Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison

Presented with the Long Now Foundation

Wednesday June 10, 02009
7:00pm – 9:00pm

Tickets are $15, purchase HERE
Long Now Members tickets are $10

Long Now is co-sponsoring this lecture with the David Brower Center in Berkeley, a new space committed to creating a just and ecologically sustainable society.  Long Now Members will get an email with the discount code for the tickets.

Originators of a whole systems perspective in the eco-art movement, the collaborative team of Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison (often referred to simply as “the Harrisons”) have worked for almost 40 years with biologists, ecologists, architects, urban planners and other artists to initiate collaborative dialogues to uncover ideas and solutions which support biodiversity and community development.  This event will provide a rare look into their visionary work and process.

David Brower Center
2150 Allston Way,
Berkeley, CA 94704
directions

Stewart Brand was on Ira Flatow’s Science Friday show on NPR today discussing nuclear power and climate change.  You can listen here.

There is a new study published in the Journal of Archaeological Science that Tim O’Reilly pointed out in his Twitter stream.  It points to resource over-use by the Maya over the course of a few centuries. This would seem to lend credence to former Seminar speaker Jared Diamond‘s collapse theories.

Abstract

Tikal, a major lowland Maya civic-ceremonial center in the heart of the Petén region of Central America, relied heavily on the adjacent lowland rainforest as a resource base for fuel and construction materials. In this study, we analyzed 135 wood samples from timbers used in the construction of all six of the city’s major temples as well as two major palaces to determine which tree species were being exploited and to better understand ancient Maya agroforestry practices during the Late Classic period. We found evidence for a change in preference from the large-growing, upland forest species, Manilkara zapota, to a seasonal wetland species Haematoxylon campechianum in A.D. 741 as well as a decrease in lintel beam widths over time. Though M. zapota later returned as the wood species of choice in A.D. 810, beam widths were found to be significantly smaller. These findings concur with models that hypothesize widespread deforestation during the Late Classic period and indicate a declining forest resource base by the 9th century A.D. Because of the many large timbers available for temple construction in the 8th century, some system of forest conservation is indicated for the ancient Maya prior to the Late Classic period.

Source:

Journal of Archaeological Science
Volume 36, Issue 7, July 2009, Pages 1342-1353

The Long News: stories that might still matter fifty, or a hundred, or ten thousand years from now.

At a recent conference on the future, one of the participants claimed that every one of the top ten human diseases would be cured within twenty-five or fifty years. While the time frame may be overly optimistic (after all, we’re still waiting for our flying cars to arrive), the pace of change in medicine is nothing short of remarkable — as shown in these recent news items.

1. Two stories of doctors operating at the molecular level: Bacteria take fantastic voyage through bloodstream and Healing the heart with bone-marrow cells

2. A new era of customized medicine: Personalized drugs may lengthen cancer survival

3. Reports of two new treatments for the blind: Synthetic fibers to reverse blindness and Implantable telescope helps restore vision

4. A new possible treatment for Parkinson’s: Sending genes into the brain

5. Finally, if these stories don’t make you feel optimistic, maybe this one will: The whole world is optimistic

We invite you to submit story suggestions for The Long News here.

Long Now Foundation Seminar host and board member Stewart Brand, as well as former Seminar speaker Clay Shirky will be presenting on June 3rd at the US State department in their first mini TED conference. It looks like those of you in the press might be able to get a pass, otherwise it will be posted on the TED site at some point in the future.

update:  The talks were also mentioned on the White House Blog along with a mention of Long Now.

What do Klingon, Elvish and Esperanto have in common?  They are all explicitly constructed languages — some for fictional worlds, some for the real world.  Some are created to entertain, others have such lofty goals as achieving world peace.  Some have dictionaries, grammars and language academies.  All have a fair number of real world speakers, and probably even a few native speakers.  But none, so far, have been the subject of serious linguistic inquiry…until now.

In her recently published book In the Land of Invented Languages: Esperanto Rock Stars, Klingon Poets, Loglan Lovers and the Mad Dreamers Who Tried to Build a Perfect Language, linguist Arika Okrent takes a serious look at as many of these as she could find (about 900 are well documented over the past several hundred years).  In these languages, often dismissed as whimsy, she finds a kind of ingenuity that is uniquely human, and a creative drive that can shed light on our own identification with languages and what they can and cannot achieve for us as speakers.  The NPR program “On Point” aired this hour long interview with Arika Okrent today.

We at The Rosetta Project have always thought invented languages are totally cool (after all, philologist J.R.R. Tolkien wrote in his letters that he created Middle Earth as a way to showcase his invented languages and what could be cooler than that?).  The invented languages Esperanto and Interlingua are both represented the Rosetta Disk — we have Genesis translations for both (hint: look in the European region for languages of France).