On last Sunday’s CBS Sunday Morning Show they did a segment on the daylight savings switch over that featured Long Now.  Only corrections worth noting… 1.  The Clock is not meant to be “absolutely accurate”, just reasonably so.  2.  Danny Hillis is not the primary funder, we have over 2000 donors that support our projects.

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

presents Mayor Gavin Newsom on “Cities and Time”

Wednesday, April 8, 02009 at 7:30 pm

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. There is room for 100 walk-ups (60 seats) for the free simulcast in the Lobby; this is a separate line, so get there early!

About this Seminar:
Mayor Newsom is a strong advocate for sustainable urban planning and green business practices; he lead San Francisco to join the Kyoto Protocol, created significant incentives for solar power installation through the GoSolarSF program, and is working on an ambitious plan to make SF the “Electric Vehicle Capital of the U.S”. He will discuss his ideas and plans for shaping the growth of cities during these turbulent times.

Stewart Brand will be speaking about Rethinking Green: How Can Information Replace Energy and Finesse the Biosphere? on Monday March 16, 02009 from 7:30 pm to 9:00 pm.

This lecture is part of the Berkeley Center for New Media’s Art, Culture and Technology Colloquium.

This lecture is free, un-ticketed and seats are available on a first come first serve basis. Here is the location of the 250 seat Sibley Auditorium, Bechtel Engineering Center on the U.C. Berkeley campus.

The economist is running a great profile on the heroic work of our good friend and ally Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archive.  We used to share a building in the Presidio of SF with the Archive and I remember moving all the boxes of DLT tapes that would eventually become the invaluable  Wayback Machine.  Great to see this kind of coverage of an archivist who was visionary enough to archive when few knew there was even something there to save! (Excerpt below)

Mar 5th 2009
From The Economist print edition

Brewster Kahle wants to create a free, online collection of human knowledge. It sounds impossibly idealistic—but he is making progress

by Andy Potts

FOR a man who has set himself a seemingly impossible mission, Brewster Kahle seems remarkably laid back. Relaxing in the black leather recliner that serves as his office chair, his stockinged feet wriggling with evident enthusiasm, the founder of the Internet Archive explains what has driven him for more than a decade. “We are trying to build Alexandria 2.0,” says Mr Kahle with a wide-eyed, boyish grin. Sure, and plenty of people are trying to abolish hunger, too.

It would be easy to dismiss Mr Kahle as an idealistic fruitcake, but for one thing: he has an impressive record when it comes to setting lofty goals and then lining up the people and technology needed to get the job done. “Brewster is a visionary who looks at things differently,” says Carole Moore, chief librarian at the University of Toronto. “He is able to imagine doing things that everyone else thinks are impossible. But then he does them.”

Mr Kahle is an unostentatious millionaire who does not “wear his money on clothes”, as one acquaintance graciously puts it. But behind his dishevelled demeanour is a skilled technologist, an ardent activist and a successful serial entrepreneur. Having founded and sold technology companies to AOL and Amazon, he has now devoted himself to building a non-profit digital archive of free materials—books, films, concerts and so on—to rival the legendary Alexandrian library of antiquity. This has brought him into conflict with Google, the giant internet company which is pursuing a similar goal, but in a rather different (and more commercially oriented) way.  (read the rest)

[Image courtesy Matthew Buckingham]

“The Six Grandfathers, Paha Sapa, in the Year 502,002 C.E.” is the handiwork of Matthew Buckingham, an Iowa-born, New York-based artist, whose output, says his website, “questions the role that social memory plays in contemporary life. His projects create physical and social contexts that encourage viewers to question what is most familiar to them.” This particular image looks forward 500,000 years to a time when, according to geologists’ estimates, the likenesses of four U.S. Presidents carved into the granite of Mount Rushmore, South Dakota, will finally have eroded beyond recognition:

[It] asks the viewer to consider Mount Rushmore as a cultural, political, and social symbol by imagining Rushmore’s inevitable disappearance and slow return to “nature.” As its power to represent fades, the paradox of Rushmore’s meaning as a “shrine to democracy”—on land stolen from the Sioux and carved by an artist who was an active member of the Ku Klux Klan—intensifies.

