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Art project in progress A History of the Sky features lots and lots of time-lapse videos of the sky that are synchronized so that they’re all showing the same time of day.  Ken Murphy is the artist that created it and he hopes to one day manifest all the data he’s collecting as a video installation that’s always displaying the skies of the last 365 days.  The project was recently featured at the Exploratorium, but it’s still in a need of a home for the installation.

Here’s how it works.

If you’d like to see an installation in person, here are several upcoming opportunities:

• Maker Faire UK, at the Life Science Centre Planetarium, Newcastle UK: March 13-14, 2010
• Google I/O Conference After Hours Party, at Moscone West, San Francisco: May 19, 2010
• Bay Area Maker Faire, at the San Mateo County Event Center: May 22-23, 2010

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There is new media available from our monthly series, the Seminars About Long-term Thinking. Stewart Brand’s summaries and audio downloads or podcasts of the talks are free to the public; Long Now members can view HD video of the Seminars and comment on them.

Watch the video of Alan Weisman’s “World Without Us, World With Us”

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The Long Now Foundation’s monthly Seminars About Long-term Thinking

presents David Eagleman on “Six Easy Steps to Avert the Collapse of Civilization”

Thursday April 1, 02010 at 7:30 pm at the Herbst Theater in San Francisco

Long Now Members can reserve 2 seats, join today!

or you can purchase tickets for $10 each.

About this Seminar:
David Eagleman may be the best combination of scientist and fiction-writer alive. Sum, his collection of afterlife alternatives, made a stunning literary debut last year and now appears in 21 languages. Simultaneously he is a neuroscientist at Baylor College of Medicine, specializing in time perception.

• Twitter - up to the minute info on tickets and events
• Long Now Blog – daily updates on events and ideas
• Facebook – stay in touch through our fan page
• Long Now Meetups - join one or start your own

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There is new media available from our monthly series, the Seminars About Long-term Thinking. Stewart Brand’s summaries and audio downloads or podcasts of the talks are free to the public; Long Now members can view HD video of the Seminars and comment on them.

Listen to the Audio of Beth Noveck’s “Transparent Government” (downloads tab)

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Boing Boing notes that Popular Science has put up their whole 137 year historical archive on line in partnership with Google.  While you cant search by issue, you can do keyword searches.  I hope more long standing publications follow suit, this is a real treasure trove, especially the advertisements…

Search the Popular Science Archive

Thanks to Chaz for sending this in.

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Dot.Gov

Noveck began with the example of patents, first devised in Renaissance Florence and Venice to protect techniques such as glass manufacture. In England, conferring a monopoly on a tool or technique became a prerogative of the king. In contemporary America, the process of getting a 20-year monopoly on your invention from the US Patent Office is mired in a morass of litigation costs, a huge backlog, insufficient reviewers with insufficient science education, and what Noveck calls “an outmoded conception of expertise.”

Her revolutionary approach is to…

Read the rest of Stewart Brand’s Summary

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A pillar at the Gobekli Tepe temple near Sanliurfa, Turkey. (photo: Berthold Steinhilber/Laif-Redux)

The good folks at Atlas Obscura pointed me to this fantastic story on an archaeological find near the Syrian Border in Turkey that pushes back the date of great stonework, and in effect the beginning of known civilization, by many millennia. (snippet below)

Standing on the hill at dawn, overseeing a team of 40 Kurdish diggers, the German-born archeologist waves a hand over his discovery here, a revolution in the story of human origins. Schmidt has uncovered a vast and beautiful temple complex, a structure so ancient that it may be the very first thing human beings ever built. The site isn’t just old, it redefines old: the temple was built 11,500 years ago—a staggering 7,000 years before the Great Pyramid, and more than 6,000 years before Stonehenge first took shape. The ruins are so early that they predate villages, pottery, domesticated animals, and even agriculture—the first embers of civilization. In fact, Schmidt thinks the temple itself, built after the end of the last Ice Age by hunter-gatherers, became that ember—the spark that launched mankind toward farming, urban life, and all that followed.

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