July 19, 2003

  • Rode my bike yesterday, for the first time in, uh, too many months. I did better than I thought I would, but I still had to walk over a few hills.

    Thankfully, I got to the Burke-Gillman trail pretty easily. The trail's a converted rail line, so it doesn't have steep inclines or drops.

    Went down to University Village and ate a burrito. They called it a 'wrap,' but it's a burrito. Looked at books for a while in the ajacent bookstore and found one about the history and science of sundials.

    It mentioned giant solar observatories that once existed in Mesopotamia, present-day Iraq. From building-sized sundials (science and understanding) to GPS units on the heads of guided missiles (shock and awe). Measuring the sky from the earth to measuring the earth from the sky.

    I want to build a giant sundial. I want it to be made of trees, planted in such a way that as they grow, they get more accurate. And when they fall over, they fall in just the right pattern so that they're nurse logs for the next sundial. This is unlikely to happen, of course, but it sends me on another tangent, which is the Clock Of The Long Now, an ambitious project if ever there was.

    At the present moment, the Clock's database contains the largest amount of linguistic data on the planet, recorded for posterity. The Clock project has also spun off a really cool site called Long Bets, where you bet on things like:

    "The first discovery of extraterrestrial life will be someplace other than on a planet or on a satellite of a planet."

    YES freeman j. dyson
    NO Peter A. Spark

    Stakes: $2,000
    ($1,000 each)

    The winnings go to charity, assuming the charity still exists. This is important because some of the bets won't be known for quite some time, like the one about whether the universe will stop expanding.

    Thinking about Big Time makes me happy. It's seeing the beach instead of the grains of sand, and who'd argue that a day with some grains of sand is more pleasant than a day at the beach?

    And anyway. The long bet site is a really nice place to read tiny essays by the authors, many of whom are quite respectable.