If so that is somewhat ironic. A message intended to communicate a date to thousands of years into the future got demolished a mere 86 years after its creation due to a drainage issue and a contract dispute.
I'd have to look at what it looked like before, but when I visited there earlier this month, I didn't see any restoration in progress and the star map was open. I didn't take a ton of photos in that area, and here are the only two of the monument I grabbed:
It is currently under reconstruction, it sounds like much of it was beyond salvage and has to be remade but it is difficult to find much info on this, bits and pieces strewn about the web. The project was resumed in 2023 and the BOR stated they were still committed to reconstructing the star map. In 2024 they completed the new underlayment and I have yet to find anything from 2025 other than that Monument plaza is still closed to the public.
I have once created a pendant to my friends’ wedding following a similar idea. A silver disk engraved one one side with the position of the planets and major moons at the moment of the ceremony. Fun thing is that the Galilean moons orbit fast enough that you can even read the intended minute. https://www.instagram.com/reel/DIpFTPOIP60/
If you have a blog post with a few more technical details, it may be a nice submission for HN. (Do you have a few photos of the intermediate steps to share?)
Some ideas/questions: How is it painted? Is it laser cut or by hand? Did you designed it? How did you do the calculations? Does Saturn have rings? Where is the cutoff? (No Neptune/Uranus/Fobos/Deimos/...) Have you tried to give a different size to each planet?
PS: I showed the video to my older daughter that is interested in astronomy and she likes it.
> If you have a blog post with a few more technical details, it may be a nice submission for HN.
Oh. That is very kind of you. I do have many more pictures and details. I will try to collect them together, and will publish it once it is done. But can’t promise that it will happen soon. So i will answer your questions here in the meantime.
> How is it painted?
The shapes are recessed and the recesses are filled with black nail polish. The excess nail polish was then scraped off from the flat upper surfaces leaving it only in the recesses.
It was very fiddly, and i don’t necessarily recommend this method for anyone. I have since learned how to enamel by melting glass powders onto the metal surface which is both easier and gives a better result. That is how i would do it today. (On my instagram the last reel i posted is showing that process, even though with a different design.)
> Is it laser cut or by hand?
A third and a fourth option. The planet side is machined on a cnc. First I etched the orbits with a v-bit, then cut the planets with a 0.8mm flat endmill, then cut the hole, and finally cut the outline. After that i etched the initials side chemically. As a resist i used self-adhesive vinyl which i cut with a plotter.
To be honest. I wouldn’t recommend this process either. It was super finicky, slow, and error prone. Today i would just etch and cut the metal with a fiber laser. In fact i bought a fiber laser because i got sick of the chemical etching and mechanical machining during this project. :)
> Did you designed it? How did you do the calculations?
I did design it! I’m very proud of it. The initials side was designed in inkscape while the planet side was generated with a python script. The script used the super handy skyfield python library for the calculations. (Which in turn uses the planetary ephemeris files published by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.)
> Does Saturn have rings?
No ring of Saturn unfortunately. But it would be a cool idea!
> Where is the cutoff? (No Neptune/Uranus/Fobos/Deimos/...)
Unfortunately I don’t have a real good principled answer to this. Because of the machining I had a hard limit on the smallest details I could put on the metal. I did know that i wanted to put the Gallilean moons on there because their short periods meant that they provide good basis for the minutes and hours part of the date. I did know that i also wanted one of the gas giants to provide a “slow hand” to the clock to show the years, and to hopefully stretch out the period before the next time the solar system is in a similar position to very far into the future. And i wanted the inner planets and the Moon so people and future alien minds will recognise it as the solar system. Everything else was just futzing around with the script and finding a good compromise between not making it too large to wear and not making it too crowded either.
> Have you tried to give a different size to each planet?
I did, but it looked uneven and too haphazard to my eyes. Not saying it is impossible to make it neat with different planet sizes but I liked the diagram simplicity of keeping all the planets one size and the moons an other smaller size.
> I showed the video to my older daughter that is interested in astronomy and she likes it.
If others are interested in getting something like this — there's an Australian firm already doing a good job at scale (but slightly different to parent).
They have a very handy example right on the landing page how one can calculate the positions and angles of a planet from a date.
