The always wonderful Paleo Future blog has uploaded a full PDF copy of a treatise on the future done in 01963 for a now lost time capsule. It is full of optimistic predictions of what the next century will bring from an era of happy futurism.

It is wonderful to see other modern craftsmen and artists working on machines like this again.  Eugene Sargent recently completed this beautiful Orrery commission for a client.  There is a very nice write up on the client’s web site as well as this fun video of it being produced.

Wired is running a cool pictorial on the new amorphous metal making techniques. These “metallic glass” materials have some amazing properties for making long lasting structures. Back in 01997 or so we tested some of these metals as pendulum flexures (as seen above).  In fact there is still test pendulum hanging on one of these here at our museum. At the time however the techniques for making metallic glass limited the material to only very thin strips, and were still prone to spiral type fracturing which kept us from using it in torsional pendulums. It looks like this new technique has a kind of hybrid molecular structure, that works similarly to a composite, and stops that type of fracturing. Very cool. Cant wait to get my hands on some…

* Niall Ferguson & Peter Schwartz on “Historian vs. Futurist on Human Progress” - audio up, video coming soon

* Video is up of the discussion between Alexander Rose the Director of The Long Now Foundation and Carlo Petrini the Founder of Slow Food, entitled “Why Time” (presented by The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.)

It’s a clock that is dead, until you break its glass case. Then it begins ticking. You are now committed to whatever. The artist, Alex-vf, says “it helps you make up your mind.” Here is the official description (via Seth).

The “Birth Clock” is a fragile glass object containing a digital clock that is not working; it is designed to help you to come to a decision when you’re stuck at a specific point in life. Smash the glass, and the clock will start to work, leaving you with the broken object as a reminder of your dramatic decision.

Our good friends from The Science Museum in London (which houses our first clock prototype) have recently completed and shipped over their historic construction of Charles Babbage’s Difference Engine No.2 to the Computer History Museum here in California. There is a great video of it working and an explanation at Wired.com (also above, sorry about the advertisement). They are having a public opening on May 10th.

The good folks over at Paleo Future published this great nugget from the 01922 Ogden Standard predicting what the world might be like in 10,000 years (click image above for a large version). While they seem to have nailed a few things that have already come about like solar power, chemical re-breathers, and strong clear plastics, we are still clearly working on the anti-gravity floating cities. Perhaps most disturbing is this illustration of a flying person in the year 11,922, where the author failed to grasp the inevitable advancements in hair loss treatment:

The strangest part is the reasoning around why we might live in cloud cities Lando Calrissian style. The author seems to think that while humans could easily adapt to the lower atmospheric pressure, that (what we now know are very hardy) microbes would not, and we would therefore no longer have to worry about disease. The other interesting assertion as to why we might live above the clouds is that “Sunlight, as we know, is most beneficial to humans beings, and having a 100 percent of it all the time we naturally shall be far better off.”

This is a wonderful find by “America Found: A Snapshot History” blog. It is someone’s snap shots they took of their TV as one of the Apollo missions took place. There is something quaint and lovely about taking pictures of your television to document an important moment. Pre VCR, pre DVD, pre TiVo but still captures the essence of the broadcast.

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.

 

(olive tree photo by CorinthianGulf on Flickr)

Joseph Holsten (Charter Member #637) sends in this interesting yet troubling piece from the Wall St Journal on the market for very old trees:

Nick Lloyd, who edits the online Spanish environmental journal iberianature.com, says the market in ancient olive trees is growing, despite the naturally limited supply of the commodity and mounting opposition from conservation groups. “Ten years ago the starting price was €2,000 for a thousand-year-old tree,” Mr. Lloyd says. “Now it’s €18,000.” (continue to the article)