I came across this wonderful blog of historical photos recently. The photo above was taken in 1858 of the temple at Karnak. It is interesting to look up modern photos on Flickr of these same things. For instance the columns in the above photos seem to have all been excavated in the last 150 years and now you can see how tall they really are.
A great Metafilter posting about the spread of Slowing Down — not just slow food, but slow everything else. The posting — which has links for all these slow threads — announces:
Beginning with Slow Food in 1986, the idea of rejecting the “cult of speed” has gradually spread from a focus on food into other fields. In his book
Carl Honore explores the spread of the worldwide Slow movement, urging greater attention to all aspects of daily life, human relationships, and the quality of experience. Meanwhile, on the web, witness the spread of Slow. Slow down your stuff with Slow Home, Slow Travel, Slow Fashion, Slow Art, Slow Craft, Slow Design. Relax with some Slow Reading; check out a Slow Read from a Slow Library. Plan for Slow Cities governed by Slow Leadership. Use Slow Schooling, Slow Research, and the Slow University to explore Slow Science and Slow Math. Bank with Slow Money [PDF]. Explore the world with Slow Travel, using Slow Fuel for Slow Transportation. What’s the rush? Come on. Take it easy.
There’s a typically intelligent Metafilter discussion about the price of slowness in the discussions afterward that is worthwhile. One entry sums up the Slow Manifesto:
The Slow Making Manifesto:
1.To strive for appropriate excellence in the making process
2. To make objects that enhance the life of the user
3. To know the origins of our materials, ensuring that they respect country; the communities who produced or harvested them and are from sustainable sources
4. To make objects that will last, can be easily repaired when necessary and are made using materials and processes that do not harm the makers, the community or the environment
5. To deal with our co-workers, clients, suppliers and sellers in an ethical and fair manner
6. To foster, utilise and pass on skills that enhance the making process
7. To enjoy and relish the way of slow making
Alexa.com allows users to compare traffic to different websites through time according to reach, rank, and page views and using various levels of magnification. It’s fascinating to compare not only the quantity of traffic, but the shape of growth curves. For example, although Facebook is still slightly behind MySpace in terms reach (though it appears to have pulled ahead in rank and page views on November 11th of this year), Facebook exhibits more of an exponential curve whereas MySpace exhibits more of a linear one, enabling predictions about when the former was destined to surpass the latter.
And although the data only goes back to slightly before 02000, this small virtual here is growing…
Futarchy is an untried form of government proposed by economist Robin Hanson, in which officials define measures of national welfare while prediction markets determine which policies are most desirable. In Hanson’s words, “we would vote on values, but bet on beliefs.”
Futarchy is based on the assumption that poor nations are poor because their governments adopt flawed policies, despite expertise recommending otherwise. Although this assumption may be problematic, in that it boils economic stagnation down to sheer misjudgment, the question of how to render governments accountable to public opinion regarding the future is a valuable one. Futarchy intends to address this by having democratically-elected representatives formally define and manage after-the-fact measurements of national welfare, while allowing market speculators to determine which policies are expected to raise national welfare (Hanson). According to Hanson, “the basic rule of government would be: when a betting market clearly estimates that a proposed policy would increase expected national welfare, that proposal becomes law.”
Hanson was also involved in the creation of the Foresight Exchange (see image), an online play predictions market in which current market prices reflect consensus about the future, and FutureMAP, a (now cancelled) DARPA research project into the use of prediction markets for shaping government policy.
It’s possible to imagine participation in something like the FX as a civic duty in Futarchic societies, and specialized predictions markets emerging around particular issues, geographies, etc. For more information, including Futarchy’s potential shortcomings, refer to “Shall We Vote on Values, but Bet on Beliefs?” and visit Hanson’s website.
I found this on Otherthings Flickr page. It a multilayered paint chip taken from a public mural wall that was recently demolished.
This is an extreme closeup scan (2400 dpi) of a paint chip retrieved from the ruins of Belmont Art Park by Amy McKenzie earlier this year. The fragment is about 1cm thick, and appears to consist of about 150-200 layers of paint. (For a sense of scale, note the ridges of my fingerprint in the lower right.) This should give you an idea of the staggering number of pieces painted in this spot over the decades. The park used to be surrounded by one long wall covered with artwork, but that wall was illegally demolished by real estate developers earlier this year.
Good Magazine ran an interview recently with a man they call The New Nostradamus. Bruce Bueno de Mesquita uses a mathematical model that is based entirely on game theory to predict the outcomes of political conflicts. He takes a very literal interpretation of the phrase “political science” and focuses his analysis strictly on issues of strategic interest, ignoring any cultural or historical aspects of the parties involved. He believes that the theory of rational choice can accurately predict the actions of any political actors as long as the data underpinning the determination of interests are correct. An analysis of his model’s predictive abilities done by the CIA found it to be accurate 90 percent of the time.
In the article a few of his predictions are discussed, but what is interesting is that he also makes a number of prescriptions. In fact, while there is a list at the end of the interview describing some of his accurate predictions, the discussion with him fails to clearly separate predictions from prescriptions. In the interview, he proposes a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and criticizes the outcome of negotiations with Kim Jong-Il of North Korea for not conforming to his model.
