Christopher Butler

via The Long Now Foundation:

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.

Standard Time: A Clock Rebuilt Every Minute

Slideshow: The Ancient, Distant, and Dead →

SEED:

Signal-to-noise ratio is the relationship between meaningful information (a signal) and external factors (background noise). In a broader theoretical sense, it can refer to seeking out meaning from complexity. We do this in our daily lives, constantly and without thought, each time we take mundane actions and, ultimately, whenever we attempt to make sense of the world we live in. The young Scottish artist Katie Paterson toys with this balance. Whether it’s hacking a mobile phone and burying it deep in the Arctic to capture the dying murmurs of a melting iceberg, or working with astronomers to capture the earliest known light of the universe, Paterson’s work—with a nod to scientific research—explores the curiosities within some of our universe’s infinite blips: remote ones, old ones, ones long gone.

The current tone of John Cage's ORGAN2/ASLSP As Slow aS Possible →

Scientists have built a clock which is 100,000 times more precise than the existing international standard.

Arthur Harsuvanakit designed this alarmless alarm clock that mimics sunlight as a means of “naturally” waking you up…

BibliOdyssey has a post collecting victorian infographics that is worth checking out…

via GOOD:

The Life Clock, according to PSFK, is “a standard mechanical clock slowed by a factor of 61320, with a face that is broken down by year into 80 years.” On the one hand, it’s a tad morbid—I can imagine pouring a tumbler of bourbon and sitting down for a nightly staring contest with its cursed face. On the other hand, it’s a great way to keep things in perspective, and a clever means of slowing down.

The Crypt of Civilization

An incredible time capsule! It’s plaque reads:

This Crypt contains memorials of the civilization which existed in the United States and the world at large during the first half of the twentieth century. In receptacles of stainless steel, in which the air has been replaced by inert gasses, are encyclopedias, histories, scientific works, special editions of newspapers, travelogues, travel talks, cinema reels, models, phonograph records, and similar materials from which an idea of the state and nature of the civilization which existed from 1900 to 1950 can be ascertained. No jewels or precious metals are included.

We depend upon the laws of the county of DeKalb, the State of Georgia, and the government of the United States and their heirs, assigns, and successors, and upon the sense of sportsmanship of posterity for the continued preservation of this vault until the year 8113, at which time we direct that it shall be opened by authorities representing the above governmental agencies and the administration of Oglethorpe University. Until that time we beg of all persons that this door and the contents of the crypt within may remain inviolate.

It’s inventory is strange…

The Helium Centennial Time Columns Monument located in Amarillo, Texas holds 4 time capsules in stainless steel that should be opened after a duration of 25, 50, 100, and 1000 years after they were locked in 1968.

Animation showing Earth’s palaeogeographic reconstruction beginning from early Cambrian period.

Geologic Time Scale

A Timeline of Timelines →

From Cabinet Magazine (so glad I still have the printed version of this timeline at home):

The problems presented by 20th-century versions of the timeline arise from different sources. In most important respects, the conceptual issues were already on the table in the 18th century. But the 20th century brought developments in time reckoning that gave timelines new poignancy. In 1945, it became relevant for the first time to tell world history in terms of milliseconds, and, very soon, it also became necessary to start thinking in practical terms about the transmission of information over the course of the very long term. There is something more than a little sobering about the recurrence of the cyclical form in the US government glyph for the declining radioactivity of nuclear waste stored in Yucca Mountain. In it, there may be an echo of Joseph Mede’s indecision about the appropriateness of applying the linear form to an apocalyptic narrative.

Standard Time [standard-time.com] involves about 70 workers who built a large (4x12m), wooden “digital” time display. Which they then updated in “real time”. All of this resulted in a unique urban screen that involved about 1,611 tedious changes within 24 hour period.

“The spectator looking at Standard Time does not only see the time, but also the people constructing it. People who, with a stoic sense of duty, are wasting time on an apparently useless activity that fulfills only one function: to display time.”

This from The Long Now Foundation, which also includes some interesting failed predictions from the past, such as:

“It will be years –not in my time– before a woman will become Prime Minister.”
–Margaret Thatcher, October 26th, 1969.