A two-day, family-friendly festival of invention, creativity and resourcefulness, and a celebration of the Maker movement.
A two-day, family-friendly festival of invention, creativity and resourcefulness, and a celebration of the Maker movement.
Topic(s): Engineering
Tags: future long-term sustainability time clock language
The Long Now Foundation works to foster long-term thinking. We are building an all mechanical, monument-scale clock to last 10,000 years. We have also developed a laser-etched disk containing 30,000 pages of linguistic data and text in over 1,000 languages in order to preserve linguistic diversity for the distant future.
The Clock engineering team is led by Danny Hillis, one of the founders of Long Now with additional design and project management by Alexander Rose; the other engineering team members are Paolo Salvagione, Greg Staples, Luke Khanlian and Jascha Little with Christopher Rand doing much of the machining and fabricating. The stone work is being led Stuart Kendall and Jason Clauson.
Alexander Rose was hired as the first employee of The Long Now Foundation in February of 01997. Now the Director of Long Now, Alexander has facilitated projects such as the 10,000 Year Clock with Danny Hillis, The Rosetta Project, Long Bets, and the Seminars About Long Term Thinking.
Laura Welcher is a linguist with research interests in endangered language documentation, description and revitalization, as well as the growing subdiscipline of computer-assisted linguistics. She received her Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of California, Berkeley, where she learned first hand the importance of creating digital language resources that last in her field research on Potawatomi (a critically endangered North American language) and in her work as an archivist with the Survey for California and Other Indian Languages. She worked with the E-MELD project in developing FIELD, an ontology-based lexical database, and building Potawatomi resources for the School of Best Practice. Since then she has become involved with various projects in linguistics that are working towards developing standards for the creation and archiving of digital language resources and interoperable tools to support linguistic research, including the Open Language Archives Community, LINGUIST List, and the GOLD Markup Ontology.
Chris began working with us in mid 01997 and has been an invaluable asset to the Clock project. Chris has been a machinest/builder for many Americas Cup racing syndicates, Survival Research Labs, Skellington Studios and Industrial Light and Magic.
Paolo is a world renowned bicycle designer and builder who joined our team in 02000. He is the principle engineer on almost all the Clock prototypes completed since then.
Greg Staples is a Design Engineer with a Bachelors of Science in Mechanical Engineering from Santa Clara University. He began working with Long Now in 02006 and is one of the designers of the Chime Generator and the Solar Trigger. With 10 years of experience as a Product Design Engineer, he has worked with everything from hand-held surveying equipment to low pressure aluminum casting machines. He enjoys tinkering with and resurrecting old mechanical junk.