The inverse was a bit trickier. But I also implemented a script which could “solve” a given picture backwards and give us a date. I believe i used binary search to narrow the date down first for the planet with the slowest period, and then refined the date around that timestamp using the position of the planet one faster. That way the estimate got more and more accurate and i didn’t need to brute force search a large time interval. (I applied the assumption that the date to be found is within half a saturn year from our current date, but if that assumption were incorrect it would have resulted in a solver failure during the refinement and thus detected.)
> Due to the precession of the equinoxes (as well as the stars' proper motions), the role of North Star has passed from one star to another in the remote past, and will pass in the remote future. In 3000 BC, the faint star Thuban in the constellation Draco was the North Star, aligning within 0.1° distance from the celestial pole, the closest of any of the visible pole stars.[8][9] However, at magnitude 3.67 (fourth magnitude) it is only one-fifth as bright as Polaris, and today it is invisible in light-polluted urban skies.
> During the 1st millennium BC, Beta Ursae Minoris (Kochab) was the bright star closest to the celestial pole, but it was never close enough to be taken as marking the pole, and the Greek navigator Pytheas in ca. 320 BC described the celestial pole as devoid of stars.[6][10] In the Roman era, the celestial pole was about equally distant between Polaris and Kochab.
"Milankovitch cycles describe the collective effects of changes in the Earth's movements on its climate over thousands of years. The phenomenon is named after the Serbian geophysicist and astronomer Milutin Milanković. [...] variations in eccentricity, axial tilt, and precession combined to result in cyclical variations in the intra-annual and latitudinal distribution of solar radiation at the Earth's surface, and that this orbital forcing strongly influenced the Earth's climatic patterns.
The Earth's rotation around its axis, and revolution around the Sun, evolve over time due to gravitational interactions with other bodies in the Solar System. The variations are complex, but a few cycles are dominant."
This is the kind of stuff I love about ancient architecture. It seems they were full of such clever things (or maybe only the few constructions which survived until today).
Its nice to see that some people still care about creating such thoughtful art for modern constructions. It seems that most building of our time are just optimized for fast and efficient construction.
I hope there are many more out there, so that Earth's Graham Hancock of the year 16000 has something to explore on his/her ayahuasca trip.
When you had no electricity to produce light pollution, when you have no TV, printing press, or any other thing to distract your attention, you had plenty of time to look at the night sky. When that also means you didn't have a way to have a shared calendar, you paid more attention to the sky to know when the seasons were changing. When the changing of seasons were key into surviving, you gave it a lot of importance. It's hard to put that into perspective when we can just look at an app to see the specific time/date of astronomical events well into the future.
Many Hindus celebrated Malay Sankranti a week ago. It was originally meant to coincide with winter solstice but because the Hindu dates are based on the position of the Sun against the background stars (as viewed from the Earth), precession over the last ~1700 years has driven it out of sync with the tropical calendar.
The precession circle is 144 arc degrees sin 23.5. In an 80 year lifespan precession would move the rotation pole about .44 arc degrees or the diameter of the full moon. Any long lived astronomical observatory in ancient times would have noticed this.
Makes sense when talking about human postures and emotions.
Victory/elation/worship corresponds to extending the arms above the head or in a "V" shape, sorrow/grief corresponds to dropping to the knees and holding the head in the hands, etc. These associations seem to persist despite language barriers and great spans of time.
Walking along the millennia, viewing the night's glorious celestial panorama, the registrations on the floor, you'll have successfully circumnavigated the long now, as well the total integral of your own life.
The fact is; this kind of knowledge are mostly pursued by people called "lunatics" and this is taking science held back in fringe cases. But sometimes lunatics are right too
I first heard about this in a Graham Hancock book. Found it a fascinating example of an attempt to encode a date that far distant future generations might understand (provided it survives).
> Marking in the terrazzo floor of Monument Plaza showing the location of Vega, which will be our North Star in roughly 12,000 years. (Photo by Alexander Rose)
I wonder if some content creator 12K years from now will transport to Earth and stream the North Star from this position for likes/views. If that's even a thing then...
Haha, I clicked without reading the URL. Then I read the "01931" in the text, immediately looked at the URL and of course it was longnow.org. Brought a smile to my face.
It's not silly when you consider what longnow stands for. They look at "now" on a 20,000 year scale so the extra zero is just emphasizing that 01931 is still the "long now".
