Warren Buffett and (l to r) Protégé Partners' Scott Bessent, Jeffrey Tarrant, and Ted Seides.

The second year’s results on Buffett’s Million Dollar Long Bet are in.  Article from Fortune Magazine below:

By Carol J. Loomis, senior editor-at-large. April 27, 2010: 9:34 AM ET

(Fortune) — Unaudited results are in for the second year of “Buffett’s Big Bet” — Warren Buffett’s 2008 wager against Protégé Partners that a low-fee index fund will outperform certain funds of hedge funds — and the famous investor has gained some ground on his challenger. In the 2009 segment of the 10-year bet, an S&P 500 index fund — that’s Buffett’s pick — outdid the average performance of the five funds of funds that New York-based money management firm Protégé backs, 26.2% to 15.9%.

But Buffett’s spurt was not enough to undo the lead that Protégé’s funds had racked up in the turbulent year of 2008. True, the standings for the two years combined show both contenders having lost money. But Protégé’s picks are down 11.8%, less than the S & P’s minus 20.2%.

Both sides are measured net of all fees, costs, and expenses. By the terms of the bet, Protégé has never publicly disclosed the names of the five funds it picked. One of them is assumed to be the fund of funds that Protégé itself runs.

Buffett does know the names of the five funds and has seen their audited results for 2008. He will not see 2009 audited results for the funds until later this year.

The two sides, however, agreed last fall that “approximate” results for the previous year would be announced each spring, in time to be discussed by Buffett at the Berkshire Hathaway (BRKA, Fortune 500) annual meeting, which is to take place in Omaha this week, on Saturday, May 1st.

The precise index fund “bought” by Buffett is Vanguard’s S&P 500 Admiral fund
In a sense, the horses in this race have so far run true to form. In an up period for the market, which 2009 obviously was, the general market often beats hedge funds.

But in a bad year, and 2008 certainly fits that description, the short selling that many hedge funds engage in and their freedom to roam beyond stocks allows them to cut their losses and whip the S&P. In 2008, S&P’s Admiral shares were down a devastating 37.02%, The Protégé funds managed to fall by “only” 23.9%.

The money involved in this bet is $1 million — sort of. That qualification is necessary because of a present-value factor. Each side originally put up $320,000 as its wager. The total funds of about $640,000 were next used to buy a zero-coupon bond that will have appreciated to a value of $1 million at the end of 2017, when the bet concludes.

That prize will then go to the winner’s charity. If Protégé wins, it wishes the money to go to Absolute Return for Kids, an international philanthropy based in London. Buffett has designated Girls Inc. to get the money if he wins.

The party holding the money — that zero-coupon bond — is Long Now Foundation of San Francisco, which oversees a mechanism called Long Bets that will pay off the bet. Both Buffett and Protégé have posted arguments on Long Bets’ Website that explain why each thinks its bet will win.

–The writer of this article is a friend of Warren Buffett’s and the editor of his annual letter to Berkshire Hathaway’s shareholders.

Since its inception in 01979 programs like the Long Term Ecological Research Network have been selecting and tracking ecological sites to be monitored over the long-term.   The NSF funded LTER network  hopes to codify what usually occurs by accident in science.  For instance the “Keeling Curve“, which was one of the first bits of scientific proof about baseline atmospheric carbon, was not found on purpose.  The Keeling curve was discovered as part of a control for another experiment on volcanism.

However it is only when we do the the same boring non-sexy data collection year after year, that we might see trends that only appear after decades or centuries.  This is difficult science to keep going on an ongoing basis, and it is great to see it getting done.  It is also worth pointing out that other institutions are doing “slow science” like The Smithsonian’s Tropical Research Institute which has been studying a chunk of Panama for almost 90 continuous years.  We also now have over 50 years of Pan Evaporation Data thanks to the agriculture industry, which is leading to startling new realizations about the global dimming effect.

There is also a lot of science being done that would be great to make into slow science.  For instance the many chapters of the Surfrider Foundation collect all kinds of data about the toxicity of ocean water in sites all around the world.  Yet as far as I know they are not saving this data for posterity, as they are primarily concerned with how toxic the water is at a given moment. But just think how fantastic it would be to have that data from 100 or 1000 years ago?

I would love to hear about other “slow science” projects and collect them here.  Either ones that are going on, or data that you would like to see collected over the long-term like the Surfrider example.  So please use the comments field to suggest others.

Listing of Slow Science experiments (thanks for the additions!):

• Pitch Drop Experiment
• Long Term Ecological Research Network
• The Smithsonian’s Tropical Research Institute
• Pan Evaporation Data
• Keeling CO2 measurements
• (added) Audubon Christmas Bird Count
• (added) Framingham Heart Study
• (added) Sloan Digital Sky Survey
• (added) The Oxford Electric Bell
• (added) Rothamsted crop rotation experiments
• (added) The Beverly Clock
• (added) Up Series (more art than science, but in the same realm)

Member Tyler Emerson sent in a link to this article by Larry Brilliant on “How to Prevent the Next Global Crisis“.  Many of you know Mr. Brilliant as the former director of Google.org, he was also former Long Now Seminar speaker, and is now directing Skoll’s Global Threat initiative.

