Founded by futurists to engage in truly long-term thinking, the Long Now Foundation is best known to many for Long Bets or its recent placement of a Rosetta Disk on a comet, but the organization has an array of amazing projects designed to last hundreds of generations, including a 10,000 Year Clock. Something to consider before we go any further: civilization as we know it is arguably only around 5,000 years old – we are talking here about an technologically sophisticated endeavor aiming to span (and keep track of) twice that period of time.

Designers and builders are used to thinking in terms of decades, perhaps even centuries, but are rarely called upon to consider millennia in their plans and calculations. In the case of the 10,000 Year Clock, environment is critical – in addition to robust materials and geological stability, predictable temperatures and relative isolation are key ingredients in siting the mechanism. Towering 500 feet vertically and with gears weighing up to 1,000 pounds each, the first clock is being built high and dry inside a West Texas mountain on property owned by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. Another is planned for Nevada – both are sited to avoid excessive rain or freeze-and-thaw cycles that could damage it over time.

In the conceptual design stage of the project, polymath inventor Danny Hillis said of his aspirations: “I want to build a clock that ticks once a year. The century hand advances once every 100 years, and the cuckoo comes out on the millennium. I want the cuckoo to come out every millennium for the next 10,000 years.” Indeed, the experience of the clock has even more unique twists than initially envisioned: each time it chimes the sound is unique – with 3.5 million melodies in store, it will not repeat itself for the next ten thousand years.

Located in a separate space from the clock’s inner workings, the face of the clock “displays the natural cycles of astronomical time, the pace of the stars and the planets, and the galactic time of the Earth’s procession.” Prototype parts of the clock are on display in some places, like the Long Now’s bar and event space in San Francisco known as The Interval, where this author recently saw Kevin Kelly, board member of Long Now and founding editor of Wired, speak about his book and history with the organization.

Perhaps most impressive of all: the clock can keep itself going for the entirety of is planned existence. While it will not display the time unless wound it will continue to keep track, using the sun and stars for guidance and temperature differentials for power. “Thermal power has been used for small mantel clocks before, but it has not been done before at this scale. The differential power is transmitted to the interior of the Clock by long metal rods. As long as the sun shines and night comes, the Clock can keep time itself, without human help. But it can’t ring its chimes for long by itself, or show the time it knows, so it needs human visitors.”

While this kind of working technology over such a long time period has almost no precedent, there are many examples of things surviving for such long periods – human-made ceramics have lasted up to 17,000 years along with other artifacts. The biggest worries? Some moving parts will not shift for generations, so making them able to work after a millennium without motion may be tricky. And then there are human visitors, well known for vandalizing and stealing from historical sites over time – we may, once again, be our own worst enemies.

As shown in the video above, “This system will be suspended 400ft down in the 500ft deep shaft that was carved using a raise bore drill last year. The large structural elements and gears are made from marine grade 316 stainless steel, most smaller pins and rollers are titanium, and the bearings are all made from an industrial ceramic. The entire system uses no lubrication, but the first tests have shown that over 93% of the energy put into the system, comes back out to go to the Clock.”

As any experienced urbanist can tell you, city life is rarely dull and this year has proven no exception – from traffic-topping articles to staff-picked stories, here are WebUrbanist’s must-read highlights of 2013. Skim below and skip ahead as desired, but be sure to click the blue links inline along the way for full article access. Share your favorites with family and friends … and thank you, as always, for reading!

Starting with the world of architectural anomalies of the West, a London skyscraper became a global sensation when its curved glass surface began starting fires in neighboring structures. Many readers were also amazed to discover faux facades hiding everything from train tunnels to power stations in plain sight in cities including New York, Toronto and Paris. Speaking of NYC and secrets, don’t forget this temporary abandoned water tower-turned-speakeasy on a Brooklyn rooftop.

Meanwhile, in the East, we witnessed a Tokyo company add a top-down twist to building demolition in Japan. Nearby China, in turn, presented designs for an incredible car-free city whilst simultaneously making the news for an array of deserted urban endeavors, including a surreal smaller-scale replica of Paris.

In the realm of futurism and fantasy, this year included a Russian space hotel design and artists making floor plans from famous American television shows. But fact can be stranger than fiction, as many commented on how much this dark tower in South Africa resembled the setting of a dystopian film. And in a bid to push urbanism beyond the borders of continents and countries altogether, one entrepreneur floated the idea of an entire high-tech offshore city. In turn, IKEA is also stretching the boundaries of architectural interventions with its portable $1000 flat-pack refugee shelter.

Our ongoing 7 Wonders Series is a long-standing fan favorite and well worth browsing for travelers and urban explorers. Many of these collections showcased abandoned places around the world, including top-secret buildings and underwater wonders; some were classed by broad type, including military, residential, commercial and industrial architecture, while others were organized by region, like Antarctica and New Zealand. Still others were even more specific, including sets of abandoned ski resorts, swimming pools, bookmobiles and unfinished nuclear power plants.