Not even in the northern hemisphere. Celestial navigation is about shooting altitudes for known bright stars. At least three ideally five. This could include Polaris, but it doesn't need to. Source: watched some old training videos about celestial navigation after reading Fate is the Hunter a while back.
I loved this. I wish I had the ability to do the same innocuous deep dive into a easter egg in code - but I fear it would never be discovered at this rate of which AI is generating similar stuff. But much like this article maybe there's a time and place.
Was that in the original 01931 as in 1931? Or is that the usual truncation of 101931, since most relevant dates are in this decamillennium?
Leading zeros don't do what you think they do; you need look no further than how people say 03 when they mean 2003. A leading zero does not unambiguously say "there are no implied nonzero digits to the left of this zero".
Just, stop.
Or find some other convention, like, say, =1931. The = means, this is an exact value and not some value truncated modulo a power of ten.
It is a convention of The Long Now Foundation to get people to think of time in terms of 10k years instead of a lifetime at best. It goes hand in hand with their 10k year clock.
> A leading zero does not unambiguously say "there are no implied nonzero digits to the left of this zero".
Nor does it anywhere say that it means that or that it should mean that. To me the the leading zero in front of 1931 means “Do you think a thousand year is long? Think on a longer scale.” It is a vibe.
> Or is that the usual truncation of 101931, since most relevant dates are in this decamillennium?
The sentients of 101931 won’t be confused because they will know that 01931 refers to our time. Simply from all the context clues acrued. Such as the fact that the document was written in HTML (an archaic markup format rarely used past 8470 as any historicaly inclined sentient of that age would know) and found saved on an SD—card in the backpack of an astronaut who crash landed on the far side of the moon in 2457. Same as you don’t get confused about which milenia a roman public inscription unearthed in Pompei refers to.
Why do you imagine that =1931 wouldn’t be equally confusing in some future decamillenium? Arabic numerals have only been around for (charitably) 0.12 decamillenia. Sorry, =.12 decamillenia.
It's has been pretty normal for clocks with digital displays to include leading zeros for seconds, minutes, hours and/or days for about a century. Doing the same for years, while unusual, doesn't seem particularly confusing. And of course, there is precedent with things like ISO86011 - where 0400 is the year 400 CE.
I'm not sure why one would assume it was a truncation of 101931. That doesn't really make much sense. The first decamillennium digit started at 0, just like the first millennium digit started at 0. 101931 would be 99,905 years in the future.
> how people say 03 when they mean 2003
Making people think beyond that form of casual shorthand (even omitting the apostrophe which would indicate the omission!) is sort of the point? Never mind that 03 doesn't necessarily mean 2003.
In the extremely interesting book about water, cadillac desert, there is a great discussion with a scholar of some kind, I think an archeologist, about the large western US dams and the future. The gist is that the reservoirs will eventually silt up and disappear, but the dams will remain for thousands of years. The silted lakes will preserve clear evidence of their construction in the geologic record of these regions.
We will quite plausibly be known as the dam builder civilization, as these artifacts could very easily outlast the memory of what we call ourselves. It is fitting to embellish them in this way.
During DEF CON XX, I got bored/overwhelmed (it was not my first year attending) — so I decided to rent a car and visit Hoover Dam (this was before the bypass bridge was completed). I drove through the desert 100mph+, in my own little HST jaunt, searching for nothing but concrete's high water mark.
The statues in OP's article are absolutely beautiful examples of Art Deco / 1930s Americana (my local post office was built then, too, and has eaglettes of similar [but smaller] design). I had no idea they were out there until stumbling upon them, and they definitely leave a lasting impression of our forefather's imposing presence. America, fuck yeah!
Wish I had then-known about this "clock," which is definitely hidden in plain sight. Wish we had similarly-lavish federal budgets, today. But worth visiting, both article, statues & dam.
I actually went to get away from some friends, whom were presenting that year (they needed prep time — and I needed escape). Top 10 memories made by myself out at Hoover Dam, watching as the bypass got completed (that is another incredible feat of engineering).
Definitely a cool experience, and I'm glad I did. My last year attending DEF CON me and a Hadoop buddy (nobodies) just walked up onto a stage [during a terrible presentation] and started drinking whiskey with the ESL speaker (again: nobodies) — predicting we'd get banned from attending (but didn't — nobody cared... audience appreciated the break from hard-to-understandings).