This is also hot on the heels of Eagleman’s talk on “Six Easy Steps to Avert the Collapse of Civilization”.  It is interesting to see this emerging theme.  It seems like a good sign that long-term thinking is on a pendulum upswing…

The 5 traits that connect the world’s biggest threats—and what we must do to stop future ones.

by Larry Brilliant, Skoll Global Threats Fund

San Francisco recently marked the Chinese New Year, a big event here with a downtown parade, fireworks and plenty of celebration. We moved from the year of the Ox to the year of the Tiger. Perfect. 2009 saw a certain ox-like obstinacy — stunned by the economic downturn, people, governments and economies plodded along, keeping their heads down. 2010, however, is eminently Tigerish. We face many tremendously complicated issues this year. If tigers were global threats, this year we have many by the tail.

I sit on a committee on catastrophic risks for the World Economic Forum and co-chair a national committee on biological risks established by presidential directive. I also head up a new organization, the Skoll Global Threats Fund, which focuses on threats that — if left unchecked — might bring the world to its knees.

Skoll Global Threats Fund is brand new — only half a year since Jeff Skoll started this new entity — and we are setting about trying to find ways to help mitigate the risks from climate change, water scarcity, pandemics, nuclear proliferation and conflict in the Middle East.

There are some common denominators these threats share, which are for the most part also common to other grave global problems, like the financial system meltdown, global governance failures, and disruptions of global trade that our WEF committee deals with. And for many of these factors, the year of the Tiger is a turning point, a crossroads. Here are five common denominators: (continue reading at Forbes)

Anthropologist David Graeber recently sent in his essay on the 5000 year history of debt (orignally published in Mute and Eurozine).  Aside from being an interesting read in general, this effort (which he is just now finishing as a book) is an interesting resource for the Eternal Coin and the Long Finance project.

Debt: The first five thousand years by David Graeber

Throughout its 5000 year history, debt has always involved institutions – whether Mesopotamian sacred kingship, Mosaic jubilees, Sharia or Canon Law – that place controls on debt’s potentially catastrophic social consequences. It is only in the current era, writes anthropologist David Graeber, that we have begun to see the creation of the first effective planetary administrative system largely in order to protect the interests of creditors.

There is new media available from our monthly series, the Seminars About Long-term Thinking. Stewart Brand’s summaries and audio downloads or podcasts of the talks are free to the public; Long Now members can view HD video of the Seminars and comment on them.

Watch the video of David Eagleman’s “Six Easy Steps to Avert the Collapse of Civilization”

History of Major Contagion Map by Haisam Hussein

Long Now member #744 Jason Martin sent in links to a few maps by Lapham’s Quarterly each of which depicts a different view of deep time.  Click on the maps shown here to see the larger versions.

Telling Tales Map by Haisam Hussein

The Art of Knowing graphics by Joyce Pendola

President Barack Obama attends the opening session of the Space Conference at NASA Operations and Checkout Building in Cape Canaveral, Florida, April 15, 2010.

This week President Obama laid out his plan for the future of NASA.  It includes a large budget increase, a push to hand off orbital space flight to private companies, the design of new propulsion systems, and included the long-term goals of landing on an asteroid, going to Mars, and even pushing beyond that.  The national press and political reaction has been interesting to watch from a perspective of long-term thinking.  While there has always been a general agreement that we want to achieve these goals, the administration is taking heat from the press and both sides of the isle for looking “too far out.”

Reaction to President Obama’s plan to kill the space shuttle, scrap moon missions in favor of deep-space travel, and outsource launches to private contractors is falling mostly along partisan lines—but even some Democrats said the proposals could hurt U.S. space interests in the short term. (information week)

See more press through this Google News Search

It was predictable that representatives of all the “space states” like Florida and Texas might get upset. It was a little less predictable to see the right opposing privatization of orbital flight however. But even beyond that, I think this is one of the first cases I have seen a political figure chastised explicitly for thinking too long-term.

The best bit of long-term thinking was actually glossed over in the announcement of an asteroid mission.  An asteroid or comet impact on earth is the only serious threat to human (and nearly all lifes) existence, yet we spend basically no part of NASA’s budget trying figure out how we might avert such a disaster (the little bit of funding for Rusty Schweickart’s program is an exception, but a small one).

