New Cities with New Rules This talk was the first in a series of public discussions of an idea that Romer has been working on for two years. His economic theory of history explains phenomena such as the constant improvement of the human standard of living by looking primarily at just two forms of innovative [...]

The Long News: stories that might still matter fifty, or a hundred, or ten thousand years from now. There have been a flurry of reports in the last few weeks which try to anticipate how climate change may impact human populations. 1. Two trends (urbanization and global warming) seem to be on a collision course: [...]

Follow @longnowlive on Twitter for live updates from Long Now events, including tonight’s Paul Romer Seminar which starts at 7:30 PST. Our special guest live Twitterer today is @mikl_em. We encourage anyone else who would like to live twitter about the event to use the #longnow tag on their posts so that anyone can track [...]

A shift in time can shift our perspective, which is why time lapse photography can be so powerful. Here is a simple time lapse of the night sky, using a wide-angle lens. You get a Big Here/Long Now experience. But the Canon 5D used to capture this was modified by replacing the standard infrared filter [...]

The 4th Annual Maker Faire takes place this year on Saturday May 30th and Sunday the 31st at the San Mateo Fairgrounds and Long Now is thrilled to be an exhibitor for the third year running. Maker Faire is an incredible experience for the whole family with exhibits ranging from gigantic Tesla coils to small [...]

  Member Austin Quig-Hartman sent in a reference to this very cool clock project by Che-Wei Wang.  It reminds me of a clock version of Art Ganson’s “Machine with Concrete.“  What I find really interesting is that the designer ended up with  3.16 billion cycles which is basically the average number of beats a human [...]

Bragging about failure rarely gets a professor tenure, or makes a scientist famous.  However it is failure by which we all learn the most from.  The video above where Brian Cox discusses the first failure at the LHC is an excellent example of how interesting failure can be.The benefits of publishing negative or ‘inconsequential’ data [...]