But is the star map there? This article seems to imply that it got demolished in 2022: https://www.oskarjwhansen.org/news/save-the-star-map
If so that is somewhat ironic. A message intended to communicate a date to thousands of years into the future got demolished a mere 86 years after its creation due to a drainage issue and a contract dispute.
I'd have to look at what it looked like before, but when I visited there earlier this month, I didn't see any restoration in progress and the star map was open. I didn't take a ton of photos in that area, and here are the only two of the monument I grabbed:
https://photos.app.goo.gl/qgJ3x5za82EiFz5P7
From my cursory web searches, your photos may be the first online evidence that the restoration project was indeed completed.
This is the second-best way to doxx HN users I've ever seen.
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Thank you for the confirmation! This is so good to hear.
It is currently under reconstruction, it sounds like much of it was beyond salvage and has to be remade but it is difficult to find much info on this, bits and pieces strewn about the web. The project was resumed in 2023 and the BOR stated they were still committed to reconstructing the star map. In 2024 they completed the new underlayment and I have yet to find anything from 2025 other than that Monument plaza is still closed to the public.
It's in pieces, evidenced here: https://www.oskarjwhansen.org/news/save-the-star-map-decembe...
At a loss for words. :|
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This is horrible! I always wanted to visit this. :(
That is a crime of humanity. Terrible!
The same website says that as of 2024, it is slowly being reconstructed: https://www.oskarjwhansen.org/news/2024-hoover-dam-star-map-...
On Google maps, someone posted a photo from 9 months ago, explaining the restoration.
I have once created a pendant to my friends’ wedding following a similar idea. A silver disk engraved one one side with the position of the planets and major moons at the moment of the ceremony. Fun thing is that the Galilean moons orbit fast enough that you can even read the intended minute. https://www.instagram.com/reel/DIpFTPOIP60/
If you have a blog post with a few more technical details, it may be a nice submission for HN. (Do you have a few photos of the intermediate steps to share?)
Some ideas/questions: How is it painted? Is it laser cut or by hand? Did you designed it? How did you do the calculations? Does Saturn have rings? Where is the cutoff? (No Neptune/Uranus/Fobos/Deimos/...) Have you tried to give a different size to each planet?
PS: I showed the video to my older daughter that is interested in astronomy and she likes it.
> If you have a blog post with a few more technical details, it may be a nice submission for HN.
Oh. That is very kind of you. I do have many more pictures and details. I will try to collect them together, and will publish it once it is done. But can’t promise that it will happen soon. So i will answer your questions here in the meantime.
> How is it painted?
The shapes are recessed and the recesses are filled with black nail polish. The excess nail polish was then scraped off from the flat upper surfaces leaving it only in the recesses.
It was very fiddly, and i don’t necessarily recommend this method for anyone. I have since learned how to enamel by melting glass powders onto the metal surface which is both easier and gives a better result. That is how i would do it today. (On my instagram the last reel i posted is showing that process, even though with a different design.)
> Is it laser cut or by hand?
A third and a fourth option. The planet side is machined on a cnc. First I etched the orbits with a v-bit, then cut the planets with a 0.8mm flat endmill, then cut the hole, and finally cut the outline. After that i etched the initials side chemically. As a resist i used self-adhesive vinyl which i cut with a plotter.
To be honest. I wouldn’t recommend this process either. It was super finicky, slow, and error prone. Today i would just etch and cut the metal with a fiber laser. In fact i bought a fiber laser because i got sick of the chemical etching and mechanical machining during this project. :)
> Did you designed it? How did you do the calculations?
I did design it! I’m very proud of it. The initials side was designed in inkscape while the planet side was generated with a python script. The script used the super handy skyfield python library for the calculations. (Which in turn uses the planetary ephemeris files published by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.)
> Does Saturn have rings?
No ring of Saturn unfortunately. But it would be a cool idea!
> Where is the cutoff? (No Neptune/Uranus/Fobos/Deimos/...)
Unfortunately I don’t have a real good principled answer to this. Because of the machining I had a hard limit on the smallest details I could put on the metal. I did know that i wanted to put the Gallilean moons on there because their short periods meant that they provide good basis for the minutes and hours part of the date. I did know that i also wanted one of the gas giants to provide a “slow hand” to the clock to show the years, and to hopefully stretch out the period before the next time the solar system is in a similar position to very far into the future. And i wanted the inner planets and the Moon so people and future alien minds will recognise it as the solar system. Everything else was just futzing around with the script and finding a good compromise between not making it too large to wear and not making it too crowded either.
