Unveiling of second Long Now clock in Bay Area: photos

The Long Now Foundation held a first-ever public unveiling of the Orrery clock last night in Marin County. Snip from project documentation:

The Orrery is a ten foot tall planet tracking display. The lower half is a mechanical binary calculation engine. Each layer is calculating the orbit if one of the six human eye visible planets (Mercury through Saturn) to 28 bits of accuracy. The Orrery is primarily made of monel (a nickel copper alloy), and stainless steel. The planet spheres are ground from natural stones that resemble each planet they represent.

Boing Boing pal Jake Appelbaum was present, and shot many fine photos. Look, Neal Stephenson was there! So was Mike Lynn -- the fellow who got into all that trouble last year over the Cisco security weaknesses. And also present, of course, was the man behind it all: Danny Hillis (also shown in image above).

Link

[#1 posted by cellocgw , July 22, 2008 9:41 AM]

There was a different long-time-span piece of art some time ago. It consisted of an electric motor driving a 10:1 (or whatever) reduction gear, the output of which drove the next 10:1 reduction.... the estimate was that the last disk in the chain would complete a rotation in something like a million years.
I always wondered how long it would take to clear out the wind-up slack in the system :-)