(no subject)
Mar. 14th, 2008 03:30 pmThere's some really fascinating stuff here at The Long Now foundation. The 10,000 year mechanical clock and especially the orrey that they've constructed really grab me.
I'd never heard of an orrey until the first time I saw one in the Lycaeum in one of the old Ultima games. I'd always been fascinated by complex clockwork mechanisms and the idea of this construct that tracked the movements of the planets was an enthralling one. The one at the link above is very beautiful.
My imagination is also being captured by the idea of the people of The Rosetta Program to create a tablet based on the idea of the Rosetta Stone, but containing samples of every documented language of Earth. I would so love to see one of their disks in person.
Yes, I'm a little bored at work. I'm spending time calling in bad laptops to get repaired by HP, but in the spaces between I'm cruising jwz.org, which is where those links came from. Lots of really useful and/or fascinating stuff there.
I'd never heard of an orrey until the first time I saw one in the Lycaeum in one of the old Ultima games. I'd always been fascinated by complex clockwork mechanisms and the idea of this construct that tracked the movements of the planets was an enthralling one. The one at the link above is very beautiful.
My imagination is also being captured by the idea of the people of The Rosetta Program to create a tablet based on the idea of the Rosetta Stone, but containing samples of every documented language of Earth. I would so love to see one of their disks in person.
Yes, I'm a little bored at work. I'm spending time calling in bad laptops to get repaired by HP, but in the spaces between I'm cruising jwz.org, which is where those links came from. Lots of really useful and/or fascinating stuff there.