This issue of the Quarterly News for Long Now Members covers the 02009 Summer Solstice in the Northern Hemisphere and the Winter Solstice in the Southern Hemisphere. It is written by Long Now staff and we hope you enjoy it.
Long Now founding board member Brian Eno lit up Sydney this summer (winter down there, of course) for the first annual incarnation of Luminous, a festival of music, ideas, light and performances. Curated by Eno, the event was kicked off by the Lighting of the Sails on May 26th, in which the Sydney Opera House's iconic white structure was bathed in the glow of massive projections from Eno's auto-generative artwork 77 Million Paintings. Each night until June 14th, the piece illuminated the harbor as Luminous' festivities went on around it.
"What's great is watching crowds of people gathering and going 'Ooooh!' and 'Aaaah' as though at a very slow fireworks display," Eno said.
To create such huge and vivid images, more than fourteen 3,000-watt projectors were used. Here's what Brian said on the process of creating the projections:
"They're enormous projectors - 14 on that side alone - and very carefully masked so there's no fringing. And the image is double projected - so every area is covered by two identical images carefully registered on top of each other to boost power. The projectors are 3,000 watts each, and they project from across the other side of the harbour - a throw of about 500 metres."
"It was done by first of all photographing the building from each projector position, using a lens identical to that in the projector - and then cutting precise masks based on the photos."
"The Opera House has received so much interest from surrounding inhabitants that they're now starting it an hour earlier every evening - a lot of people wanted to be able to see it from their offices and on the way home from work (it's winter here now so starts to get dark about 5)."
In order to offset the energy usage, agreements were made with several nearby skyscrapers and office towers to keep off their non-essential nighttime lighting. Additionally, the projectors used Bespoke lenses, designed for the Beijing Olympic Ceremonies. These lenses offer a 40% improvement in magnification and helped the projectors operate more efficiently. All energy used for the installation was generated using renewable biomass.
Many amazing photos of the projections can be found on Flickr.
Photos in this article courtesy of Gilbert Jadraque.
Luminous was put on by the Sydney Opera House as part of the annual Vivid Sydney city-wide festival. Celebrating music, light and the diversity of Sydney's creative industries, Vivid Sydney lasts throughout May and June.
Long Now is looking for a few intrepid souls. In preparation for inviting all the Long Now members to the Nevada Clock site in June of 02010 for a "camping conference about long-term thinking," we will need to train a set of guides this September to help us.
The Nevada Clock site is spectacular, rugged, and unforgiving. It ranges from our 60 acre base camp property in Spring Valley at 6,000 ft., to the the 183 acres stretched out along Mt. Washington reaching above 11,400 ft. It encompasses one of the only privately held stands of Bristlecone pine trees in the world, some of which have been dated at nearly 5,000 years old. It is surrounded by The Great Basin National Park, the wild Nevada desert, and cave systems like Lehman Caves. The site is 75 road miles from any form of services such as gas, food, mechanics, medical, and lodging.
The reason we need trained guides is that due to the remote and rugged environment, and need of 4x4 vehicles to access much of the area, our small staff would not be able to accommodate a large group safely. In order to be of help to us as a guide you should be self reliant and fit most of the criteria listed below either on your own, or as a team of two. Next June 02010 we will need these guides to be able to advise and lead groups of 5-10 people in and around the area.
If you are interested in the training, please apply by sending an email to jobs@longnow.org with a paragraph explaining your interest, related experience, and which of the criteria you fit below with a description of the vehicle you can bring. We will also need people to help coordinate and organize the camping area which is less technical, and does not require a 4x4 vehicle, please let us know if you are interested that.
Sincerest thanks,
Alexander Rose
Executive Director and Clock Project Manager
* A note about 4 wheel drive vehicles: They are not all created equal. All Wheel Drive is not the same as 4 wheel drive. You will need 4 wheel drive with low range to get to the top of Mt Washington and reasonable undercarriage clearance. Some stock and rental vehicles have made it to the top which include some models of Land Rover, Jeep, Suburban, Dakota, 4 Runner etc. You don't need a giant jacked up, rock crawling, tube frame chassis specialty machine, but please feel free to bring one if you want.
