Watchmaker Stephen Forsey has just released a new mechanical planetaria with Richard Mille watches that is quite gorgeous. There is an excellent write up of it in Watchismo. (thanks to Danielle for sending this to me by way of boingboing. . .   Read More

Long Now seminar speaker Alex Wright brought to all of our attention the truly visionary work of Belgian Paul Otlet and his Mundaneum of 1910 (video from a documentary above, and Stewart Brand’s description from the talk below.)
The greatest unknown revolutionary was the Belgian Paul Otlet.
In 1895 he set about freeing the. . .   Read More

A Series of Information Explosions

As usual, microbes led the way. Bacteria have swarmed in intense networks for 3.5 billion years. Then a hierarchical form emerged with the first nucleated cells which were made up of an enclosed society of formerly independent organisms.

That’s the pattern for the evolution of information, Alex Wright. . .   Read More

For the past few years Chris Hibbert has been working on Zócalo, an Open Source Toolkit for Prediction Markets. He writes, “my purpose in the project is to build prediction market software that people can use as a foundation for deploying many markets of this type. As I said in my proposal to CommerceNet, the […]

Danielle here at Long Now sent me this interesting BBC piece on how a group at the University of Wisconsin – Madison is looking at mechanical computing at the nano scale in order to avoid the thermal limits being approached in CMOS circuitry.

They claim to be inspired by Babbage’s decimal computing tech. It makes. . .   Read More

 
I was once again reminded of Dan Bricklin’s excellent piece on long term software and thought it was worth a mention here.  His basic point is that a governments software, should be as lasting and shared as its other civil infrastructure.  The article does a great job of showing the perils of entrusting all. . .   Read More

Democracy versus Culture

Francis Fukuyama began by describing the four most significant challenges to the thesis in his famed 1992 book, The End of History and the Last Man. In the book he proposed that humanity’s economic progress over the past 10,000 years was driven by the accumulation of science and technology over. . .   Read More

This is the first working prototype of the Orrery, or planetary display for the 10,000 Year Clock. This prototype was just recently re-installed at our San Francisco Museum & Store. This part of the clock might help future visitors understand other parts of the clock by accurately showing the positions of the human. . .   Read More

Long Now recently completed this prototype of the Solar Synchronizer for the 10,000 Year Clock, and it is now on display at our San Francisco Museum & Store. This mechanism will help the Clock keep accurate time over the millennia. While the Clock’s day to day time-keeper is a slow pendulum, a. . .   Read More

This has nothing whatsoever to do with Long Shorts (videos, generally short ones, that exemplify long term thinking or longer perspective) at all.

In the Long Now Shop we carry a variety of DVDs that have something to do with long term thinking, or inspire us the same way the clock does. One of these. . .   Read More