> Have you tried to give a different size to each planet?
I did, but it looked uneven and too haphazard to my eyes. Not saying it is impossible to make it neat with different planet sizes but I liked the diagram simplicity of keeping all the planets one size and the moons an other smaller size.
> I showed the video to my older daughter that is interested in astronomy and she likes it.
Oh thank you! That is lovely!
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If others are interested in getting something like this — there's an Australian firm already doing a good job at scale (but slightly different to parent).
https://www.thenightsky.com/
That's so cool! Is there a calculator somewhere that can convert to/from dates and solar system position charts?
To calculate the orbital positions i used the skyfield python library. https://rhodesmill.org/skyfield/
They have a very handy example right on the landing page how one can calculate the positions and angles of a planet from a date.
The inverse was a bit trickier. But I also implemented a script which could “solve” a given picture backwards and give us a date. I believe i used binary search to narrow the date down first for the planet with the slowest period, and then refined the date around that timestamp using the position of the planet one faster. That way the estimate got more and more accurate and i didn’t need to brute force search a large time interval. (I applied the assumption that the date to be found is within half a saturn year from our current date, but if that assumption were incorrect it would have resulted in a solver failure during the refinement and thus detected.)
Positions at a given time could be simulated in e.g. Celestia (and then projected). The other direction, I don't know.
More:
> Due to the precession of the equinoxes (as well as the stars' proper motions), the role of North Star has passed from one star to another in the remote past, and will pass in the remote future. In 3000 BC, the faint star Thuban in the constellation Draco was the North Star, aligning within 0.1° distance from the celestial pole, the closest of any of the visible pole stars.[8][9] However, at magnitude 3.67 (fourth magnitude) it is only one-fifth as bright as Polaris, and today it is invisible in light-polluted urban skies.
> During the 1st millennium BC, Beta Ursae Minoris (Kochab) was the bright star closest to the celestial pole, but it was never close enough to be taken as marking the pole, and the Greek navigator Pytheas in ca. 320 BC described the celestial pole as devoid of stars.[6][10] In the Roman era, the celestial pole was about equally distant between Polaris and Kochab.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pole_star
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celestial_pole
"Milankovitch cycles describe the collective effects of changes in the Earth's movements on its climate over thousands of years. The phenomenon is named after the Serbian geophysicist and astronomer Milutin Milanković. [...] variations in eccentricity, axial tilt, and precession combined to result in cyclical variations in the intra-annual and latitudinal distribution of solar radiation at the Earth's surface, and that this orbital forcing strongly influenced the Earth's climatic patterns.
The Earth's rotation around its axis, and revolution around the Sun, evolve over time due to gravitational interactions with other bodies in the Solar System. The variations are complex, but a few cycles are dominant."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milankovitch_cycles
I somehow doubt there is any future version of me that regrets joining The Long Now Foundation, and work like this is the main reason why.
If you're in SF you should pay them a visit and buy a coffee at The Interval; I think you'll find it worth the trip.
This is the kind of stuff I love about ancient architecture. It seems they were full of such clever things (or maybe only the few constructions which survived until today).
Its nice to see that some people still care about creating such thoughtful art for modern constructions. It seems that most building of our time are just optimized for fast and efficient construction.
I hope there are many more out there, so that Earth's Graham Hancock of the year 16000 has something to explore on his/her ayahuasca trip.
When you had no electricity to produce light pollution, when you have no TV, printing press, or any other thing to distract your attention, you had plenty of time to look at the night sky. When that also means you didn't have a way to have a shared calendar, you paid more attention to the sky to know when the seasons were changing. When the changing of seasons were key into surviving, you gave it a lot of importance. It's hard to put that into perspective when we can just look at an app to see the specific time/date of astronomical events well into the future.
Having something built IRL would at least inspire a few to actually be interested in astronomy or star gazing.
The buildings then were also optimized for fast and efficient construction.
Those buildings are, of course, gone now.
