In his Seminar for the Long Now Foundation in January, Saul Griffith mentioned what he called the Rolex/Montblanc Pen approach to solving climate change.  As a way of cutting down on wasteful consumption (and the carbon embodied in consumer goods production), he suggests making and using fewer products.  The few products we do use, he explains, should be of the highest quality so that they’ll last and be worth using for our entire lives.  He exemplifies the idea by suggesting that everyone should be issued one Rolex watch and one Montblanc pen at birth:

I just have to own less stuff and make it last ten times as long.  Sometimes I call this the Rolex and Montblanc pen approach to life. So that just made me sound like a pretentious wanker. I am really not.  I am a deep green environmentalist and so what you want is when your child is born or when you are born to be issued a Rolex and a Montblanc pen and that’s the only writing implement, the only time piece you get for your whole life.

All right, so we solved just now writing and time reading but how about cell phones? So I think this is actually kind of great challenge.  The first company that makes the cell phone that will last a lifetime totally wins. That will be the most amazing thing.  For everyone in the audience who just got laid off please go and start a company to make a cell phone that lasts 100 years.  That would be the best thing you can do.

Anil Dash tells us that we’re already using plenty of very high-quality products.  Since there is no reason to throw out something that still works, he has started Last Year’s Model:

It’s totally normal to lust after the hottest new geeky gadgets. It’s also cool to put some thought into what we buy, and what we throw away. So this is a place to show the world that a lot of us are choosing to use Last Year’s Model.

In a way, it’s a prescriptive take on Kevin Kelly’s idea that species of technology never go extinct.  We may consider them ‘obsolete’ because we use a different tool for the job now, but somewhere someone is doing it the old fashioned way.  It can be a pretty fun challenge to find uses for the old tech you’ve got laying around and Dash’s site encourages people to submit the ways they’re still using iPods with (*gasp*) moving parts, or other less-than-shiny products from back in the day.

Also, I hope we can all agree that un-boxing videos have always been a little weird.

LONGPLAYER  LIVE
THE LIVE DEBUT OF THE LONGEST PIECE OF MUSIC EVER WRITTEN

Lasting 1000 years, Jem Finer’s Longplayer has been playing without interruption, since the first moments of the year 2000, at listening posts around the world. Originally commissioned by Artangel, for almost 10 years it has been performed by computer. Now, for the first time, a tiny fragment of its millennial expanse receives its live debut.

On September 12th 2009, Finer will direct Longplayer’s spectacular first-ever live performance – 1000 minutes from its vast continuum, performed by a 26-strong orchestra, on a purpose-built 20-meter wide instrument, effectively a giant synthesizer built of bronze-age technology, with highly resonant bells for tone generators and humans for power.

Much more than a piece of music, Longplayer is a conceptual artwork, a social institution and a profound work of imagination. A unique historical moment, Longplayer Live will be an opportunity to contemplate time past, present and future, and be part of something momentous, lasting and beautiful.

Longplayer Musicians
Douglas Benford • Steve Beresford • Gina Birch • John Bisset • Ansuman Biswas • Tom Chant • Richard Cripps • Peter Cusack • Rhodri Davis • Ben Drew • Roger Eno • Jem Finer • Iris Garrelfs • Darryl Hunt • Ivor Kallin • Andrew Kotting • Kaffe Matthews • Graeme Miller • J. Maizlish Mole • Hayley Newman • Michael Ormiston • Spider Stacy • Emma Stow • David Toop • Candida Valentino • Laura Williams

•      •      •

THE ARTANGEL LONGPLAYER CONVERSATION

An epic relay of one-to-one conversations, inspired by the philosophical implications of long-term thinking and related issues, will take place simultaneously in the Roundhouse Studio. Jeanette Winterson will begin the 12-hour conversation featuring leading writers, filmmakers, scientists, academics and technology activists.

Long Conversationalists
Charles Arsene-Henry • Cory Doctorow • Marcus du Sautoy • Sophie Fiennes • Daniel Glaser • Bonnie Greer • Mark Haddon • Lisa Jardine • Andrew Kötting • Mark Miodownik • Susie Orbach • Ruth Padel • Robert Preston • Bigna Pfenninger • Steve Rose • David Toop • Vincent Walsh • Jeanette Winterson • Lewis Wolpert • And more…

•      •      •

TICKETS & INFORMATION

Tickets £15 (£12.50 concessions)
Buy tickets online at: www.roundhouse.org.uk
To book by telephone, call: 0844 482 8008

More information about Longplayer & Jem Finer is available at www.longplayer.org.
Listen to Longplayer’s live stream here.

