Image from Perroquet (02008) by Sølve Sundsbø, at SHOWstudio

Inspired by science photography and nature documentaries, Norwegian fashion photographer Sølve Sundsbø produced an art exhibition called Perroquet, comprising a stunning series of photographs and slow-motion videos showing the spectacular plumage and graceful movement of a slender, long-tailed parrot in flight.

This particular subject matter couldn’t be more removed from Sundsbø’s lavish editorial spreads and striking campaign imagery, although his reasons for choosing this particular species do, in a way, relate to fashion. Possessing almost sartorial qualities, it was the bird’s trademark vibrant plumage that piqued the photographer’s interest. Sundsbø looks to this as fashion on an evolutionary scale: compared to the fast-paced, demanding nature of the fashion calendar and the many ‘looks’ each season produces, this creature’s stunning ‘outfit’ has taken centuries to develop.
…
It was always Sundsbø’s chief intention to document the parroquet [sic] using photography and film; both mediums enabling him to steal moments that would normally be missed. … The photographs present ‘frozen moments’ of the bird’s journey; rather than showing its full body, the cropped viewpoints bring abstract qualities to Sundsbø’s powerful images.

~Perroquet Project Description at SHOWstudio

(The videos are wonderful also, but they are not, it seems, capable of being embedded in other websites: check them out here.)

One thing that strikes me about this project is the unusual and satisfyingly elegant way that it brings together domains normally dealt with by people using different languages and techniques: that is, in my mind at least, the nature documentarian and fashion photographer seem almost to inhabit different worlds. But here, Sundsbø brings his studio skills to bear on a natural marvel, taking fashion and nature — processes typically, and reasonably enough, placed at opposite ends of the temporal spectrum, as in Stewart Brand’s “layers of time” diagram — and putting them on the same footing. Generally speaking, nature may move at a rate orders of magnitude slower than fashion, but that inexorable evolutionary process somehow contrives not merely to keep pace with fashion’s breathless pursuit of beauty, but indeed to remind us, time and again, what beauty is.

Photo from Perroquet (02008) by Sølve Sundsbø, at SHOWstudio

[via BoingBoing]

The Convergence08 Unconference on Nano-Bio-Info-Cogno (NBIC) technologies and their interactions will be held November 15-16, 02008, at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. Long Now Members receive a discount on the registration price – check your email for more information.

Long Now Board Member Paul Saffo, a Silicon Valley forecaster with over two decades experience exploring long-term technological change and its practical impact on business and society, will keynote the event.

“A host of technologies that seemed like daring science fiction just a few years ago are racing toward practical application with breathtaking speed. Convergence08 is a unique opportunity to look into the coming NBIC future, examine its implications, and prepare for the vast surprises in store for us all.” Paul Saffo

Each of the 2 days starts and ends with an eye-opening debate or keynote to inspire, and the remaining agenda is created by conference participants; the planning has already started on the Convergence08 wiki.

Surreptitious crowd sourced book digitizing… one word at a time.

Last night I attended the Internet Archive’s Open Content Alliance meeting.  I was really amazed by how far their book scanning, (over a million books now), and contextualizing projects have come.  The two most amazing things were the blog embed tools for the scanned book interface (more on that soon), and the most amazing use of Captcha technology I have seen.  One of the inventors of Captcha’s, those funny squiggly words used to prove your a human when you sign up for something, has now put this wasted time and human brain power to work.

ReCaptcha is now getting its difficult to decipher words from scanning projects like the Internet Archive’s and is using the human effort to digitize the words the computer cant recognize. Over a half million man hours a year can now go to digitizing books instead of just wasting your time.

