Linden Lab releases new builds every week. Flickr releases them up to every half hour. Writer and publisher Tim O’Reilly writes that “the open source dictum, ‘release early and release often’ in fact has morphed into an even more radical position, ‘the perpetual beta,’ in which the product is developed in the open, with new features slipstreamed in on a monthly, weekly, or even daily basis” (O’Reilly). Considering that it is a component of long-term success in Web 2.0, ‘the perpetual beta’ can remind us that iterative short-term thinking is nested within thinking that is longer-term.

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Clive Thompson riffs on a piece by the New York Times public editor discussing the dilemma of what to do with old news items that are now badly out of date. They are small to the public but large to the folks involved, who often want them either amended or deleted. It’s a great piece about long-term responsibility: if you keep an archive are you obliged to keep it updated? You can read about it here. Clive reposts this bit:

Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, an associate professor of public policy at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, has a different answer to the problem: He thinks newspapers, including The Times, should program their archives to “forget” some information, just as humans do. Through the ages, humans have generally remembered the important stuff and forgotten the trivial, he said. The computer age has turned that upside down. Now, everything lasts forever, whether it is insignificant or important, ancient or recent, complete or overtaken by events.

Following Mayer-Schönberger’s logic, The Times could program some items, like news briefs, which generate a surprising number of the complaints, to expire, at least for wide public access, in a relatively short time. Articles of larger significance could be assigned longer lives, or last forever.

Mayer-Schönberger said his proposal is no different from what The Times used to do when it culled its clipping files of old items that no longer seemed useful. But what if something was thrown away that later turned out to be important? Meyer Berger, a legendary Times reporter, complained in the 1940s that files of Victorian-era murder cases had been tossed.

“That’s a risk you run,” Mayer-Schönberger said. “But we’ve dealt with that risk for eons.”

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This is a great appendix I just came across on the half life of vocabulary in a language. From the text:

The rate of vocabulary change The half-life of a word is the amount of time required for there to be a 50% chance that it will be replaced by a new word. Most words have a half-life of 2,000 years. However, a small number of words have a half-life of greater than 10,000 years. This shows that despite the fast average pace of language evolution, some meanings, like highly-conserved genes, evolve at a slow rate. The y axis in the graphic is the number out of a sample of 200 meanings. (ref. 1)

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Watchmaker Stephen Forsey has just released a new mechanical planetaria with Richard Mille watches that is quite gorgeous. There is an excellent write up of it in Watchismo. (thanks to Danielle for sending this to me by way of boingboing.)

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Long Now seminar speaker Alex Wright brought to all of our attention the truly visionary work of Belgian Paul Otlet and his Mundameum of 1910 (video from a documentary above, and Stewart Brand’s description from the talk below.)

The greatest unknown revolutionary was the Belgian Paul Otlet.
In 1895 he set about freeing the information in books from their
bindings. He built a universal decimal classification and then
figured out how that organized data could be explored, via “links”
and a “web.” In 1910 Otlet created a “radiated library” called the
Mundameum in Brussels that managed search queries in a massive way
until the Nazis destroyed the service. Alex Wright showed an
astonishing video of how Otlet’s distributed telephone-plus-screen
sysem worked . - Stewart Brand on Alex Wright

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The best-selling book The World Without Us draws scenarios of what our home planet would look like if our civilization suddenly vanished. The book’s website has a small slide show with a graphic illustrations of some scenes from the future in this scenario. Click down to Visual TImeline Slideshow. It’s a coherent long view.

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We now have 13 of our Seminars About Long Term Thinking made into DVD’s and available at Amazon. Starting in Janurary 02006 with the help and guidance of Will Hearst’s Whole Earth Films, we began to film the series professionally (all filmed and edited by Chris Baldwin of Shoulder High Productions). More videos will be coming out soon to bring us up to the most recent talks. These will also be availble in our store and at the talks themselves.

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(Matthew Salzer pulls a core sample from a tree on the Long Now Nevada property)

One of the ways that the 10,000 year Clock of the Long Now will stay accurate over the millennia is with a solar synchronizer. The interesting question that comes up with doing this, is that we need to understand how long a period we might expect there to be no sun over the course of several millennia.

In 1999 Long Now purchased a desert site in eastern Nevada whose upper reaches are covered in very long lived bristlecone trees. In recent years we have been working with Matthew Salzer of the University of Arizona Tree Ring Lab who has been sampling bristlecones all over the southwest in a climate research project (including the trees on our property).  He has recently published those finding in an excellent paper.  From this paper we have learned how many cloudy years there have been over the last 5000.

Since a bristlecones growth rings are further apart in warm years of fast growth, and narrower or non existent in cold years, Salzer is able to tell us the weather over 5000 years.  Below you can see a graph of just the last 1000 years of the tree you see him coring above (you might also note that the last 50 years show the most growth in the last 1000).  In the notes below you can see the absent and micro rings that, (when correlated to other trees,) can tell you about how many cloudy years there have been.  These in turn are aligned to historical records, where possible, of major volcanic eruptions, or meteor impacts that might have occluded or decreased sun over the whole planet for a year or more.

In their paper it looks as though there are over 20 separate years where there was not enough warmth or sunshine for bristlecone tree ring growth.  These are the years that our Clock would have to be accurate enough on its own to make it through without a synchronization.

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A series of information explosions

As usual, microbes led the way. Bacteria have swarmed in intense
networks for 3.5 billion years. Then a hierarchical form emerged
with the first nucleated cells which were made up of an enclosed
society of formerly independent organisms.

That’s the pattern for the evolution of information, Alex Wright
said. Networks coalesce into heirarchies, which then form a new
level of networks, which coalesce again, and so on. Thus an unending
series of information explosions is finessed.

(more…)

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On September 8-9 the Singularity Summit will be at the Palace of Fine Arts. One of Long Now’s board, Paul Saffo, will be speaking. From their website:

The Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence is thrilled to announce the Singularity Summit 2007, a major two-day event bringing together 17 outstanding thinkers to examine a historical moment in humanity’s history – a window of opportunity to shape how we develop advanced artificial intelligence. We invite you to join us.

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