almost the entire vocabulary of English.  The project was begun in 1965. (Thanks, Joe Stirt)

According to the BBC report:

The work was nearly destroyed in a fire in 1978, but despite the building being gutted, a metal filing cabinet protected the files. A spokesman said the final tome would contain over 230,000 categories with 800,000 meanings. The thesaurus was nearly completed in 1980, but the team decided to include words from updated versions of the Oxford English Dictionary. This added almost 30 years more work to the project.

One wonders what other kinds of things could we do if we were willing to devote half a century to it?

According to Oxford U Press the book features:

• A unique thesaurus resource – the very first historical thesaurus to be compiled for any of the world’s languages
• The largest thesaurus resource in the world, covering more than 920,000 words and meanings from Old English to the present day based on the Oxford English Dictionary
• Synonyms listed with dates of first recorded use in English, in chronological order, with earliest synonyms first
• Uses a thematic system of classification, with synonyms and related words forming part of a detailed semantic hierarchy
• Comprehensive index enables complete cross-referencing of nearly one million words and meanings
• Contains a comprehensive sense inventory of Old English
• Includes a free fold-out colour chart which shows the top levels of the classification structure

You can preorder the “Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary: With Additional Material from A Thesaurus of Old English” at Amazon for $316.

But the Canon 5D used to capture this was modified by replacing the standard infrared filter that normally ships inside the camera (which also block out the deep reds) with a special filter to permit near infrared photography. Thus the reds you see here that most cameras won’t capture.  You can buy fully modified Canon 5D cameras, ready for astrophotography, from here.

Here are the technical specifics by William Castleman:

The time-lapse sequence was taken with the simplest equipment that I brought to the star party. I put the Canon EOS-5D (AA screen modified to record hydrogen alpha at 656 nm) with an EF 15mm f/2.8 lens on a weighted tripod. Exposures were 20 seconds at f/2.8 ISO 1600 followed by 40 second interval. Exposures were controlled by an interval timer shutter release (Canon TC80N3). Power was provided by a Hutech EOS203 12v power adapter run off a 12v deep cycle battery. Large jpg files shot in custom white balance were batch processed in Photoshop (levels, curves, contrast, Noise Ninja noise reduction, resize) and assembled in Quicktime Pro. Editing/assembly was with Sony Vegas Movie Studio 9.

Long Now Member Michael C. sent word about a great book review on the Atlantic’s Editor’s Choice for December.  The book is Europe Between the Oceans by Barry Cunliffe, and it recounts 10,000 years of European history starting in 9,000 BC.

I can’t think of a better gift this year for the historically minded reader. No book so well exemplifies what Cunliffe joyously calls “the vibrancy of archaeology.” More important, its focus on what Braudel called the longue durée will jolt the temporally complacent (and aren’t we all?), just as its bracingly materialist approach—which leads to the inescapable conclusion that trade has always laid the foundation for the exchange of ideas and beliefs, indeed for most cultural transformations—nicely tempers our blather about the power of ideas and the individual.

Tyler Cowen liked it, too.  Pick it up in all it’s deca-millenial glory.

The recent collision of two satellites in orbit represents a pretty serious problem for proponents of spaceflight.  Some scientists are discussing ways of cleaning up the increasing amounts of debris in earth orbit.  They’re worried that more and more junk flying around up there will make it difficult for humanity to reliably operate satellites or manned vehicles.

Trash in orbit isn’t a new issue – it came up a couple years ago as a result of the Chinese test to shoot down a satellite, though the debris concern was somewhat overshadowed by totally legitimate fears of the militarization of space.

What scientists and spaceflight supporters hope to avoid is what’s called the Kessler Syndrome – a chain reaction set off by debris collisions that cause more debris and, therefore, more collisions.  The result of this scenario is such a high risk of collision in orbit that it renders impossible many or all of the space-based activities that we currently take for granted.

NASA’s on the case, though, with their Orbital Debris Program Office at the Johnson Space Center.  The coolest thing on their site is a link to the facility where orbital debris collisions are modeled – the Hypervelocity Impact Technology Facility.  They use high-speed cameras, light gas guns and computer simulations (with video!) to explore how collisions at orbital velocity (kilometers per second) will effect various shielding materials.

The European Space Agency is also taking a serious look at the space debris problem.  Watch a video showing the build-up of orbital debris over the last 50 years on their Space Debris Spotlight page and check out their own work on hypervelocity impacts on the space debris section of their website.

On the left: “All the water in the world
(1.4087 billion cubic kilometres of it)
including sea water, ice, lakes, rivers,
ground water, clouds, etc.”

On the right: “All the air in the atmosphere
(5140 trillion tonnes of it) gathered into a
ball at sea-level density.”

Re-blogged from Forgetomori.

On November 1st and 2nd, Stanford University and UC Berkeley will be hosting a gathering of the “scientific community.”  You don’t need tenure to get in, though.  The goal of Wonderfest is to bring together all who are curious, regardless of institutional ranking, to celebrate the scientific quest for truth and to hear a little bit about how we’re doing on some of the big questions.

On Saturday at Stanford, you can hear a physicist and a statistician discuss randomness, some geneticists hoping to revive extinct species, and a whole panel of conservation, carbon capture, solar and fission experts talking about the future of energy.  There will also be a Science Expo featuring art, books, comedy, crafts and music with a “scientific bent,” and a Mind Duel, pitting scientists against high school students.

The Wonderfest heads up to UC Berkeley on Sunday with an astronomer and SETI’s Chief Scientist discussing humanity’s heretofore cosmic loneliness, a psychiatrist talking about dreams with a sleep researcher and a discussion about how to make politics a little more science-savvy.  In addition, the Science Expo continues!

Channeling the late, great Carl Sagan, Wonderfest Director Tucker Hiatt says:

“I hold that the popularization of science is successful if, at first, it does no more than spark the sense of wonder.”  This sentiment, expressed by astronomer Carl Sagan shortly before he died, inspired the name — and the emotional foundation — of America’s oldest science festival.   After ten years, Wonderfest, the Bay Area Festival of Science, is still dedicated to Sagan’s memory.

Wonderfest 2008, the tenth anniversary festival, happens at Stanford on Saturday, Nov. 1, and at UC Berkeley on Sunday, Nov. 2.  The heart of Wonderfest is a series of public dialogues between world-class researchers in discussion of provocative scientific questions.  This year’s dialogues address the origin of randomness, the revival of extinct species, humanity’s perilous energy future, the decades long failure of SETI, the significance of dreams, and the science understanding that is essential for our leaders.

The dialogues and many ancillary activities — some festive, some deep — serve to broaden the meaning of “scientific community.”  Professional scientists often use this term to refer only to themselves.  Wonderfest uses it to describe everyone who regards science as the best way of learning how the world really is.

 I recently came across these amazing data driven globe’s from Yale’s G-Econ group.  The one above represents population density, but their tool allows for all kinds of data to drive the topology from average rainfall to distance from coastlines.