The Long Now Foundation’s monthly Seminars About Long-term Thinking

presents Michael Pollan on “Deep Agriculture”

Tuesday, May 5, 02009 at 7:30 pm at the Herbst Theater

Long Now Members can reserve a seat HERE

You can purchase tickets for $10 HERE

 

We recommend purchasing or reserving your seats in advance as our Seminars can sell out.

Additional tickets might be available at the door and we will release empty seats in the theater right before we start on a first come first serve basis.

About this Seminar:
Michael Pollan will discuss his ideas on resolarizing the food system to fight climate change and the health care crisis. Following the lecture, there will be a Q&A session moderated by Stewart Brand.

Michael Pollan will also be doing a signing of the latest paperback release of “In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto”, copies will be available for purchase.

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Long Now member and close friend Susan Shea sent me this astoundingly good episode of James Burke’s “Connections”show from 01978 (It is in 5 parts).  It is the best tracing of computing technology through time and culture I have ever seen, and shows the lineage of ancient clocks to modern computers (if a computer in 01978 can be called modern, but you get the idea.) This also reminded me how good this TV show was, now I have to watch the other episodes…

David Pogue has been doing some good reporting on digital longevity.  Today he posted the transcript of an interview he did with the folks down at the Computer History Museum.

The interview does not leave us with much hope for digital data.  The upside to this is that the problem will hopefully get broader attention, the downside is it doesn’t touch on the many efforts that are going on, or possible paths forward.

Here is an excerpt:

David Pogue: What is data rot?

Dag Spicer: Data rot refers mainly to problems with the medium on which information is stored. Over time, things like temperature, humidity, exposure to light, being stored not-very-good locations like moldy basements, make this information very difficult to read.

The second aspect of data rot is actually finding the machines to read them. And that is a real problem. If you think of the 8-track tape player, for example, basically the only way you can find 8-track cartridges is in a flea market or a garage sale.

The problem, strangely enough, is not so bad on the older stuff, but quite bad on the more recent stuff. So we can read tapes here at the museum that are 50 years old. You know, we bake the tapes first, and we extract–

DP: You bake the tapes?

DS: Yeah, we put them in an oven and we dry them out, because after time, the tape just sticks. It becomes one giant reel of goo, and you can’t just peel it apart, because then you start peeling data off the tape. So there’s a little wizardry involved in reading this stuff.

Continued over at the NYT blog…

The latest Seminars About Long-term Thinking are now available as audio downloads or podcasts and in hi-res video for Long Now members.

*Daniel Everett on “Endangered Languages, Lost Knowledge and the Future” – audio available
*Funeral for Analog TV – 30 minute video of the live event

There’s a new mood: collapse.

Former President Reagan defined a recession as when your friend lost his job, and a depression as when you lost your job. Collapse is when no one has a job; in fact there are no longer any such things as jobs to be had.

Google Trends showing number of news references to “collapse” (red) and “depression” (blue).

Doom and collapse are in the air. We could think of the Long Doom as the opposite of the Long Boom. The stock market has been falling steadily for a year and not even  the usual optimists are claiming it has bottomed out.  Like a vicious circle bad news breeds more bad news, and so at the moment the prospect for the near future is for more of the same bad news.

How low could it go?

Article continued at The Technium…

A fully browseable version of the Rosetta Disk is now available online at The Rosetta Project website. Using this link, you can virtually browse and explore the contents of the disk, just as you would if you were looking at the micro-etched Rosetta Disk with a high-powered microscope.  The viewer for the digital version of the Rosetta Disk on this DVD was built by Kurt Bollacker, using the OpenLayers 2.5 map visualization framework.

The browseable Rosetta Disk is temporarily replacing the content of the previous Rosetta Archive site, while we build out a new architecture for Rosetta that will make it much easier to access, use and repurpose Rosetta Data. Our new site is still under wraps, but we are very pleased to say that its distributed architecture involves both the Internet Archive — a caretaker for one of the original Rosetta Disks — and the open database site Freebase. Meanwhile all Rosetta data is safe, sound, and continues to be backed up by Stanford University Libraries.

Stay tuned for more on this channel, and meanwhile, happy disk browsing!

Language revolution

The Pirahã tribe in the heart of the Amazon numbers only 360, spread in small groups over 300 miles. An exceptionally cheerful people, they live with a focus on immediacy, empiricism, and physical rigor that has shaped their unique language, claims linguist Daniel Everett.

The Pirahã language has no numbers or concept of counting (only terms for “relatively small” and “relatively large”); no kinship terms beyond immediate children and parents; no “left” and “right” (only “upriver” and “downriver”); no named distinction of past and future (only near time and far time); no creation stories or myths; and—most important for linguists—no recursion…

Read the rest of Stewart Brand’s Summary

The solid line–representing the life-expectancy in years of each recording medium–declines through the years.

Tim O’Reilly pointed me to this digital loss piece in Lost Magazine by Alexander Stille.  And Paul Saffo sent me the referred to Yale article AS WELL AS this amazing update on the recovery NASAs moon exploration photos. Here is an excerpt from the Stille article:

In fact, there appears to be a direct relationship between the newness of technology and its fragility. A librarian at Yale University, Paul Conway, has created a graph going back to ancient Mesopotamia that shows that while the quantity of information being saved has increased exponentially, the durability of media has decreased almost as dramatically.

(more…)

 

The PRI show “To The Best of Our Knowledge” aired their weekly segment today on the subject of time.  They included a segment on Long Now.   You can listen via Podcast by clicking this link (it is the second of the three segments dated 3/13/02009).

A multitude of tweets from people like Tim O’Reilly and Nion McEvoy pointed me to this excellent piece on the end of analog news by (past seminar speaker) Clay Shirky.  Not to be missed, here is an excerpt:

“When someone demands to know how we are going to replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution. They are demanding to be told that old systems won’t break before new systems are in place. They are demanding to be told that ancient social bargains aren’t in peril, that core institutions will be spared, that new methods of spreading information will improve previous practice rather than upending it. They are demanding to be lied to.

There are fewer and fewer people who can convincingly tell such a lie.”

I guess Long Now should start planning our next technological funeral event.  The funeral for the analog newspaper.