The Computus Engine

September 2010 desktop calendar

2010-01-02T23:27:55Z

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The Tellurium clock of Marc Maradan

2010-08-27T17:28:43Z

Time and space are intertwined. Even before Minkowski's famous observation it was clear our temporal constructs (calendar systems and clocks) are merely models of the heavens - an attempt to codify the movements of space. This desire to understand our world is a deep human need.

The earliest calendars were merely notches on bone; a simple count of the passing of days between full moons. As our understanding of natural cycles grew, so did the complexity of our physical expressions. Meticulous mechanical constructions such as clocks and orreries are all models of the heavens.

A Tellurium clock combines both clock and orrery in a single movement. Last week I received pictures from Marc Maradan of a Tellurium clock he is working on. Marc is a process engineer based near Bern in Switzerland.

Inspired by a 2006 documentary on the Antikythera mechanism he set out to build his own Heliocentric calendar machine. He produced his designs using open source CAD software and manufactures all the components himself (no CNC machining) using only the technology available to the ancient Greeks.

The Tellurium construction is in five main parts. The Moon gear with 16 gears, the sun gear with 5 gears, the precession gear with 8 gears, the malteser linear mechanism, and the malteser cross mechanism with 7 gears.

The moon gear show the earth rotation, the sidereal month of the moon, the synodic month of the moon, and the lunar phases, metonic cycle and golden number. The sun gear ensures the earth/moon constellation turns around the sun. The precession gear shows the position in the zodiac and the month and is responsible for the movement of the equinox point.

The malteser linear gear is a device to make visible the difference in sunrise between summer and winter, and also the quotient from day and night. Marc also points out that the transformation from rotation in a linear movement always has the same speed (no sine function). The malteser cross mechanism is responsible for the change of the seasons.

Marc estimates he will finish the mechanical part of the tellurium in about a year, and will then move onto the cosmetics - gold-plating, enamel , engraving etc. It's an exciting an inspirational project and I look forward to watching his progress.

August 2010 desktop calendar

2010-01-02T23:25:19Z

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TED Global 2010, Hyper Island Creativity Lab and Flash On The Beach

2010-07-02T00:52:07Z

The next few months are gearing up to be a bit of a roller coaster. I've been working on a couple of projects that I'll finally be able to talk about, as well as attending some pretty amazing events.

TED Global 2010: Oxford

The first event in a couple of weeks is TED Global in Oxford. I don't yet know if I'll be there for the event but my good friend Chris Wild will be presenting some of our work. Chris is the maestro behind The Retroscope and the nicest time traveler you'll ever meet. I won't give away any spoilers but I want to thank Mike and Simon for helping us get to the submission deadline in one piece!

Hyper Island Creativity Lab: Middlesborough

The day after I'll be heading up to Middlesburgh for the Hyper Island Creativity Lab. Founded in Sweden in 1996, Hyper Island is like boot camp for creatives - the original course is still run from a converted prison. In fact it might be better to describe it as re-boot camp. The course aims by way of self discovery to let you think creatively about digital. Should be great.

Flash On The Beach: Brighton

Last up in September is the biggest UK Flash conference of the year. Flash On The Beach has a well deserved reputation as a fun and inspiring three days. I cover the con every year for FlashMagazine, but this will be my first time speaking. Blink and you'll miss it as I'll be covering 10 years of FlashMagazine in 3 minutes!

If there are tickets left I'd thoroughly recommend getting along. Despite the name, the sessions are not all about Flash. All creative technologies and media are represented and there's a good mix of design and technical sessions. The end of day inspirational sessions are worth the entrance fee on their own.

July 2010 desktop calendar

2010-01-02T23:22:08Z

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released under the UK Creative Commons Attribution licence

June 2010 desktop calendar

2010-01-02T23:20:04Z

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released under the UK Creative Commons Attribution licence

Edward Tufte at the Royal Geographical Society

2010-05-24T11:32:55Z

Edward Tufte has been writing about information graphics for over 25 years. His first book, the self published The Visual Display of Quantitative Information is a classic text on information design. On Thursday he visited the Royal Geographical Society to deliver a talk entitled 'Beautiful Evidence'. This also happens to be the title of his most recent book (2006) and in many ways the whole talk felt like a retrospective.

In an article for Wired magazine, Tufte famously demolished Powerpoint. He coined the phrase "chartjunk" to describe it's visually chaotic templated graphs. The smart money therefore was not expecting a Powerpoint presentation. What we got was Keynote on the Mac and a couple of beautifully printed handouts; an A2 facsimile of Minard's classic statistical graphic of Napoleon's Russian campaign, and a series of pages describing Sparklines.

Tufte outlined his grand principles of information display. Simple tenets such as show comparisons, show causality and show multivariate data, were accompanied by examples from historical documents. Information design as a recognised discipline is relatively new, but what I found fascinating was the temporal range of his examples.

Taking the long view he presented imagery showing the evolution of text and graphics over the last thousand years. The power of inline graphics was neatly demonstrated using a text by Galileo. This was followed by a 9th century manuscript showing the spectacular image of a centaur constructed from Latin text. Really great.

You can catch a flavour of the insight and humour of the man from the clip below.

With a room full of technical creative people it's almost inevitable that the sketch notes on Flickr would be something special. I just love these...

Sketch notes by Paul Downey

Sketch notes by Lucy Spence

Temporal Analytics

2010-05-16T21:53:10Z

There was a time when predicting the future was the sole domain of mystics, auguries and madmen. Before the enlightenment it was commonplace for a ruling monarch to consult their court astrologer prior to making a decision. Knowledge of the future has always held a powerful allure and these days prediction is big business.

Everything from the markets to the weather is modeled and analysed, but until recently little historical data has been publicly available on the web. Tim O'Rielly, in his treatise on The State of the Internet Operating System, made an astute observation about the general lack of temporal data driven services.

"Time is an important dimension of data driven services - at least as important as location, though as yet less fully exploited. Calendars are one obvious application, but activity streams are also organized as timelines; stock charts link up news stories with spikes or drops in price. Time stamps can also be used as a filter for other data types (as Google measures frequency of update in calculating search results, or as an RSS feed or social activity stream organizes posts by recency.)"

The advent of open data is paving the way for a new kind of online service. Recorded Future brands itself as the world's first temporal analytics engine. Their technology mixes historical search with statistical analysis to make predictions about the future. The results were impressive enough to land investment from Google Ventures making this technology in every sense, the search engine of the future.

May 2010 desktop calendar

2010-01-02T23:15:58Z

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released under the UK Creative Commons Attribution licence

Synchronoptic timelines

2010-04-22T13:43:07Z

A synchronoptic timeline is one in which several timelines are displayed concurrently. The earliest recognised example dates from 1753 and is the work of the French physician Jacques Barbeu-Dubourg.

His Carte chronologique was produced on a scroll some 54 feet long, and at a scale of one year per tenth of an inch, it spanned the 6,480 years since the creation. Onto this Barbeu-Dubourg plotted a number of thematic timelines. Notable persons are annotated with iconography denoting their profession and social or religious status.

A contemporary of Barbeu-Dubourg was the English chemist Joseph Priestley who produced a number of synchronoptic timelines during his lifetime, including several editions of his New Chart of History.

The Afghan Conflict: A map of possible scenarios offers a modern take on the synchronoptic timeline. Instead of documenting the past Marc Tiedemann has charted a number of possible futures for the Afghan Conflict. The scenario timeline is available as a 164cm x 70cm printed poster and also as an interactive presentation on Prezi.