Laura Welcher just pointed me to this Google Earth Outreach project on the ancient Bristlcone Pine tree. These are the same trees that live atop our Nevada Clock site. Much of the data comes from our friends over at the Arizona Tree Ring Lab that have been studying the trees on our property. By studying the rings on living and dead bristlecones they have been able to piece together climate data of the last 10,000 years.
Wired and AP is reporting that Disney’s new “house of the future” will be (re)-opening this May. The original one (prominently sponsored by Monsanto Plastics) that opened in 01954 was closed only a decade later, (see the excellent video above and Part 2 here).
Apparently the new one sponsored by Microsoft, HP, and LifeWare looks more normal but is filled with a lot of digital wizardry to “make your life easier”. I assume this means “Clippy” will be doing my dishes soon.
Via Jad Abumrad, host of RadioLab, I came across a 18-minute loop of music commissioned by a very enlightend hospital morgue near Paris. The composer’s assignment was: “Please write us a song that will allow family members to face the death of a loved one.” The morgue wanted music for the bereaved that did not pump up emotional grief, but instead elevated the eternal aspect of all things. Help slow the living down, to take the long view.
The resulting musical piece (Salles de Departs by David Lang) is lovely, with an ethereal but not too alien spirit. And the architecture of the place is cool. It feels like the morgue has been there 10,000 years, has always been there, and will always be there.
Both the music and the design provokes you to think outside of time, which I what I hope our 10,000-year Clock does.
Second thought: Seems like folks have gone nuts in outdoing each other in creative weddings? Wait till you see their funerals. Boring off-the-shelf traditional funerals are becoming as passe as traditional cookie-cutter birthday parties, graduations and weddings. These life-passage events are now opportunities for showing off your individuality. What bigger life passage is there than death? Coming up for the boomer generation and beyond: funerals with style.
A very meta service. Cabinet magazine, a hip paper-based journal of unusual ideas, published a chronology of calendars and timelines in history a few years ago. They updated the list for the web. It’s quite comprehensive, and provides in one chronological sequence the major inventions in the art of chronologies. But it could be made more complete and cooly recursive by adding at the end of their timeline, their own creation as the “first timeline of timelines.”
Example:
1753 Jacques Barbeu-Duborg, the French translator and disciple of Benjamin Franklin, creates his Carte chronologique, a 54-foot timeline of history from Creation contained in an wooden case.
Long Now has been playing with geo-data mash-ups recently as a potential interface for our Rosetta Project. In researching what is out there Flickr Vision and Earth Album (and TwitterVision linked off the same page) is one of the cooler geo-mash-ups I have seen. Using online mapping capability tied to social networking, and online photo services like Flickr, this mash-up is an endlessly rotating ball of earth that shows you pictures as they are uploaded to Flickr by location. The locations are often not perfect correlations (as where a photo is uploaded is often not where it is taken.) None the less it is a fun serendipitous interface to great data that is otherwise un-minable. Another nifty one I have seen along these lines is a Google Earth Layer that tracks Instant Messages…
Dispatches from Extremistan
A “black swan,” Taleb explained, is an event which is 1) Hard to predict; 2) Highly consequential; 3) Wrongly retro-predicted. We pretend we know why the big event happened, and so entrench our inability to deal with the next world-changing improbable event.
Examples: Viagra, 9/11, Harry Potter, First World War, Beatles, the PC, Google, and the rise of any successful religion. History is dominated by sudden, lasting changes wrought by deeply unexpected events.
Part of the problem is that we ignore the “silent evidence” of the nonobserved and nonobservable. We compute probability from the success of survivors. No one writes or reads a book titled “How I Lost a Million Dollars.” Another problem is that we revise our own predictions and intentions unconsciously to match what actually happens. We disguise having been wrong by pretending we were right. This is “confirmation bias.”
There are TWO kinds of randomness, two realms in which events happen…
Mediocristan is dominated by the average— one new observation won’t change much. If you are measuring the weight of a large sample of humans, adding the heaviest person in the world won’t change the result, whereas measuring the average wealth of a large sample of humans would be transformed by adding the wealthiest person. Mediocristan is the realm of the Law of Large Numbers and of the Gaussian Bell Curve.
Extremistan is dominated by extremes. Every year 16,000 novels are published in English. A handful of best-sellers absolutely dominate. This is the realm of the power-law curve and the Long Tail. Extremistant defies prediction. You can say there will be a few monsters and lots of midgets and the world will be changed by the monsters, and that’s all you can say.
Benoit Mandelbrot convinced Taleb that the main dynamic of Mediocristan is energy, and the main dynamic of Extremistan is information. Anything social is Extremistan.
Thus there are two kinds of experts. A soufflé chef really is an expert and can be trusted. An economist is a pseudo-expert. “Never take advice from someone wearing a tie.” All you get from a Council of Economic Advisors is an illusion of control. Stock market analysts have proved to be worse than nothing.
Don’t focus on probability. Focus on consequences. Black Swans will come. Prepare against the negative ones; be ready to soar with the positive ones.
Pay attentive heed to tradition and old people— they have experienced more Black Swans.
PS… All of the SALT speakers perform for free. Taleb added the further generosity of insisting on paying for his travel and lodging. Extra thanks to him for that.
I just saw this press release from the Dia Center for the Arts that the site of the Spiral Jetty (Smithson’s 1970 seminal land art piece on the Great Salt Lake in UT) is being threatened by oil drilling interests. If you would like to voice your opinion on it before the deadline on Feb 13th there is contact information and even sample letters in the press release.
While contemporary visions of the future aren’t new, past visions of the future are. Indeed “yesterday’s tomorrows” is a new genre with a growing body of material, including several books, such as “Yesterday’s Tomorrows: Past Visions of the American Future”.
The heydays of science fiction are 50 years old. That’s a lot of future in the last century. Now that everyone is a futurist, we are creating mounds of future past visions of the future, if you can follow me. The future dates quickly. There’s nothing that says “yesterday” quite like an old portrait of the future.
Someday social scientists will key into the remarkable record of aspirations, assumptions, biases, and gestalt that visions of the future represent for each generation. They’ll no doubt pour over ancient copies of The “Usborne Book of the Future”, a great treasure-trove of yesterday’s tomorrows. First published in 1979, it illustrates the forecasted world of the year 2000 “and beyond.”
Tom Morton very generously scanned in the entire book and posted it on the blog Pointless Museum.
This is a wonderful clock concept — a bead drops every 5 minutes.
I imagine that the beads are a Buddhist mala and it is used for meditation…
The artist apparently hasn’t arranged to have this manufactured, but it sure would be a wonderful addition to the [Long Now] Clock store if it were available.
I was pointed to this by this article in the NY Times on slowness.
This wonderful video posted online last week by New York-based performance art collective Improv Everywhere showcases their latest project, “Frozen Grand Central”, which mischievously targeted victims of the Big Apple’s notoriously short now.
At first I wondered whether this had anything to do with the campaign by Adbusters Media Foundation, a Vancouver-based activist network, to promote a Slow Down Week in the middle of last month (13-19 January 02008).
Apparently not.
Now, I love the idea of staging performance art simply to cause “scenes of chaos and joy in public places”, as Improv Everywhere’s website has it, but Adbusters really could have used this kind of boost to its cause. (At the time of writing, googling the phrase “Slow down week” yields 7,050 hits; “Frozen grand central” gets 22,900.) Personally, I clean forgot about Slow Down week for the duration. It was the start of semester and one of my busiest weeks in the past year. Oops.
(Nice find, Zander.)
You are currently browsing the The Long Now Blog weblog archives for February, 02008.
