Technology: quotes, facts and reflections - Page 12

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Q2065

WonderTechnology

Deep in a west Texas mountain, engineers are installing a clock designed to keep time for ten thousand years — powered partly by daily temperature swings, ticking through centuries whether or not anyone visits.

Designer Danny Hillis proposed it in the 1990s as a provocation: civilisation, he argued, had lost the habit of thinking past the next quarter. A first prototype has ticked since New Year's Eve 1999 and lives in London's Science Museum; the full-scale version, funded by Jeff Bezos inside a 150-metre shaft, has no announced opening date. The clock is engineered so its bells ring a new sequence each day it chimes — never repeating across ten thousand years.

Clock of the Long NowRead card

Q2103

DriveTechnology

The most damaging phrase in the language is: 'We've always done it this way.'

Hopper kept a clock on her office wall that ran backwards, hands sweeping anticlockwise, and she could read it perfectly well. It was there to make a point to visitors: the direction is a convention, not a law. She argued for years that computers should take instructions in something close to English, and was told it could not be done. The language that came out of that argument, COBOL, was still running bank systems sixty years later.

Grace Hopper, Information Week interview (1987)Read card

Q2124

DriveHistory

The Nizaris carved lined cisterns into the mountain, channelled water from distant springs and terraced the valley below, so Alamut could simply ignore a blockade.

Cutting a cistern into limestone and lining it is slow, unglamorous work that pays off only in a crisis that may never come. The Nizaris did it anyway, across a network of mountain strongholds, alongside underground channels from springs and terraced fields of wheat and barley. Their castles were designed around the assumption of being cut off. It is a strange kind of confidence: to build as though the worst will happen, so that when it does, very little changes.

Alamut CastleRead card