If you find yourself in SF between Fisherman's Wharf and the Golden Gate bridge, you should check out the Long Now Museum. It's a charming little tribute to impractical arty earnest nerd idealism.
It's not a museum in the traditional sense, but interesting.
You know people were working on this years before Bezos decided to fund it and donate land?
"The idea for the clock has been around since Danny Hillis first proposed it in WIRED magazine in 1995. Since then, Hillis and others have built prototypes and created a nonprofit, the Long Now Foundation, to work on the clock and promote long-term thinking."
Totally. I think using the word "commissioned" in the headline is very misleading. It implies that Bezos paid to have it designed & created, when in fact he's just giving Hillis the money he needs to finally make it a reality.
I love how Bezos chooses to spend his money. When you think of being a billionaire, you (or the common train of thought is) think of consuming stuff or investing in businesses/buying companies.
You hardly think about doing large civilization-type stuff. Or rather, I hardly hear about it so I don't think about it much.
But this is so awesome. Feels like we are in the days of the Roman empire that made statues and told stories of legends from generation-to-generation.
The article [1] linked to by nl describes it quite well.
There are three separate energy reserves in the clock. The hands (dials) mechanism requires human winding -- but only to indicate time, which is kept independently. The chime mechanism is to be primarily ran on human winding. The main (timekeeping) mechanism extracts energy from thermal differences between day and night, and may also be wound by humans.
Moreover, if the main mechanism's reserve accumulates enough energy, it is engineered to overflow and wind up the chime mechanism -- thus the chime will ring once in a while even without humans to wind it. Quite cute, if you ask me.
Another cunning contraption uses Sun's thermal energy for adjusting the clock to solar time (apparent time).
Human intervention to activate the dials and wind the chimes, but the timekeeping is good for 10000 years (they went for daily temperature changes as well as the pendulum.)
From http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2011/06/the_clock_in_...:
So how does the Clock keep going if no one visits it for months, or years, or perhaps decades? If it is let to run down between visits, who would keep resetting it? The Clock is designed to run for 10,000 years even if no one ever visits (although it would not display the correct time till someone visited). If there is no attention for long periods of time the Clock uses the energy captured by changes in the temperature between day and night on the mountain top above to power its time-keeping apparatus. In a place like a top of a mountain, this diurnal difference of tens of degrees in temperature is significant and thus powerful. Thermal power has been used for small mantel clocks before, but it has not been done before at this scale. The differential power is transmitted to the interior of the Clock by long metal rods. As long as the sun shines and night comes, the Clock can keep time itself, without human help. But it can’t ring its chimes for long by itself, or show the time it knows, so it needs human visitors.
But a friend of my father an old hacker (reverse engineered apple2 back in the days and is just crazy good at hacking together stuff) build this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jens_Olsen%27s_World_Clock in half the size al in hand.
One of the cogs takes 400 years to rotate around it's own axis.
How do you measure/test the life of something that's supposed to last for a really long time?
For example, we refit our house with some (beautiful) CREE LED downlamps that are supposed to last about 25 years. While that's nice to know, is it possible to test that claim, or is it purely theoretical? It's not like they have been keeping the same bulb on since 1986.
Former Reliability Engineer here. Not sure for bulbs, since my experience was automotive, but I imaging it is similar. In general, we tried to determine all the factors that lead to failure - vibration, force, impurities, sunlight etc, then you try to accelerate these. So for sunlight, you might raise the intensity of UV etc. There are settings so X hours of acceleration == to X years normal use. These settings are developed in a variety of ways. After you run the test, you apply some stats analysis and a bit of handwaving and proclaim 25 years.
The paras around the picture "Testing the longevity of materials in space on the MISSE" are quite informative. Testing materials in space... I think they're taking it quite seriously.
well you can let 1000 of them run for a year and from the ratio of those that failed calculate (or rather guesstimate) for how many years can more than 500 be still running.
It's not perfect, but for a perfect solution you would need something like a time machine, I guess.
Some failures are at a random distribution - running 1000 for a year will help you estimate that.
But any moving part has a finite lifetime due to wear, and you want to know how long this is. Running lots of them for 1/1000 of the expected lifespan shouldn't produce any at all of this kind of failure.
The normal speed of the clock is very slow, so it should be easy to run it at an accelerated rate to test wear. (There are limits, though; apparently the Difference Engine jams frequently if you overclock it.)
Anathem was the first thing I thought about when I read this article. A quick Google Search shows that Neal Stephenson was unsurprisingly inspired by the Long Now Foundation, so the parallels between this project and the novel are not remotely coincidental. (To me that makes it all the more cool).
Honestly, anything is better than a dead Godaddy domain.
I have a few dead domains that I basically registered during a drunken binge; http://widgetsex.com/ is a good example, the dog you'll see is my friend's and his name is widget; if you let it refresh long enough, you should see an easter egg.
If you want real content, I'd probably just put up some links to information about Anathem, the clock, and the Long Now foundation, with maybe a contact form that accepts suggestions that are better than mine :P
Aha, figures. Would have been surprised if it had been the other way around, he doesn't seem to have any ideas that are his own. Then again, I guess that's the hypothesis of somethingrather - there are no new ideas.
It definitely reinforces Bezos' long-term view of business that he always talks about. And the subtext here is that he is building Amazon to be a company that is still around 10,000 years from now.
A huge clock is nice, but we need a secret giant archive of humanity's intellectual works to go with it. We need a Foundation to support the clock keepers who will maintain this clock.
The purpose of the clock is going to get lost, and eventually there's going to be holo-documentaries on how the 20th century "Americans" predicted the end of the world.
The fact that it's dug into a mountain and has multiple large chambers definitely won't help make it seem scientific and not archaic, mysterious and cultish. I swear they are taking cues from novels.
In 10,000 years, humans could repeatedly cycle between "Stone Age" and "holo documentaries". Civilization as we know it isn't that old, technological civilization even less so.
I don't have a citation, but I've read that if we fall, we won't get back up. The easily mineable metals, minerals and fuel sources have been used up - starting again from scratch would be incredibly difficult.
(Larry Niven addresses this somewhat in his novel The Mote In God's Eye. I can't really elaborate without spoilers. :P)
I wonder how viable that is. In a world where we're considering sucking oil out of sand and stealing air conditioners for $2 worth of copper, I'm surprised there aren't more landfill reclamation projects - so maybe that's strong evidence that landfills don't contain as many goodies as we think.
Plus, you're not going to find coal or oil at a landfill, except in the form of plastic.
For many materials, I think landfill mining is a lot more viable than mining from ores, both on the basis of high concentrations and on the basis of higher energetic states. I mean, you're not going to find native iron, aluminum, titanium, or silicon in rocks, and cullet is a lovely material for making glass from. And, in most of the world, you'll find a lot more platinum and tungsten in the landfill than you will in your local rocks.
Energy and helium are the only resources we're currently consuming. The others are just being reversibly transformed.
Mining landfills is dangerous work, but it can be automated. Mining in general is dangerous work, but I suspect that landfills are even more unpredictable than rocks. Landfills contain smallpox virus, polychlorinated biphenyls, HIV-contaminated hypodermic syringes, and so on.
I think that current landfill mining is limited largely by aesthetic considerations (and the resulting laws), not pure self-interest.
