They've broken ground on the 10KY Clock

12 years ago

And here's a Robotic Stone Saw!

Previously, previously, previously.

Tags: mad science, mpegs, robots, space, the future

3 Responses:

1. Sean M Burke says:

   12 years ago at 7:15 pm

   Hey, music... club... man!

   I'm the dude who implemented the algorithm (as beep boop 0s and 1s, not in clockwork) for playing the clock chimes.

   The old plan was for it to chime once daily, noonish presumably. And so for my own amusement, I made a file that is a whole month's chimes, with a few seconds' delay between chimes, instead of a delay of 24 hours.

   * long_now_chimes_09794-11-01.mp3, 12MB (~8 minutes long, I think)

   Now I think the plan is that you pull a chain, or something, and that makes a chime, maybe limit is once daily? Anyway, the thing with having dates attached to groups of chimes is apparently anacronistic (heh, literally), but I haven't gotten around to rewriting things, much less get it puzzled out first as to how they would want to refer to chimes-groups now.

   Once, I got crazy with the cheez-whizz and wrote something in PostScript (!) that figures out the chimes in your printer:

   Long_Now_Chimes_sheet_music.ps.txt -- short-ish file, just source code, don't panic. You'd set what years/months you'd want at the very end. At the moment, if you re-extensioned it to .ps and tried printing it, you'd get all 132,000 pages, one month per page. But, uh, don't do that, just revel in the source and KNOW THAT I AM GOD.

   As to what it looks like, here's one page of it:

   * 07003.ps, 50KB 1 page, for January 07003, the month for which Eno's album is a sonical-phonical minimidelic expoloration!!

   What I learn from listening to the chimes: 10/2 (writing it as 12/4) time is not what our musical brains can easily cope with. So I say RAWK ON, BRAIN!

   I wrote an implementation in JavaScript and great sound (the samples right out of Eno's synth), but then I had a whammy of medical trouble with graaaaaaaaadual recovery and so there was no one day of "okay, done, now I can dive back into things!". So: I never got back to spiffing up its interface into anything but what you see there. But I really should write back to the the Long Now dudes and... see what they wanna go. Either folks can "browse" chimes this way, and/or people can say "okay, now gimme a month, as an MP3" and then here comes a 6MB of Lame-encoding-on-the-fly file, or there can simply be a few already-prepped whole-month files (like I linked to up there) for people to listen to.

   In short: thanks for being a reminder to me about this!

   And wow, those PHOTOS!

   • DFB says:

     12 years ago at 12:06 am

     /StaveSpacing 62 def
/TopStave 737 def
/PageTop 790 def
/PageBot 30 def

     Maybe that would work better as an MPEG so the bounding box could be adjusted?

2. Ben Brockert says:

   12 years ago at 5:19 pm

   Really they've broken ground on a 10k clock, since "the" clock is on a Long Now site, rather than hidden in Bezos, Texas. As you do with your 10k clock, it's opposite the spaceport, and south of the covert paramilitary airport.