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 [...]

See Digi-Man and Blizzard duke it out over digital plans of a nuclear powerhouse!! It is good to see an effort to make digital preservation heroic, which as we saw with the Apollo tapes below, it certainly can be. From the halls of Digital Preservation Europe Go to the feed source of this article Go [...]

The latest Seminars About Long-term Thinking are now available as audio downloads or podcasts and in hi-res video for Long Now members. *Michael Pollan on “Deep Agriculture” – audio now available Go to the feed source of this article Go to publisher’s website This article appeared on the website mentioned above and the author and/or [...]

Making farmers cool again Farming has become an occupation and cultural force of the past. Michael Pollan’s talk promoted the premise — and hope — that farming can become an occupation and force of the future. In the past century American farmers were given the assignment to produce lots of calories cheaply, and they did. [...]

Can a logographic script of a major world language survive its own government bureaucracy?  As reported in the NY Times: “Seeking to modernize its vast database on China’s 1.3 billion citizens, the government’s Public Security Bureau has been replacing the handwritten identity card that every Chinese must carry with a computer-readable one, complete with color [...]