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

presents Wayne Clough on “Smithsonian Forever”

Monday August 17, 02009 at 7:30 pm at the Cowell Theater

Long Now Members can reserve a seat HERE

You can purchase tickets for $10 HERE

About this Seminar:

The Smithsonian Institution is the largest museum and research complex in the world, 163 years old. Its brand-new Secretary is Wayne Clough, formerly president of Georgia Tech.

During his first year on the job, Secretary Clough toured the entire present activities, staff, and history of the far-flung Institution, with an eye to framing up its very long term future, which should embrace centuries at least. In this talk he spells out the prospects—including the long-term future of science and education.

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Engineered organic

Organic farming teacher Raoul began the joint presentation with a checklist for truly sustainable agriculture in a global context. It must:

Provide abundant safe and nutritious food…. Reduce environmentally harmful inputs…. Reduce energy use and greenhouse gases…. Foster soil fertility…. Enhance crop genetic diversity…. Maintain the economic viability of farming communities…. Protect biodiversity…. and improve the lives of the poor and malnourished. (He pointed out that 24,000 a day die of malnutrition worldwide, and about 1 billion are undernourished.)

Organic agriculture has made a good start on these goals…

Read the rest of Stewart Brand’s Summary

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

*Pamela Ronald and Raoul Adamchak” – audio now available

Our good friends at The Chabot Space and Science Center in Berkeley CA, is hosting one of their lively evening events, 10000,  A Skyline Party Among the Stars this Friday July 31, from 7 to 11 pm.

Come for live music from Pop Fiction, celestial beverages, provocative science, films and views of the cosmos (weather permitting, of course).

Through a generous offer, Long Now members can get half off the ticket price, check your email box for details, or email membership@longnow.org.

Long Now Clock engineer Paolo Salvagione sent in this excellent write up by fellow horological geek Alex Doak of Watchismo of his trip to see Big Ben ring in its 150th year.  It includes a link to animated “how Big Ben works” that is one of the best clock descriptions I have seen.  Most interesting to me of course were the descriptions of the stoppages and challenges involved:

Stoppages are rare, but the most notable are:

2007: the longest suspension of the hour strike (Big Ben) since 1990. Big Ben’s famous ‘bongs’ were silent for seven weeks in 2007, allowing essential maintenance work on the clock mechanism to take place. From 11 August to 1 October, an electric system kept the clock moving, but Big Ben, the name for the Great Bell, and the quarter bells were quiet. This was the final phase of a programme of planned works to prepare for the Great Clock’s 150th anniversary in 2009.

October 2005: The clock mechanism was also suspended for two days in to allow inspection of the brake shaft.

Over the years, the clock has been stopped accidentally on several occasions – by weather, workmen, breakages or birds. The most serious breakdown occurred during the night of 10 August 1976 when part of the chiming mechanism disintegrated through metal fatigue, causing the mechanism to literally explode under its own immense forces, dropping its weights to the base of the Tower with a noise that the policeman on duty initially reported as being an IRA bomb. The Great Clock was shut down for a total of 26 days over nine months – the longest break in operations since it was built – until it was fully repaired.

Follow @longnowlive on Twitter for live updates from Long Now events, including Tuesday’s Pamela Ronald & Raoul Adamchak, Organically Grown and Genetically Engineered: The Food of the Future which starts at 7:30 PST. Our special guest live Twitterer for this event is Long Now member Jennifer Leonard.

We encourage anyone else who would like to live twitter about the event to use the #longnow tag on their posts so that anyone can track the aggregate postings.

If you’d like to send in questions to @longnowlive, Jennifer will be in the front row while we sort questions to get them into Stewart’s hands.

Please note that there are still some pre-sale tickets available for the talk, and we will have a walk up line that will be first come first serve to try and fill as many un-claimed seats as possible.  There is also room for 100 walk-ups for the free simulcast in the Lobby – this is a separate line, so get there early!

Feel free to comment on this post with your twitter handle if you want others to know about your live twittering of this event…

PS: For those those of you wondering what Twitter is… here is a video that explains it.

 Kent Corbell sends in this wonderful website, the Atlas Obscura.  A crowd-sourced, yet curated collection of the worlds most wondrous treasures.  As a collector of such places I was amazed to find many many new sites to me.  Including a clock museum in Austria that apparently has a 8820 year clock, a site in the wilds of north east India that has bridges made of living tree roots, and a 92 foot tall aeolian wind harp nearly in my back yard… amazing.

Found while reading Charles Stross’ web diary is this wonderful link from 02000 Forbes Magazine on where computers would be in ten years… now just a few months away.  Some gems:

Within 10 years, in fact, silicon will fall to the computer scientist’s triple curse: “It’s bulky, it’s slow, and it runs too hot.” At this point, computers will need a new architecture, one that depends less on electrons and more on… well…what else? Optics. 