Discussed at the time (of the article):
A 26,000-Year Astronomical Monument Hidden in Plain Sight - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19124698 - Feb 2019 (57 comments)
Many Hindus celebrated Malay Sankranti a week ago. It was originally meant to coincide with winter solstice but because the Hindu dates are based on the position of the Sun against the background stars (as viewed from the Earth), precession over the last ~1700 years has driven it out of sync with the tropical calendar.
The precession circle is 144 arc degrees sin 23.5. In an 80 year lifespan precession would move the rotation pole about .44 arc degrees or the diameter of the full moon. Any long lived astronomical observatory in ancient times would have noticed this.
> There is an angle for doubt, for sorrow, for hate, for joy, for contemplation, and for devotion.
I’m so intrigued - what was going on inside Hansen's brain?
Makes sense when talking about human postures and emotions.
Victory/elation/worship corresponds to extending the arms above the head or in a "V" shape, sorrow/grief corresponds to dropping to the knees and holding the head in the hands, etc. These associations seem to persist despite language barriers and great spans of time.
You solved the riddle good sir!
Walking along the millennia, viewing the night's glorious celestial panorama, the registrations on the floor, you'll have successfully circumnavigated the long now, as well the total integral of your own life.
For a hypothesis concerning the precession of the equinoxes and religious pantheons, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38761574
[flagged]
You are confusing the thing with the category of the thing.
Religion the category is only a few hundred years old. The things that fall under that category go back at least as far as Neanderthal times.
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What?
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The fact is; this kind of knowledge are mostly pursued by people called "lunatics" and this is taking science held back in fringe cases. But sometimes lunatics are right too
I first heard about this in a Graham Hancock book. Found it a fascinating example of an attempt to encode a date that far distant future generations might understand (provided it survives).
Graham Hancock the fraud?
I think author and journalist is how he presents himself. Or pseudo-scientist according to Wikipedia. But yes Graham Hancock.
That was an excellent rabbit hole to go down while eating lunch :)
My wife has bought a few of these for significant dates as gifts:
https://thestarposter.com/
And to think we're all here building b2b SaaS
Those ad impressions won't optimize themselves!
> Marking in the terrazzo floor of Monument Plaza showing the location of Vega, which will be our North Star in roughly 12,000 years. (Photo by Alexander Rose)
I wonder if some content creator 12K years from now will transport to Earth and stream the North Star from this position for likes/views. If that's even a thing then...
> transport to Earth
They’ll almost certainly still be on Earth. Fundamental physics is unlikely to change in the next 12,000 years.
Haha, I clicked without reading the URL. Then I read the "01931" in the text, immediately looked at the URL and of course it was longnow.org. Brought a smile to my face.
I find it a bit silly. When we refer to 70 CE or 500 CE we don’t add zeros in front.
It's not silly when you consider what longnow stands for. They look at "now" on a 20,000 year scale so the extra zero is just emphasizing that 01931 is still the "long now".
> Having this one fixed point in the sky is the foundation of all celestial navigation.
Only in the northern hemisphere.
Not even in the northern hemisphere. Celestial navigation is about shooting altitudes for known bright stars. At least three ideally five. This could include Polaris, but it doesn't need to. Source: watched some old training videos about celestial navigation after reading Fate is the Hunter a while back.
I loved this. I wish I had the ability to do the same innocuous deep dive into a easter egg in code - but I fear it would never be discovered at this rate of which AI is generating similar stuff. But much like this article maybe there's a time and place.
Thanks for this, at one point I tried to google this monument and didn't find much.
> construction of the dam began in 01931
Person in far future:
Was that in the original 01931 as in 1931? Or is that the usual truncation of 101931, since most relevant dates are in this decamillennium?
Leading zeros don't do what you think they do; you need look no further than how people say 03 when they mean 2003. A leading zero does not unambiguously say "there are no implied nonzero digits to the left of this zero".
Just, stop.
Or find some other convention, like, say, =1931. The = means, this is an exact value and not some value truncated modulo a power of ten.
It is a convention of The Long Now Foundation to get people to think of time in terms of 10k years instead of a lifetime at best. It goes hand in hand with their 10k year clock.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clock_of_the_Long_Now
I think they are speaking to, not ignorant of, this.
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> 10k year clock
a.k.a. cuckoo clock
> Just, stop.
Why do you mind what others do?
> A leading zero does not unambiguously say "there are no implied nonzero digits to the left of this zero".
