Scientists at NASA have announced that Voyager 1 is making its way through the very outer edges of our solar system. Sooner than expected, they say, the space probe will leave our tiny corner of the Milky Way behind, and become the first man-made craft to enter the dark reaches of interstellar space.

Voyager. . .   Read More

Long Now Board Member Kevin Kelly recently went on a two-month voyage through Asia. But don’t worry – he won’t make you sit through hours of travel pictures. Instead, he’s made a video that condenses his 60-day trip into a mere 90 seconds:

Kelly took 1 second of footage for each. . .   Read More

When we think about the development of computers, we often think into the future: we imagine (or work on developing) new software, ever larger capacities for data storage, and ever smaller, sleeker hardware design.

But Ptak Science Books, a blog on the history of science with an emphasis on images, gives us an interesting look. . .   Read More

Have you ever accidentally dropped something out of your pocket while the toilet is flushing? That’s R-M-*.
Those three little characters are more dangerous than they might look: they very nearly spelled the end of Woody, Buzz Lightyear, and Mr. Potato Head. R-M-* erases Linux and Unix drives, and in 01999, someone. . .   Read More

In 1854, Sir Francis Galton published his first edition of The Art of Travel, a practical handbook for the serious globetrotter. The work offered useful tips and advice to help expeditions deal with unforeseen issues along the way, from building a makeshift shelter and navigating without a compass, to dealing with hostile “natives.” The guide. . .   Read More

Solar-powered houses, computerized education, flying cars, and strawberries the size of your head: that’s how artist Arthur Radebaugh once imagined the future. In the 1950s and ‘60s, he published a series of newspaper cartoons entitled “Closer than We Think,” in which he illustrated a shiny, grand, and technologically revolutionized world of tomorrow.

Radebaugh. . .   Read More

Nature is often resilient, not fragile. There is no wilderness unspoiled by man. Thoreau was a townie. Conservation, by many measures, is failing. If it is to survive, it has to change.
Environment & Energy Publishing recently featured an article on former SALT speaker Peter Kareiva, the chief scientist for the Nature Conservancy who argues. . .   Read More

Hungry for information, but bored by graphs and pie charts? Then pay a visit to Information is Beautiful, a site dedicated to all things informational – and all things pretty. Its pages showcase models and graphics that reveal what can happen when data presentation is combined with an eye for design and aesthetics.

The site is. . .   Read More

It’s somewhere between performance and installation art: last month, artist Jonathan Schipper slowly – and deliberately – crashed a car into a wall. Moving at microscopic speeds, the crash took place over the course of a full month, each day inching a bit closer to its inevitable fate. Schipper’s piece captures the destruction of speed, […]

In a recent article on Slate, Long Now Board member Esther Dyson takes up the concept of Charter Cities – Paul Romer’s model for the creation of prospering, sustainable zones of urban life, about which he spoke at a 02009 SALT lecture. Dyson suggests that Romer’s business-model approach to the construction and functioning. . .   Read More