In Summer 02002 the image appeared in Cabinet magazine, accompanied by a historical account of the area’s journey from obscurity to celebrity, via (genocidal) infamy. It includes this interesting side note about the apparent farsightedness of the monument’s chief supervisor:

[Sculptor Gutzon] Borglum worked on Mount Rushmore for fifteen years. [He] intended to carve the presidential portraits to the waist, but when he died in 1941 only the faces were near completion. The US government restricted further spending on the memorial, allocating just enough money for Borglum’s son, Lincoln, to finish the hair and faces on the four heads. Even then the likenesses were not actually “complete.” Gutzon Borglum’s design intentionally left three extra inches of granite on the surface of the sculpture so that nature, in the form of wind and water erosion, would finish carving Mount Rushmore for him over the next 20,000 years.

I have no idea whether that part of the story is true, but in any case, the 20,000-year forward view and the 500,000-year one, considered side by side, seem to have something to say:

However long your now, there’s always a longer one that eats it whole.

[Image courtesy National Park Service Gallery via Wikimedia Commons]

(via HTC Experiments. Thanks to Bryan Boyer for the tip!)

The beautifully crafted short above by Bruce Banit (via Kevin Kelly’s blog) depicts a fantastical yet believable world building interface, in a future that does not feel too far off from where Google Sketch Up is now.  As if to prove that point, Stewart Brand sent over the below reference:

 This virtual “Telematics City” was built by design firm Hook for a Lexus marketing campaign.  The fantastic video linked above is a time lapse of the “building” of that city.  I guess it’s like the man said…

“The future is here, its just not evenly distributed yet.”  – William Gibson

And yet another Update:  Wired is running a piece today on the physical city modeling that has taken place, and features one of the greatest treasures in the SF Bay Area, The Army Corps of Engineers Bay Model in Sausalito.

The Evolution of Life in 60 Seconds is an experiment in scale: By condensing 4.6 billion years of history into a minute, the video is a self-contained timepiece. Like a specialized clock, it gives one a sense of perspective. Everything — from the formation of the Earth, to the Cambrian Explosion, to the evolution of mice and squirrels — is proportionate to everything else, displaying humankind as a blip, almost indiscernible in the layered course of history.

Each event in the Evolution of Life fades gradually over the course of the minute, leaving typographic traces that echo all the way to the present day. Just as our blood still bears the salt water of our most ancient evolutionary ancestors.

Long Now Member Michael C. sent word about a great book review on the Atlantic’s Editor’s Choice for December.  The book is Europe Between the Oceans by Barry Cunliffe, and it recounts 10,000 years of European history starting in 9,000 BC.

I can’t think of a better gift this year for the historically minded reader. No book so well exemplifies what Cunliffe joyously calls “the vibrancy of archaeology.” More important, its focus on what Braudel called the longue durée will jolt the temporally complacent (and aren’t we all?), just as its bracingly materialist approach—which leads to the inescapable conclusion that trade has always laid the foundation for the exchange of ideas and beliefs, indeed for most cultural transformations—nicely tempers our blather about the power of ideas and the individual.

Tyler Cowen liked it, too.  Pick it up in all it’s deca-millenial glory.

In March there are a few of pieces of national press where Long Now will be featured.  On Sunday March 8th CBS Sunday Morning is doing piece on the spring forward time change that features Long Now (yes the time change is this weekend).  I also notice that Pogue did a piece there on digital preservation.

On March 15th PRI’s “To The Best of Our Knowledge” is doing a broader piece on subject of time for which we did some interviews.

And for those of you in the Bay Area, Laura Welcher and Alexander Rose will be doing a talk on the Rosetta Project and endangered languages at The Commonwealth Club.