For our third year as an exhibitor at the amazing Maker Faire[http://www.makerfaire.com/], we decided to bring our recently completed first full sized Clock part - the 8' in diameter Geneva Wheel that is part of the Chime Generator. We rented a 16' flatbed truck to move the large Geneva Wheel from the shop in San Rafael where it was built by our Clock team and we needed a forklift with 7' tines to unload it on the other end. We already had other Makers coming to look at it as Chris and Greg assembled and fine tuned the mechanism the day before the Faire opened - this was definitely a taste of what was to come!
We were set up right next to the very popular (and very loud) Tesla Coils. Between both exhibits, the back corner of the Expo Hall where we were located was packed with people for most of the weekend - it was a marvelous opportunity to introduce a lot of people to the 10,000 Year Clock project. We had the Geneva Wheel rigged up to a motor so that the mechanism was in motion for the whole weekend. We placed our scale model showing a section of the Chime Generator inside the mountain with a cardboard cut-out person ascending the stairs, 
next to the large Geneva Wheel. Seeing our visitors' eyes move back and forth between the large Geneva Wheel and the scale model and then the spark of realization on their face when they saw, in their mind, the 30 Geneva Wheels suspended vertically inside the mountain - that was great. That awe is one of the keys to the Clock project and to see even just a hint of it at this early stage is very exciting.
Makers are a savvy bunch, though, and the design challenges inherent to a 10,000 year project were not lost on them and their questions generated intense and in-depth conversations - another key to the success of the Clock project.
Some skeptics brought us their concerns and deposited their two cents, also some good ideas raised here.
Long Now was given an Editor's Choice Award for our exhibit - we're already thinking of what we'll bring to next year's Faire.
Photos taken by Austin Brown, Mikl-Em, Danielle Engelman and Raphael Varieras.
Kevin Kelly, one of Long Now's founding board members has a fascinating project going on - The Internet Mapping Project. He is still looking for contributions; you can download a PDF from the site and then email him your finished map.
"I've become very curious about the maps people have in their minds when they enter the internet. So I've been asking people to draw me a map of the internet as they see it. That's all." Kevin Kelly
There is a wonderful Flickr set with over 90 of these "folk maps," as Kevin calls them.
The Long Now Foundation found the old kids' game of telephone alive and well recently. Executive Director Alexander Rose wrote a blog post about the images of the Rosetta Disk that were taken by Spencer Mishlen for the Data and Art show organized by Jet Propulsion Labs.
Long Now spends a great deal of time and energy making sure what we do is properly explained to the public and Alexander's blog post covered the relevant details of the Rosetta Disk in a way that would quickly give newcomers an understanding of its goal without belaboring the point to existing fans.
The important part, though, was that the images are quite striking. As a result, the post was quickly picked up by Boing Boing Gadgets. Extra exposure is always great and author Steven Leckart did a respectable job with his own explanation of the Rosetta Disk to a more general audience. However nit-picky it may be, though, it is worth noting that, "This piece of micro-etched nickel is comprised of 13,500 minuscule pages.." is not strictly, literally true. (It's the data-set that's comprised of all those tiny pages, not the nickel.) A slightly awkward turn of phrase on a blog would, under most circumstances, hardly be worth mentioning.
Shortly thereafter, however, Gizmodo posted a piece by Jesus Diaz showing the images. His description explains that the 13,500 pages of data are "etched on a nickel." Alexander Rose contacted the editors of the blog, but as of this writing, the post has over 75,000 views (the comments are hilarious) and continues to give the impression that someone at Long Now has 6 months jail-time to serve, once the Secret Service shows up.
The way this information signal degraded as it was passed around the internet reminded us that scientific journalism can easily create significant distortions through even very small mistakes and that sometimes the care and nuance of science simply can't survive the media's need for speed and sensationalism.
We're in the final stages of finishing up the new Long Now site and improved membership program and we're looking for members who'd be interested in beta testing the new site. Please email me directly at danielle@longnow.org if you'd like to get a sneak peek and help us refine the user experience.
The new site is built using Django frameworks and there are a lot of projects we'd like to develop once the first release is completed. If you are a programmer and would be interested in finding out more about these projects, please email me with your areas of interest and expertise. Thank you!
The Long Now Foundation
Fostering Long-term Responsibility
est. 01996.