Shifting back to contemporary creations and cutting-edge design, we have seen some great innovations when it comes to modular rooms and convertible furniture, including an apartment where everything its occupant needs is hidden in floors, walls and ceilings. For those with a bit more space (and money) and an eye for luxury, there are also secret in-floor swimming pools that hide right under your feet – perhaps a reasonable place to deploy your fold-up suitcase kayak, too. Almost everyone, it would seem, loves a helpful space-saving design or a mysterious secret room, hidden passage or trap door.

In the arts, we saw everything from invisible-ink graffiti and hyper-realistic artworks to the world’s most-vandalized landmarks and ancient Greek statues turned into modern-day hipsters. In technology, we looked back at idiotic inventions from times past and forward to futuristic materials that actually exist today. And at the increasingly interesting intersection of art and technology, we found graffiti artists tagging low-tech cellophane as well as the most powerful man-made tornado in a museum.

WebUrbanist has managed a few milestones itself this year, with over 10 million visitors in 2013 alone (60 million+ total to date) and over 20,000,000 article views, also breaking a single-day record with nearly 500,000 pages viewed in one 24-hour period this fall. The site has topped 10,000 followers on Twitter and is nearing 50,000 fans on Facebook; those with a preference for  Google+ can now add WebUrbanist to your circles there as well. We are (as always) working on some new directions and innovations of our own, with more surprises to come in the new year. Meanwhile, it may sound cliche but it bears repeating: you readers, fans and friends of the site who share our articles and support our team … you make all of this possible, and you have our sincerest thanks and best wishes for 2014.

With the rise of digital technologies, photographers are finding increasingly fascinating ways to capture minutes, hours, days, weeks, months and even entire years. Here are just three extraordinary time-lapse photography examples spanning from seconds to minutes through a 24-hour day and culminating in a full 365-day year.

Sean Lenz & Kristoffer Abildgaard are on the shorter end of the spectrum, but their colorful collaborations are nonetheless spectacular. Their shots range from a few seconds up to several minutes, and capture luminescent paint sticks placed in above waterfalls – the path of the material traces the movement of the water. “To accomplish some of the more complicated shots they strung several sticks together at once to create different patterns of illumination. For those of you concerned about pollution, the sticks (which are buoyant) were never opened and were collected at the end of each exposure, thus no toxic goo was mixed into the water.”

Eirik Solheim started shooting pictures out of his window daily, then realize that with coding help from colleagues and readers, he could compile a time-lapse collage of an entire year. “The resolution of the 16 000 images I now have from 2010 are 3888×2592 pixels. So I selected 3888 images snapped during the day.” From there, he created a series of videos as well as the finalized composite still image above.

2012 is a Leap Year and what’s a Leap Year without a Leap Day? An ordinary year, obviously, which means 2012 is kinda extraordinary and February 29th is all kinds of awesome! Let’s celebrate this quirky and quixotic quadrennial calendar event by displaying a quarter of a hundred cool & creative Leap Day posters!

Caesar’s Salad Days

(image via: Maison)

Leapin’ lizards, Louise, it’s a Leap Year this year! Just what we need, one extra day of dreary, gloomy, snowy and slushy February. Those groundhogs weren’t kidding when they said we wouldn’t have an early spring, though it’s unlikely Punxsutawney Phil and his prognosticatin’ pals can grasp the concept of Leap Day… not with those wee paws, at least.

(images via: Trés Sugar, Latitude 47 and USA Weekend)

On the bright side, the 29th is the last day of the month, which is nice, and it gives us one more reason to celebrate something, anything… Leap Day? That’ll do!

(images via: Fly Magazine and Ultimate Ecards)

Leap Day has been around for longer than you might think. Roman Emperor Julius Caesar decreed it into existence in the year in 45 BC. as part of the Julian Reform of the calendar, with the first Leap Day occurring in 42 BC. Ol’ Julie may have had reason to fear the Ides of March but now at least he knew exactly when they would occur.

Lend Me Your Years!

(image via: Good Blog)

Anyway, the result was a vast improvement over the old way of keeping track of time. You can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs, however, and realigning the seriously out-of-whack Roman calendar effective January 1st, 45 BC necessitated adding some extra days to 46 BC – actually, quite a few extra days: that year ended up being 445 days long!

(images via: The Lookout and Fairfield Church of Christ)

Caesar may have made salad out of the old, imperfect Roman calendar but his fix was far from prefect, er, perfect. Since the actual length of the year is 365 days, 5 hours, 49 minutes and 16 seconds, the 365 days plus 6 hours long Julian Calendar slowly began to drift out of sync with the true solar year, gaining the equivalent of an extra day every 134 years.

