For the past few years Chris Hibbert has been working on Zócalo, an Open Source Toolkit for Prediction Markets. He writes, “my purpose in the project is to build prediction market software that people can use as a foundation for deploying many markets of this type. As I said in my proposal to CommerceNet, the plan is to start by building software to support economists doing experiments with prediction markets, and expand from there to internal markets within businesses, and eventually expand to the point where the software would be sufficient for public real-money markets in important questions on technology development, economic impacts, and other important issues” (Hibbert). Essentially, Hibbert believes that by making prediction market software open source and customizable, prediction markets will be more widely used. We are watching this closely as we are considering the same with our Long Bets software.  Build 2007.1 was released April 19, 2007; comments from users are most welcome.

(a screenshot of Zócalo via from sourceforge)

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Arborsculpture, a term coined by Richard Reames, “is the art of shaping trees trunks. It is often accomplished by framing, bending, grafting and pruning. [sic] Using one or many trees guided into pre designed shapes, functional or artistic, to remain living or to be harvested” (Reames).

Arborsculptors engage in a very slow ’sculpting’ of trees trunks into shapes desirable in the future (as well as urban greening and carbon sinking). Reames writes, “I believe that live trees can replace many of the things we normally kill trees to make. Garden furniture, gazebos, bridges, fences and fence posts are just some of the things I have been able to replace with living trees. The benefits are numerous, such as shade in the winter and sun in the summer, no paint required and instead of rotting they just get bigger every year while sequestering C02.”

His website features beautiful photographs of arborsculpture worldwide, Axel Erlandson’s Tree Circus, and Reames’s book on the subject, playing with Frances Moore Lappe’s title with his own: “Arboriculture: Solutions for a Small Planet.” A small sampling:

Axel Erlandson underneath an exhibit from his Tree Circus near Santa Cruz, California.

A “Dancing Pooktre” in Queensland, Australia. This tree is alive.

A ficus house in Okinawa, Japan. This tree is also alive.

Another ficus turned “Plantware.” Again, alive. Now if only the leaves were used as toilet paper…

(Images from www.arborsmith.com.)

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(AFP/Eric Estrade)

Artist Christo, is building one of his first long term pieces in the desert of the United Arab Emerites comprised of 390,000 oil barrels stacked 492 feet high.

The project is a far cry from the ephemeral artworks for which the couple are best known, like wrapping the Berlin Reichstag and the Pont-Neuf in Paris: “According to engineers, the Mastaba could last for 5,000 years.”

Apparently Christo has had the idea to build this piece since 1977 and after aborted attempts in Texas and the Netherlands has finally found a place and funding to realize it. I am curious what the barrels are made of that would make them last 5 millennia..?

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…take your pick.

(Thanks to Jamais Cascio for spotting this.)

From an interview with US Secretary of State, Condoleeza Rice, by BusinessWeek magazine:

BusinessWeek: Would you consider a position in business or on Wall Street?
Condoleezza Rice: I don’t know what I’ll do long-term. I’m a terrible long-term planner.

~ “A Resolute Condoleezza Rice“, BusinessWeek, 23 July 02007

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Domain Field (02003) :: image at antonygormley.com

I recently met British sculptor Antony Gormley at the EGS summer session in Saas-Fee, Switzerland. Most of his works interpret the human body, and many of them replicate actual bodies — frequently his own. A deeply thoughtful presentation of his work during an evening seminar impressed on me that I had not really thought much before about the rich, expressive possibilities of sculpture. There’s certainly an interesting paradox about something as frail and transient as the human body being expressed in much hardier materials — and although this has of course been the staple of thousands of years of statue-making, Gormley’s own take feels unique, somehow proposing, or inviting, a new vision of the human form.

Another Place (01997) :: image at Wikipedia

Anyway, a fellow student alerted me to a remark the sculptor had made which sounded interesting from a Long Now perspective. I wrote to Gormley to request elaboration, and received the following succinct reply:

Dear Stuart,

Sculpture tries to inscribe human thought and feeling in geological time.

It has been noted that “Gormley likes to play with scale, a word he prefers to size.” (His email’s brevity perhaps a case in point?) Happily, though, for those interested in further exploration, the artist has expressed variations on the art-in-geological-time idea elsewhere:

- The Independent (Sculpture “tries to inscribe within geological time some record of human experience.”)
- The Architectural Review (Sculpture “acts as a witness, holding human feeling and thought and inscribes it within geological time”)
- Camden New Journal (where he speaks of buildings as a “geological environment”)
- Guardian Online (where he refers to his figures as “industrial fossils … subject to geological time rather than human time”)
- The Observer (”Sculpture, for me, is an attempt to inscribe in geological time, in resistant materials, something about human feeling and thought.”)
- His website (where he writes of one work “activating… geological time”; and another seeking a “human equivalent [for a] geological place”)

Artists, and sculptors in particular, might justifiably argue that the real value and impact of their work lies not in the abstract ideas that explain it, but rather in the kind of experience — when one is confronted with its sheer physical presence — that it evokes. Even so, the notion of sculpture as a geological-scale statement of human concern is intriguing from a Long Now perspective. (Whether or how it actually brings that out for the viewer in any given case is another question.) But it would be great to hear from readers with further insights or examples of this kind of thought — and art.

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Danielle here at Long Now sent me this interesting BBC piece on how a group at the University of Wisconsin - Madison is looking at mechanical computing at the nano scale in order to avoid the thermal limits being approached in CMOS circuitry.

They claim to be inspired by Babbage’s decimal computing tech. It makes me wonder if Danny Hillis’ binary mechanical adder would be useful at the nano scale.

” The blueprint for a tiny, ultra-robust mechanical computer has been outlined by US researchers. The energy-efficient nano computer is inspired by ideas about computing first put forward nearly 200 years ago. ” -Jonathan Fildes, BBC

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Prediction markets can use the signals in both greed and the wisdom of the crowds to forecast. Some people are using their coin to vote for the final end of Harry Potter. As this graph from NewsFutures shows, there’s a 75% chance he’ll live.

© NewsFutures

Come back tomorrow to see how accurate this short term prediction has been.

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Do you find yourself tossing and turning at night, tortured by the stupendous challenge of addressing your culture’s pathologically short attention span by reinventing its relationship to the passage of time?

Here then, at last: a cheaper, more portable alternative to a monument-scale 10,000 year clock embedded in the side of a mountain.

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I recently came across this very nice animation of the last 2907 years of alphabet evolution. It is a remarkably condensing and simple animated illustration.

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My friend Camron sent me this great geeky blog piece on a bedding plain that was laid down by tides created by our moon 3.2 billion years ago. It not only shows the moon affects, but it also shows us it was in a lower orbit then…

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