Aside from the very important asteroid mission, is the audacious goal of not only going to Mars, but landing humans on it.  This has been talked about for years, and I think that the average person thinks of this as a simple step forward from landing on the moon.  I used to think that.  But in the last year I have had dinner with the director at NASA Ames, given a talk at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and watched a shuttle launch from about as close as humans are allowed to get.  I have learned that going to space is dangerous and difficult.  It also requires a fantastic amount of infrastructure.  Look at the picture below of Kennedy Space Center:

It goes on for miles and miles of some of the largest and most specialized buildings and facilities in the world.  And Kennedy is just the prep and launch facility, the spacecraft and payloads are almost all built with private contractors or at the other 13 huge NASA facilities around the country.  When I had dinner with several NASA scientists at JPL I remember them telling me that with existing technology we might be able to get humans to Mars… and keep them alive for about 45 minutes. Getting Home? forget about getting home…

In order to get to and come back from another planet with gravity like Mars, (unlike the moon and asteroids with little gravity) we will have to package up at least the minimal functionality of Kennedy Space Center, and all the fuel needed for all legs of the trip.  We will have to take that package, launch it into space (now is a good time to remember that for every pound of payload we launch, we use about 95 pounds of fuel), then fly it 300 million miles, land it with little or no recovery infrastructure, unpack it all, re-assemble it, refuel and launch.  Even if some of the plans for making our own fuel, water and oxygen play out, the bare bones infrastructure and ability to prep a spacecraft for flight on another planet is astoundingly difficult.  This is, by definition a long-term plan, and continuing to spend money on the same technology that barely gets us to orbit will not get us there.  If we truly want to send humans beyond the moon, we are going to have to invent a lot of new technology, and invest heavily in education.  Now seems like as good a time as any to get started…

A species of jellyfish called Turritopsis nutricula utilizes a cellular process called transdifferentiation to effectively live forever.  The process tends to be used by animals like salamanders to regenerate lost or injured body parts.  The Turritopsis nutricula, however, can use the process to completely revert themselves into a polyp form, restarting their life-cycle.

Research was published in 2008 showing that this ability has allowed the jellyfish to survive long trips in ballast compartments on cargo ships.  They’ve therefore been able to silently invade the world’s oceans and have been observed in the Atlantic, Pacific and Mediterranean.

Harnessing this process would be a boon to Extropianism, a philosophy that includes the hope that humans will one day be able to live indefinitely.  On top of this goal, perhaps their ability to colonize distant seas could be a helpful model in the service of “directed panspermia,” a process Michael Mautner has claimed, in the Journal of Cosmology, to be a moral obligation.

The walls of David Eagleman’s lab are covered with scribblings related to studying time, including the equation for entropy and analysis of scenes from science-heavy films. John B. Carnett

Neuroscientist and author David Eagleman has joined The Long Now Foundation as our newest (and youngest) board member.  Eagleman first came to our attention when Brian Eno started raving about his book of short stories, Sum: 40 Tales from the Afterlives.  Since that time he has done several collaborations with Brian, and most recently been a speaker in our Seminars About Long-term Thinking.

Posted today on the Popular Science website you can find an article on Eagleman’s research on how the brain perceives time where Eagleman staged a 15 story fall for the reporter to experience “time dilation” (video and except below):

Sorting out how the brain handles time-related information could reveal the cause of several mental illnesses. But some basic information still eludes researchers, in particular an explanation for “time dilation,” the notion that time seems to slow during life-threatening situations.

Technology Review has an article up in which some physicists defend their clock-making chops.  It seems they feel pulsars are getting more credit than they deserve in the public perception of accurate time-keeping:

So accurate are pulsar signals that when they were discovered, astronomers gave serious credence to the idea that they were evidence of intelligent life elsewhere in the Universe because they were unmatched by anything physicists could make on Earth. This has lead to the widespread belief that pulsars are the most accurate clocks in the Universe.

John Hartnett and Andre Luiten at the University of Western Australia want you know that’s no longer the case.

Today, the best optical lattice neutral atom clocks and trapped ion clocks have a frequency stability approaching one part in 10^17.By contrast, as more pulsars have been discovered, their timing stability has improved by less than an order of magnitude in the last 20 years. The best millisecond pulsars have a stability of only one part in 10^15 at best.

That means that terrestrial clocks can rightly be crowned the best clocks in the Universe, say Hartnett and Luiten.

Duly noted.  It seems worth pointing out that the measure of accuracy in the article is expressed as a ratio without units – often you hear that an atomic clock will lose a second of accuracy only every 10 billion years or so.  The author of this article avoids that, and maybe for good reason.  Sometimes people told Long Now is building a 10,000 Year Clock react by asking, “Oh, like an atomic clock?”   It seems that an occasional side-effect of using these long time units to illustrate the accuracy of atomic clocks is the implication that they will be around for eons.

The thing is, atomic clocks rely on vacuum-sealed chambers full of cesium atoms kept near absolute zero or similarly complicated mechanisms to make their extremely precise measurements.  That kind of hardware requires a significant technological, economic and bureaucratic infrastructure to maintain.  If you can imagine finding an atomic clock after the electricity failed that kept it running, you would have to recreate a lot of knowledge to understand what in fact it was.

The article goes on to discuss the difficulty of building a timepiece durable enough that its lifespan requires scientific notation to describe, and mentions Long Now’s attempt through the Clock of the Long Now. It’s in this endurance category, however, that pulsars maintain their dominance, as they’re likely to last quite a bit longer than anything humans have been able to build, even Long Now – we’ve been able to observe some that are thought to be around 200 million years old.

(Where Is the Best Clock in the Universe? – Technology Review)