The Longplayer Live Experience
The live performance begins at 8.20am on Saturday 12 September and ends at 1.00am the following morning, while the Artangel Longplayer Conversations begin at 10am and run until 10pm. Ticket holders will be free to come and go as they please, and move between the parallel worlds of the music and the conversation.

Food & Drink
The Roundhouse has a café which will be open for the duration of the event, serving breakfast, lunch and dinner throughout the day. Bars will be open all day. For a change of scenery, there is the bustle of Camden in one direction and the green spaces of Primrose Hill in the other.

The Long Now Foundation’s monthly Seminars About Long-term Thinking

presents Arthur Ganson on “Machines and the Breath of Time”

Monday September 14, 02009 at 7:30 pm at the Cowell Theater

Long Now Members can reserve a seat HERE

You can purchase tickets for $10 HERE

About this Seminar:

Arthur Ganson uses humble materials to create kinetic sculptures of humor, drama, and emotion. His work has been shown around the world, and has been an ongoing inspiration for the 10,000 Year Clock project at Long Now. His machinated gestures play with time spans that range from the epochal to the momentary.

One of the touchstone pieces for the Clock project is the Machine with Concrete. The input of the piece is a 200 revolution per minute motor, and after series of gear reductions it’s output gear is cast in concrete. Due to the multiplicative nature of the gear train it will take upwards of two trillion years to break the final gear. Ganson will be discussing the theme of time in his work, and will be bringing a piece to show live at the event.

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I would love to find a way to see this documentary film on the oldest living tree if anyone out there knows how it is being shown…

The Curse of The Methuselah Tree

“I am not part of history. No. History is part of me.” This is the story of the oldest living thing on earth and its unique view of human civilisation. With narration and specially-commissioned poetry by Roger McGough.

This original film combines beautifully shot footage of Methuselah, the 26-foot bristlecone pine, with reconstructions of the thousands of years it has witnessed. But what if such a witness could speak? For the first time this 4,643-year-old is given his own voice.

Hear the tree’s perspective on passing of ancient civilisations, the settlement of America by Europeans and the testing of atom bombs 100 miles away in the Nevada desert.

The latest Seminars About Long-term Thinking are now available as audio downloads or podcasts and in hi-res video for Long Now members.

Wayne Clough on “Smithsonian Forever” – audio now available

Ronald and Adamchak on “Organically Grown and Genetically Engineered: The Food of the Future” – video now available

The Smithsonian’s long now

[Note for those who mentally enunciate words while reading: the last name is pronounced "Cluff."]

Secretary Clough reminded the audience that we own the Smithsonian, and what that amounts to is 19 museums and galleries containing 137 million objects, plus the National Zoo and 20 libraries. Each year the Smithsonian has 27 million visitors. In addition there are numerous research centers with activities in 88 countries.

That’s the Smithsonian’s short now—it’s current profile to fulfill its abiding mission to help society understand and remember itself. The Institution’s long now reaches back quite a ways and hopes to reach into the future…

Read the rest of Stewart Brand’s Summary

In a new announcement by the Australian government, the equivalent of $7.8 million US dollars will go towards programs that work to save endangered aboriginal languages.

Australia is one of the linguistically rich regions of the world, in recent history having upwards of 275 distinct languages.  These languages also contain some fascinating linguistic features, such “mother-in-law” avoidance speech, unique noun class systems (witness the Dyirbal noun class for “women, fire, and dangerous things”), and words of surprising internal complexity (take for instance the Mayali word Abanyawoihwarrgahmarneganjginjeng. ‘I cooked the wrong meat for them again’.)

Of these 275 languages, 111 are now extinct, and an additional 100 languages are considered to be critically endangered, with only a few elderly speakers remaining.  To address this precipitous decline, the new program proposes to start with “translation services, tests for children and a feasibility study for a national centre for Aboriginal languages.”

Programs like this may seem like too little too late, but declaring these languages “national treasures” can actually go a long way in creating a better climate for their continued use.  A similar policy change came when the United States passed the Native American Languages Act of 1990, reversing decades of destructive government language policies, and setting up a grant program that continues to fund community-based language research to this day.