Perhaps not coincidentally, the recent agreement that the United States reached with the government of Pyongyang closely resembles the one that Bueno de Mesquita’s model suggested: Kim agrees to dismantle his existing nuclear weapons but not his existing nuclear capability. “He puts it in mothballs with IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) inspectors on site 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. And in exchange, we provide him with $1.2 billion a year, which we label ‘foreign aid,’ of course.” The “foreign-aid” figure published in the newspapers was $400 million, which concerns Bueno de Mesquita. “I read that and I said, I hope that’s not the deal because it’s not enough money. He needs $1.2 billion, approximately, to sustain the loyalty of his cronies in the military and so forth. It’s unpleasant, this is a nasty man, but we’re stuck with it. The nice part of the deal is that it’s self-enforcing. Each side has a reason to credibly commit to their part of the deal.”
It would appear that what he has actually developed is a highly sophisticated system of conflict mediation. His model assumes that people are selfishly rational and always gravitate toward very predictable terms in an agreement. It would be very interesting to show these predicted outcomes to two negotiating parties at the outset of their talks. Would they get to the same results faster?
Bueno de Mesquita acknowledges the power of what he is able to do with his work, which seems to play a big role in his approach. He will not call elections that he claims to know the outcome for because he does not want to influence them and he will not help organizations affect or manipulate government policy. Clearly, predicting the future is a complicated and controversial venture. It toys with our sense of continuity and our theories of causality, let alone the concept of free-will. It also seems that as people get better at it, we may be raising questions faster than we can answer them.
Author Margaret Atwood, perhaps best known for the near-future fable The Handmaid’s Tale, has invented a device called LongPen which allows writers to sign their works at a distance, replicating their hand movements.
It is the world’s first long-distance, real-time signing and handwriting device.
…
In other words, the LongPen is not an Autopen, which signs your name over and over without your presence being required. Instead, the LongPen does whatever you have just done at your end, including ‘Happy Birthday Marge’ and a picture of a pussycat — making whatever marks you have just made, in the order and with the pressure you have made them. (The signature is a legal one - which LongPen has just had reconfirmed by an expert in this field.)
…
The LongPen is known in tech circles as a ‘disruptive technology’, which means - I’m told - that it came out of nowhere, was not anticipated, is not an enhancement of a pre-existing technology, and will radically change how things are done. Author signings are just a small part of the picture!
The product’s website keeps a running tally of the carbon saved by authors foregoing air travel to attend book signings (implying that they would otherwise have attended in person, which may or may not be the case). Still, the green credentials of the LongPen seem clear, and some of the possibilities it opens up are kind of intriguing: signing international contracts without flying anywhere; collaboration on tangible artwork; remote tattooing…
It compares interestingly to robotlab’s project The Bible Scribe, blogged here just last week. Put them together and you can shortly look forward to being the proud owner of an autograph signed remotely by your favourite robot author.
The BBC reports that the work on the Svalbard doomsday seed vault is charging right along…
Engineers have begun the two-month process of cooling down a “doomsday vault”, which will house seeds from all known varieties of key food crops.
The temperature inside the Svalbard Global Seed Vault will drop to -18C (0F) in order to preserve the seeds.
Built deep inside a mountain, it aims to safeguard the world’s crops from future disasters, such as nuclear wars, asteroids or dangerous climate change.
The first seeds are scheduled to arrive at the Arctic site in mid-February.
I still think its rather funny that, at least in the reports I have read, that the vault is mainly built under the assumption of global warming. However if the Greenland ice sheet falls and sinks northern europe into an ice age, Svalbard could end up under miles of ice… and its seed bank along with it.
Reuters reported in October that the first American Baby Boomer — a retired school teacher, born one second after midnight on 1 January, 01946 — has officially applied for Social Security payments. Currently, retirees seeking early benefits can apply three months before their 62nd birthday.
As the largest generation ever in the United States, the Baby Boomers (those born in the post-World War Two period from 01946 to 01964 — demographers differ as to where precisely to draw the lines) are set to exert enormous financial pressure on American retirement funds. Eighty million Americans are expected to apply for retirement benefits over the next two decades, and a recent report by Social Security’s trustees which forecasts more being paid out than taxes received in 02017; and exhaustion of the trust fund by 02041.
Meanwhile, however, other important variables in the mix are changing. Terry Grossman, a collaborator of Singularitian and transhumanist Ray Kurzweil, writes in his book The Baby Boomers’ Guide to Living Forever (Hubristic Press, 02000, p. 3):
As an official member of the Baby Boomer Generation, I really and truly do not believe that it was intended for us to die. Death, if and when it occurs, clearly will represent a mistake of some kind. While I am no official spokesperson for the Boomers, I feel I do accurately express the hubris of my generation. According to my interpretation of the master plan, the Baby Boomers will be the first generation ever to have the option of immortality.”
Hubris is a good word for it. But however seriously one takes the prospect of human immortality, trends in health and medicine over the past several generations are sufficient to raise concern, as expressed for instance in this 02004 New York Times article, that the disbursal of social security funds could become even more problematic.
That which has just begun as a trickle will soon enough become the “silver tsunami” referred to in the press. In the understated words of the Trustees’ Annual Report summary: “Prudence dictates action sooner rather than later to address these fiscal challenges.” It is bound to be a difficult test of foresight in political debate — as well as a potential catalyst for enormous social change, depending on how the health of the Boomers, financial as well as physical, plays out.
Readers interested in population and demography will find food for thought in Long Now’s trio of related Seminars About Long-Term Thinking presented in 02004:
Phillip Longman, “The Depopulation Problem” (MP3 audio)
Michael West, “The Prospects of Human Life Extension” (MP3 audio)
Ken Dychtwald, “The Consequences of Human Life Extension” (MP3 audio)
This short film is a groovy meditation on time in a few of its facets:
It’s also bloody funny. Trust Jim Henson to make high art that doesn’t take itself too seriously.
Thanks Laughing Squid!
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