I just got an update from David Rumsey that there will be a special event at the map museum in Second Life Thursday March 6th at noon PST. MIT Tech Review is reporting that Long Now board member and mapping maven David Rumsey is launching his historical map collection in Second Life this week. A […]

Our friend Scott Beale over at Squidlist has a write up on the winner of the History Channel’s City of the Future contest. The honors go to IwamotoScott Architecture’s Hydro-Net concept netting $10,000 for their win. While a lot of the ideas are pretty interesting the “hydrogen fueled hover cars” part. . .   Read More

Since its launch in 2005, Google Earth has become a valuable tool for sharing information of global scale. Its accessible platform and wide distribution has led to a wealth of independently created “layers” exploring a huge variety of topics.

The Rosetta archive is by design an explicitly global collection, and by nature relevant to every. . .   Read More

Wired and AP is reporting that Disney’s new “house of the future” will be (re)-opening this May. The original one (prominently sponsored by Monsanto Plastics) that opened in 01954 was closed only a decade later, (see the excellent video above and Part 2 here).

Apparently the new one sponsored by Microsoft, HP, and. . .   Read More

Long Now has been playing with geo-data mash-ups recently as a potential interface for our Rosetta Project. In researching what is out there Flickr Vision and Earth Album (and TwitterVision linked off the same page) is one of the cooler geo-mash-ups I have seen. Using online mapping capability tied to social. . .   Read More

This week Shell oil published an article by their president Jeroen van der Veer about how he sees the future of energy through 02100. It is surprisingly non-corporate and shows how at least one of the largest oil companies in the world views the coming energy and environmental shortfalls. Most surprising to me is. . .   Read More

Wired’s Blog has a nifty piece on the two millennia old Demascus steel process replete with quotes from a Nobel laureate and Neal Stephenson:
Damascus swords — sharp enough to slice a falling piece of silk in half, strong enough to split stones without dulling — owe their legendary qualities to carbon nanotubes, says chemist and. . .   Read More

…by Bill Gates.

Image from the International CES website

Perhaps the central feature of the Long Now’s Long Bets project is accountability — tracking the fortunes of predictive statements and the arguments made in support of them. In a mediasphere with an attention span as short as ours, pundits, CEOs and other “thought leaders” can. . .   Read More

Here at Long Now we are now experimenting with new ways of using stone in the Clock after being introduced to Stuart Kendall and Jason Clausen, the stone crafters of Seattle Solstice. They have built new machines to cut stone in ways not before possible. Their work in large stone is machined to tolerances usually. . .   Read More

We have been researching long lasting magnetic properties for use in the Clock of the Long Now. Magnetite or lodestone is a naturally occurring magnetic material that has been known for at least two millennia. These materials have held their magnetism even over geologic time scales which makes them interesting for potential use in the […]