There is also support for aboriginal language documentation through a number of other grant programs, both large and small, that exist to support language documentation around the world.  These include the Endangered Language Fund (ELF), the Foundation for Endangered Languages (FEL), the US Federal Documenting Endangered Languages program and a few private programs such as The Hans Rausing Endangered Languages Program and the Volkswagon Stiftung funded DoBes project.  Each of these programs has been underway for several years, and combined, have a rich portfolio of successful projects to their credit.

(Thanks to Stewart Brand for passing this news item along.)

Here is an interesting example of a linguistic game, a crowdsourced translation, and a potential Rosetta Genesis Text to boot — The Lolcat Bible (or, translated into Lolcat by yours truly:  “teh Ceiling Cat goodmeow accordingz to teh kitteh”):

“At start, no has lyte. An Ceiling Cat sayz, i can haz lite? An lite wuz.  An Ceiling Cat sawed teh lite, to seez stuffs, An splitted teh lite from dark but taht wuz ok cuz kittehs can see in teh dark An not tripz over nethin.  An Ceiling Cat sayed light Day An dark no Day. It were FURST!!! “

You can read the rest here.  And by the rest, I mean, all of it – the whole Bible translated into Lolcat – down to the book, chapter and verse. And, if you see something missing, you can add it yourself – it’s a wiki.

Boreded Ceiling Cat makinkgz Urf n stuffs

The Long News: stories that might still matter fifty, or a hundred, or ten thousand years from now.

According to the most recent reports, we’re melting the icebergs. We’ve endangered fifty percent of the ocean’s coral species. And we’ve damaged sixty-three percent of the world’s fisheries. It seems we’re well on our way to destroying the two-thirds of the planet where we don’t even live.

Some recent news stories about the oceans:

1. A summary of what scientists are telling Congress: Global warming has already changed oceans

2. The latest from Greenland: Sea level rise: it’s worse than we thought

3. You know those fish stories? They’re getting smaller: Fish shrink due to climate change

4. The jellyfish are taking over: Jellyfish threaten to ‘dominate’ ocean

5. There’s so much trash floating off the coast of California, it even has a name: Students spearhead study on Great Pacific Ocean Garbage Patch

6. On the other hand, maybe it’s not all bad news: World fisheries collapse can be averted

7. And maybe we don’t really need to worry as much as the news reports say we do: Media tend to doomsay when addressing environment

We invite you to submit Long News story suggestions here.

A recent article in the New York Times describes the endangered language research of Tucker Childs, a linguist at Portland State University, who is in Sierra Leone studying the nearly extinct Kim language.  The death of the Kim language is attributed to the decision of younger speakers to learn the Mende language, spoken by 1.5 million people in Sierra Leone and Liberia. This pattern of language loss is common, especially in the era of globalization, when the ability to communicate beyond a local village is essential for economic success.

The article suggests that Kim is beyond the point of revitalization, but this makes the effort to document the language even more urgent. By documenting the Kim language, and then depositing the documentation with the Hans Rausing Endangered Languages Project, Childs and his research team are working to make sure that knowledge of the Kim language will remain long after the language is no longer spoken.  This kind of information can contribute a great deal to ongoing linguistic research (such as the study of linguistic typology and what is possible in human language) and in some cases, has even provided enough information to bring languages back into active use after generations have passed.

Technology for gathering language documentation has changed dramatically, just as language documentation efforts have redoubled in the face of rapid and massive language extinction.  Audio and video recorders are all digital, and the work of building dictionaries and translating collected texts is now typically done on a laptop computer.  One of the most moving parts of The Linguists, a documentary chronicling the work of two endangered language researchers (viewable for free on Babelgum), comes when the last speakers of Chulym, a language of Siberia, are able to immediately see a digital video recording of themselves speaking their native language, which was heavily supressed in the Soviet era.

While digital technology provides new tools in the effort to document the world’s endangered languages, it also presents a challenge for archivists trying to preserve data that is “born digital” and only exists in a digital format. The Digital Endangered Languages and Musics Archive Network (DELAMAN), is a network of digital archives that support endangered language documentation by helping ensure that data remains safe, discoverable, accessible, and usable.  Participating archives like The Rosetta Project are working to develop and promote robust archival practices around the long-term storage of linguistic data.  Similar efforts have produced and promoted ISO 639-3 codes for 6,800 human languages, linguistics-specific metadata (see the Open Language Archives Community), and are promoting open and transparent file format standards for linguistic research (see the NSF-funded EMELD project)