Optical computers still seem about ten years away even now.

The PC will be protected from theft, thanks to an advanced biometric scanner that can recognize your fingerprint.

They got that one bang on.

  You’ll communicate with the PC primarily with your voice, putting it truly at your beck and call. 

Not so much.  While there are decent voice control systems for limited applications, I would not call voice based computing a mature technology.

In 2010, a “desktop” will be a desk top…in other words, by plugging our computer into an office desk, its top becomes a gigantic computer screen–an interactive photonic display. 

It is certainly true that this type of computer has come out, not quite a standard yet though.

What do we do with our 2010 computer when we arrive home after a long day’s work? Plug it into the wall with a magnetic clamp and watch as our home comes to life. In essence, the computer becomes the operating system for our house, and our house, in turn, knows our habits and responds to our needs

Hmmmm.  There are more computer controlled home appliances now, but my bet is this will happen more with smart phones than PCs (like Apples Remote app for the iPhone).

The disk will be holographic and will somewhat resemble a CD-ROM or DVD. That is, it will be a spinning, transparent plastic platter with a writing laser on one side and reading laser on the other, and it will hold an astounding terabyte (1 trillion bytes) of data

Bingo! sorta….  Yes you can buy a 1 terabyte hard disk at Best Buy, but it sure isn’t holographic storage.

Our 2010 CPU will operate on the same principle as today’s PCs. But instead of electronic microprocessors providing the brains and brawn, our future CPU will have optoelectronic integrated circuits (chips that use silicon to switch but optics to communicate).  With communication between components no longer bottlenecked by electronic transmission, we can probably push the clock rate to 100 gigahertz, 100 times faster than what’s available now. 

Well I am writing this on a two core 3 Ghz  computer, and there are 8 core versions commercially available, but we certainly have not reached 100 Ghz.

Our main RAM will be purely optical, in fact, holographic. Holographic memory is three-dimensional by nature, so we can stack up any number of memory planes into a rectangular solid to create 256 gigabytes of optical main memory, 1,000 times as much as a really powerful desktop computer today. 

Again no optical RAM, and machines seem to be selling with around 2-4Gb of the old standard silicon in them.

Nice work Forbes for putting some actual testable predictions out there!

Estimates of the number of the world’s languages are hard to nail down precisely.  Our best estimate comes from the current edition of the Ethnologue, which puts the number at 6,909...  6,909 languages. For a challenge, try naming a hundred.  Fifty.  Ten?  The notion of living in a world with almost 7,000 languages is an abstraction for nearly everybody.

One way to potentially visualize this is by locating languages on the map.  This may seem like a simple task, but the complexities become apparent when looking even at a single language such as English.  Besides native speakers, there are many non-native  speakers of English, who learn it as way to communicate with people around the world. How do you map these speakers? How do you show that English is spoken alongside many other languages, such as the many indigenous languages of North America and Australia? The complexity of language use calls for an approach to mapping that is more than placing a single point on a country, or even drawing geographic boundaries. A good map of the world’s languages must account for the many ways in which we interact with language in our daily lives.

One attempt is LL-Map, shown here.  This project, funded by the National Science Foundation, is working to integrate many different geo-linguistic factors into a single digital map interface. To date, this interface provides many different language map layers, combined with geographic data  related to climate, political divisions, and flora and fauna, both historical and current. By integrating these layers, LL-Map provides a tool for those who hope to better understand and study the complex factors of language use worldwide.

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

The brain has been called the most complicated machine ever built. But that doesn’t seem to be stopping those who are working to understand it, repair it, or improve it. Then again, what could go wrong? It’s not rocket science, it’s just brain surgery.

Recent stories from the brain sciences:

1. Does every emotion have its own map? We’re beginning to find out: Neuroscientists locate where fear is stored in the brain

2. There are many non-traditional ways to promote learning. For example, fun with magnets: Magnetic brain stimulation improves skill learning

3. New visualization techniques to help us see inside the brain: Reading the surface of the brain, Breakthrough in 3-D mapping enables removal of fist-sized tumor

4. Discovery of a protein that might protect against Alzheimer’s: Key protein might shield brain cells

5. Some things you might already be doing right: Caffeine reverses memory impairment in Alzheimer’s mice, Regular moderate alcohol intake has congitive benefits in older adults

6. A good summary of what brain enhancement might mean: Will designer brains divide humanity?

7. Finally, who better to sum it all up than Stephen Hawking? “Humans have entered a new stage of evolution” (thanks to Bob Citron for the pointer.)

We invite you to submit Long News story suggestions here.