Nor does it anywhere say that it means that or that it should mean that. To me the the leading zero in front of 1931 means “Do you think a thousand year is long? Think on a longer scale.” It is a vibe.
> Or is that the usual truncation of 101931, since most relevant dates are in this decamillennium?
The sentients of 101931 won’t be confused because they will know that 01931 refers to our time. Simply from all the context clues acrued. Such as the fact that the document was written in HTML (an archaic markup format rarely used past 8470 as any historicaly inclined sentient of that age would know) and found saved on an SD—card in the backpack of an astronaut who crash landed on the far side of the moon in 2457. Same as you don’t get confused about which milenia a roman public inscription unearthed in Pompei refers to.
> The sentients of 101931 won’t be confused because they will know that 01931 refers to our time.
They may well be confused, because by then this silly "long now" stuff will be long since forgotten.
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Their stated aim is to encourage long term thinking. It appears they scored a bullseye with your response.
error: invalid digit '9' in octal constant
Why do you imagine that =1931 wouldn’t be equally confusing in some future decamillenium? Arabic numerals have only been around for (charitably) 0.12 decamillenia. Sorry, =.12 decamillenia.
I just look at it and think someone can't even count to 010 in octal.
> Leading zeros don't do what you think they do
It's has been pretty normal for clocks with digital displays to include leading zeros for seconds, minutes, hours and/or days for about a century. Doing the same for years, while unusual, doesn't seem particularly confusing. And of course, there is precedent with things like ISO86011 - where 0400 is the year 400 CE.
I'm not sure why one would assume it was a truncation of 101931. That doesn't really make much sense. The first decamillennium digit started at 0, just like the first millennium digit started at 0. 101931 would be 99,905 years in the future.
> how people say 03 when they mean 2003
Making people think beyond that form of casual shorthand (even omitting the apostrophe which would indicate the omission!) is sort of the point? Never mind that 03 doesn't necessarily mean 2003.
> I'm not sure why one would assume it was a truncation of 101931.
For the same reason one assumes that 03 refers to 2003 rather than 1903 (or 1803, or ...).
Of course, it's the surrounding historical context that resolves such confusion.
IS086011 or 15O86O11 to be less precise.
In the extremely interesting book about water, cadillac desert, there is a great discussion with a scholar of some kind, I think an archeologist, about the large western US dams and the future. The gist is that the reservoirs will eventually silt up and disappear, but the dams will remain for thousands of years. The silted lakes will preserve clear evidence of their construction in the geologic record of these regions.
We will quite plausibly be known as the dam builder civilization, as these artifacts could very easily outlast the memory of what we call ourselves. It is fitting to embellish them in this way.
3.82
plein d’impressement: a series of cordialities
During DEF CON XX, I got bored/overwhelmed (it was not my first year attending) — so I decided to rent a car and visit Hoover Dam (this was before the bypass bridge was completed). I drove through the desert 100mph+, in my own little HST jaunt, searching for nothing but concrete's high water mark.
The statues in OP's article are absolutely beautiful examples of Art Deco / 1930s Americana (my local post office was built then, too, and has eaglettes of similar [but smaller] design). I had no idea they were out there until stumbling upon them, and they definitely leave a lasting impression of our forefather's imposing presence. America, fuck yeah!
Wish I had then-known about this "clock," which is definitely hidden in plain sight. Wish we had similarly-lavish federal budgets, today. But worth visiting, both article, statues & dam.
Heh, a group of friends and I also visited the Hoover Dam while we were in Vegas for DEF CON one year. Was a really cool experience for sure.
I actually went to get away from some friends, whom were presenting that year (they needed prep time — and I needed escape). Top 10 memories made by myself out at Hoover Dam, watching as the bypass got completed (that is another incredible feat of engineering).
Definitely a cool experience, and I'm glad I did. My last year attending DEF CON me and a Hadoop buddy (nobodies) just walked up onto a stage [during a terrible presentation] and started drinking whiskey with the ESL speaker (again: nobodies) — predicting we'd get banned from attending (but didn't — nobody cared... audience appreciated the break from hard-to-understandings).
>It is likely that at least major portions of the Hoover Dam will still be in place hundreds of thousands of years from now.
Kinda sus of this.
[dead]
Sounds like it's about the precession of the equinoxes and the new "Age of Aquarius".
Destruction of art is the only crime I think should receive the death penalty. You’re making the world darker for everyone.