By the way of Chris Anderson’s TED twitterfeed I rediscovered the Artificial Owl site of “The most fascinating man-made abandoned creations + Their story and location.”  They now have a visual archive, google map, and much more content.  Really wonderful stuff, and great lessons for anyone like us trying to build long lasting artifacts.

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

*Mayor Gavin Newsom on “Cities and Time” – audio and video are available

Alex Steffen sent in a note about this interesting new service that allows your estate to elegantly handle your digital assets, passwords, accounts etc after your passing.

As people increasingly document their lives digitally, and move the majority of their interactions to the internet, there is a strange undeadness that happens to their online presence after they are gone.  I have had first hand experience with this in my family last year, it is very difficult to get all the passwords and account logins sorted so that you can set everything straight once someone is gone. I would love to hear from someone who has used this service…

I am not exactly sure how much better it is than telling a trusted a friend or relative where to find this information, or using an lawyer to hang onto it.  But their plans start at free for a limited account, and go up to $299 for a lifetime paid unlimited account, so that is likely less than you would spend with a lawyer, and I suspect this is easier to keep updated.

It is good to see economies popping up around long term storage of digital assets.  However the idea of storing those assets for long periods of time with an internet startup is likely a dubious venture at best.

This niftiness was sent in by Jimmy Wales.  On this one graphic is all the stuff you need to know to jump start a civilization (or get super rich if you travel back in time).  To be sure it comes with you on your travels they sell it as a t-shirt, so unless you happen to be using that time machine from Terminator that only works on naked people, you are all set.  James Welcher also noted that it is particularly interesting to cross reference this document with “Phone call to the 14th century” by Kasper Houser [mp3 audio].

For those of you in the Bay Area, Laura Welcher and Alexander Rose will be giving a talk on the Rosetta Project and endangered languages at The Commonwealth Club on Monday April 13th 02009. Tickets are available on the Commonwealth Club web site.  The talk will walk through the decade long process of collecting and archiving the the broadest linguistic archive in world and etching it into metal to last for the next ten millennia.

Sustainable cities

Mayor Newsom began with how moved he was by hosting the UN’s World Environment Day in San Francisco in 2005. For that event, which was called “Green Cities – Plan for the Planet!”, he invited 120 mayors from around the world. Days of intense discussion led to the publication of 21 policy principles for building permanently sustainable cities, in the areas of energy, waste, design, nature, transportation, health, and water. Cities, Newsom said, consume 75% of natural resources and are responsible for 75% of pollution.

He became determined to help make San Francisco the Greenest city in the world….

Read the rest of Stewart Brand’s Summary

Oromo, a language of Ethiopia with about 9,000,000 speakers, now joins languages like Mandarin, English and Spanish — languages with hundreds of millions of speakers — (and yes, Elmer Fudd-speak and Klingon) as the newest addition to Google’s multilingual interface.   This translation effort was made possible by over four years of work by dedicated volunteers using the “Google in Your Language” program.

According to Qeerransoo Biyyaa, one of the Afaan Oromoo translation team members, the translation effort “was a huge struggle as a person needs to integrate concepts from technology, language and culture simultaneously. It was sometimes hard to find equivalent technological terms in Oromo or other language from Ethiopia. This is simply because technological terms are as foreign as the technologies themselves to Ethiopia.”

Bravo!  What’s next?  Maybe the Afaan Oromoo Wikipedia …

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” – video now available

For those of you in the UK, on April 24th the Slow Down London festival begins its 10 day celebration of slowness.  Our good friend David Rooney, curator of timekeeping at Greenwich’s Royal Observatory, will be kicking it off with a free talk at the National Portrait Gallery.  Here is a write up in the Financial Times on the festival.