During his presentation at Pop!Tech 2008: Scarcity and Abundance, Dr. K. David Harrison discussed how language death leads to intellectual impoverishment in all fields of science and culture. He also detailed efforts to sustain, value and revitalize linguistic diversity worldwide. His talk was presented in collaboration with the multilingual video captioning site DotSub, where it is posted and now translated into 31 languages:

Closing his presentation, Dr. Harrison says “everyone can do something to support a world in which a diversity of thought and a diversity of ways of speaking is encouraged and is fostered and is sustained. There’s no reason for people to be forced to abandon their languages. It’s one of the false choices of globalization to tell people that they must give up a small or minority or a heritage language in order to speak a global language like English. It doesn’t have to happen. We would all be better and smarter if the world remains multilingual.”

If you would like to help keep the world multilingual, you can translate this video yourself. Log in to DotSub, go to the video page, and select your language from the pull down list under “Translate and Transcribe.”

ECOtime – stories from The ECOlogical Calendar- will debut on NPR starting this Friday October 24, as part of the weekly program Living On Earth.

This minute-long look at the natural phenomena occurring around us is narrated by Chris Hardman, creator of, and artist behind The ECOlogical Calendar.

As with the calendar, ECOtime is all about reconnecting people with the world around them, inspiring the listener to step outside, look around and enjoy the show that nature puts on every day.

We carry the calendar at The Long Now Museum and Store where it is a perennial favorite with our customers; you can also buy it online.

Listen for ECOtime on Living On Earth on your local public radio station, or listen to it online.

Find out where to tune in here.

KQED, Northern California’s public radio, will broadcast Living On Earth:
Sat, Oct 25, 2008 — 4:00 pm
Sun, Oct 26, 2008 — 1:00 am

On November 1st and 2nd, Stanford University and UC Berkeley will be hosting a gathering of the “scientific community.”  You don’t need tenure to get in, though.  The goal of Wonderfest is to bring together all who are curious, regardless of institutional ranking, to celebrate the scientific quest for truth and to hear a little bit about how we’re doing on some of the big questions.

On Saturday at Stanford, you can hear a physicist and a statistician discuss randomness, some geneticists hoping to revive extinct species, and a whole panel of conservation, carbon capture, solar and fission experts talking about the future of energy.  There will also be a Science Expo featuring art, books, comedy, crafts and music with a “scientific bent,” and a Mind Duel, pitting scientists against high school students.

The Wonderfest heads up to UC Berkeley on Sunday with an astronomer and SETI’s Chief Scientist discussing humanity’s heretofore cosmic loneliness, a psychiatrist talking about dreams with a sleep researcher and a discussion about how to make politics a little more science-savvy.  In addition, the Science Expo continues!

Channeling the late, great Carl Sagan, Wonderfest Director Tucker Hiatt says:

“I hold that the popularization of science is successful if, at first, it does no more than spark the sense of wonder.”  This sentiment, expressed by astronomer Carl Sagan shortly before he died, inspired the name — and the emotional foundation — of America’s oldest science festival.   After ten years, Wonderfest, the Bay Area Festival of Science, is still dedicated to Sagan’s memory.

Wonderfest 2008, the tenth anniversary festival, happens at Stanford on Saturday, Nov. 1, and at UC Berkeley on Sunday, Nov. 2.  The heart of Wonderfest is a series of public dialogues between world-class researchers in discussion of provocative scientific questions.  This year’s dialogues address the origin of randomness, the revival of extinct species, humanity’s perilous energy future, the decades long failure of SETI, the significance of dreams, and the science understanding that is essential for our leaders.

The dialogues and many ancillary activities — some festive, some deep — serve to broaden the meaning of “scientific community.”  Professional scientists often use this term to refer only to themselves.  Wonderfest uses it to describe everyone who regards science as the best way of learning how the world really is.

UC Berkeley’s Center for New Media is presenting this lecture as part of their series The Art, Technology and Culture Colloquium.

Ken Goldberg hosts a conversation and audience Q&A with acclaimed multi-media artist Laurie Anderson on topics ranging from privacy and politics to art and technology. This event is planned in conjunction with Anderson’s newest performance, Homeland which she is performing Friday, October 24 and Saturday, October 25 02008 at Zellerbach Hall in Berkeley.