(image via: Cafe Cargo)

It was a full 10 days out of alignment by 1582, which brought about the introduction of the current Gregorian Calendar. Due the inconvenient actual length of the year, Caesar’s quadrennial Leap Day doesn’t occur in end-of-century Leap Years unless the date is exactly divisible by 400.

(images via: Marine Marathon, Life Choices Center and Lake Elsinore Outlets)

Using this arcane but indispensable rule, 1600 and 2000 were leap years and 2400 and 2800 will be as well. The years 1700, 1800 and 1900 were not, however, and neither will 2100, 2200 or 2300. Note for trivia buffs: February 29th’s occurring in end-of-century Leap Years always occur on Tuesday.

Birthday Blues

(image via: Themes Bank)

So here we are, the 60th day of the year and it’s still February – an event that won’t happen again for another four years. You’d think those born on February 29th would thus suffer a shortage of birthday cakes three years out of four, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Leap Day discombobulation.

(images via: UK Fundraising and Wheatstack)

Several countries have enacted laws that specify which days in ordinary years are considered as official birth dates for the so-called “Leaplings”, though most simply set February 28th (the last day of the month) as a Leapling’s birthday in non-Leap Year years.

(image via: The Barkyard)

In the year 1999, New Zealand passed a law designating February 28th as the official birthday of Leap Year babies in ordinary years. The United Kingdom and Hong Kong, however, consider March 1st to be the day Leaplings reach the official age of majority and are subsequently entitled to all the privileges adulthood entails… except for Scotland; at 15 it’s the country with the world’s youngest official age of majority.

February 29 Fame & Four-tune

(images via: Themes Bank and Viva Las Vegas Weddings)

Who are some of these “unfortunate” Leaplings, you ask? Wikipedia provides a surprisingly extensive listing, or maybe not so surprising since it extends back to the birth of Pope Paul III in the year 1468.

(image via: Meredith Cutler)

Other notables born on February 29th include composer Gioachino Rossini (1792), Big Band leader Jimmy Dorsey (1904), and infamous serial killers Aileen “Monster” Wuornos (1956) and Richard “Night Stalker” Ramirez (1960).

(image via: Geocaching.com)

Leap Day captures us coming in and going out, of course. The list of those who shuffled off this mortal coil on a February 29th includes Billy the Kid’s killer Pat Garrett (1908), major league baseball player and manager Rebel Oakes (1948), and commercial auto repainter Earl Scheib (1992).

(images via: Choctaw Casinos and AngryElvis)

Scheib very nearly made it onto both the Leap Day birth AND death lists, having entered this world on February 28th of 1908. Although undoubtedly there are many others who came and went, as it were, on February 29th, the only historical figure of note to accomplish the feat was former Premier of Tasmania Sir James Wilson (1812 to 1880). You devil you!

(images via: Stackin Paper, Disney World Stories and Time and Date)

Leap Day births have also played their part in fiction, most recently in that Superman is a Leapling and most pointedly in Gilbert and Sullivan’s 1879 comic opera The Pirates of Penzance.

(images via: Louve Notes, Manhattan Hotel and Captain Blue Hen)

Librettist W. S. Gilbert contrived that the character Frederic, who was apprenticed to pirates until he reached the age of 21, was a Leap Day Baby. Sadly for Frederic, his inferred birth date of February 29th, 1852 meant he would not be eligible for freedom until 1940 when he would have actually lived 88 years. Harsh.

Leap Dazed

(image via: My God, It’s Full of Nerds!)

For a date that comes by only every 1,460 days (or every 2,920 days every quarter-millennium), February 29th isn’t really big deal unless you’re a modern-day business advertising a sale – the ancients didn’t really give a hoot one way or another.

(images via: MNN and TVFanatic)

They also didn’t have Leap Day William, who “lives in the Mariana Trench and emerges every four years to trade children’s tears for candy”, according to NBC’s most engaging page, the inimitable Kenneth.

(image via: The Inspiration Room)

You’d think that some sort of Leap Day tradition would have become established over the centuries and actually there is one: women are “allowed” to propose to men. Blame it on Irish saints Bridget and Patrick… though the latter likely agreed just to get the former to quit badgering him.

(images via: Trib Local, My History Museum and Theme Bank)

Supposedly, the penalty for turning down a woman’s Leap Day proposal on February was buying her a new set of gloves – to cover up the embarrassing lack of an engagement ring. Sorry guys, guess you can’t win for losing!

(image via: The Telegraph)

Leap Day also carries some connotations of bad luck not contingent on one’s being apprenticed to pirates. Scottish legends speak of Leap Day births as being unlucky while in Greece, to marry on a Leap Day is considered most inauspicious.

(image via: File Downloading)

I’m blaming wives for that one: a hubby who married on February 29th would only have to remember the date (and buy a gift!) every four years instead of annually. If you’re determined to go that route, dude, don’t even think of asking her to sign a pre-nup!