If you’ve ever wanted to know more about Long Now Foundation board member Esther Dyson, now is your chance to get up close and personal.  As part of the Personal Genome Project, Dyson has joined 10 volunteers, including the head of the program, geneticist George Church, and psychologist Steven Pinker, in making public their personal genetic codes.  Dyson will be speaking about the group’s goals this weekend at the Singularity Summit, but if you can’t make it to San Jose, the Personal Genome Project’s website has the scoop:

The PGP hopes to make personal genome sequencing more affordable, accessible, and useful for humankind.

We believe individuals from the general public have a vital role to play in making personal genomes useful. We are recruiting volunteers who are willing to share their genome sequence and many types of personal information with the research community and the general public, so that together we will be better able to advance our understanding of genetic and environmental contributions to human traits and to improve our ability to diagnose, treat, and prevent illness.

In order to achieve these goals, the Personal Genome Project wants to make the genetic and medical records of volunteers accessible to the public.  The PGP hopes to make it much easier to conduct genetic research by building a publicly accessible treasure trove of genetic data.  After the initial 10 volunteers, the PGP is hoping to enroll another 100,000 people to contribute to the database.  Sign-ups begin soon.

Open-sourced genetics research is an exciting, new and somewhat controversial field.  One of Long Now’s upcoming Seminar speakers, Drew Endy, takes the open approach to his work on synthetic biology, the engineering of life at a molecular level.  Whether that excites you or gives you the willies, you should probably come to the debate he’ll be having on November 17th with Jim Thomas, a member of the ETC Group.

PS: Don’t forget to brush up on your synthetic biology by checking out Craig Venter’s Seminar from February.  You can also familiarize yourself with the Long Now debate format by revisiting out last debate, which focused on the potential for human progress and featured historian Niall Ferguson and futurist Peter Schwartz.

(Thanks Gwen!)

We are testing out a crowd-sourced method of translation and subtitling of our Seminar series called DotSub.com. The first of twelve talks we are going to try this with is the Will Wright Brian Eno talk (as seen above).  We have added the full English time coded transcript, and welcome any help in translating it into other languages.  Dot Sub has a great interface that allows you to easily type in text that instantly becomes the sub-titles.

So please do try it out, and give us feedback here as comments to this post. Once we get several of these we will look at ways to localize a set of Seminar pages into various languages that we have translations for. Thank you.

Laurie Anderson is coming to Berkeley for two performances of her Homeland tour on October 24th and 25th.  The Long Now Foundation is sponsoring these performances thanks to our grant in performing arts from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.  Members of Long Now get a 15% discount on tickets to the shows, (which you should get quickly as they are selling out.)

Back in 01995 before The Long Now Foundation was formed, there were two essays published in the Wired Scenarios issue, one by Danny Hillis on the Millennium Clock, and another by Stewart Brand on human perception and time.  In that essay Stewart quoted a question from Laurie’s most recent album:

“Is time long or is it wide?” -Laurie Anderson

I’d like to know her interpretation of that question. Mine is that time can be thought of in terms of everything-happening-now-and-last-week-and-next-week (wide) or as a deep, flowing process in which centuries are minor events (long). The wide view sees events as most influenced by what is happening at the moment. The long view perceives events as most influenced by history – “much was decided before you were born.” The wide view is disparaged as “short-term thinking.”

The long view is praised as responsible.

- Stewart Brand 01995

These two essays framed the thinking that within another year became The Long Now Foundation. So when we began our Seminar series about long-term thinking in 02003, Laurie Anderson was one of the first people Stewart called.  She immediately said yes, but we have never been able to match schedules in order to get her out to this coast.  But with her Homeland tour, we are lucky enough to finally get her out here.  Laurie is re-framing what we think of ourselves in our place, and most interesting to us, in our time.

• Other media and background:
  • NY Times Review
  • This Dig radio interview caught her on the Austrialian leg of the tour and includes some of her thoughts on looking at colonizing Mars as a 5000 year project.
  • Cal Performances has several audio and video clips.