Gas Stations, Not Flowers

The fourth incarnation of Lost Landscapes of San Francisco played to a sold out house at the Herbst Theater with the chanteuse Suzanne Ramsey opening the evening with a selection of historical San Francisco songs including the 01926 gem Masculine Women Feminine Men.

Rick Prelinger prefaced the footage with a brief introduction to his archive, process, and most of all a request to go into your mother’s attic to pull out any films that feature San Francisco or the Bay Area. The archive needs your footage. Prelinger then queued up over seventy minutes…

Read the rest of Alexander Rose’s Summary

Long Now friend and supporter Ken Wilson sends in this awesome concept for the Stockholm Library.  This design seems like it would lend itself well to a 10,000 year library…

The image above is a rendering by a team of students at the Architecture School of Paris La Seine. You can see the un-textured model below and read how the design was generated over at CG Society.

Tunnel Boring Machine daylights at Yucca Mountain

Back 02002 Peter Schwartz wrote a great piece about our visit to the Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste site.  We often refer to it as “the other 10,000 year project”.  However 10,000 years is just the legally binding time congress set forth.  They actually have a design problem that spans millions of years.  This week several people have sent me this excellent write up in BLDG BLOG that features a Q&A with one of the technical architects of the project.  Most interesting to me were all the geeky technical details about material choices, climate, and engineering… an excerpt:

At Yucca Mountain we took the attitude that, since we basically have a dry mountain in a dry area with very little rainfall, we would use a material that can stand up to oxygen being present. The material we selected was a metal alloy called Alloy 22. Our design involves basically wrapping the stainless steel packages, in which we would receive the spent fuel, in Alloy 22 and sticking them inside this mountain with a layer of air over the top. What we know is that when water moves through rock or fractured materials, it tends to stay in the rock rather than fall—unless that rock is saturated. Yucca Mountain is unsaturated, so water ought not be a major issue for us at Yucca Mountain—yet it is.

We have to worry about future climates, because, right now in Nevada, we are in a nine year drought—and, basically since the last Ice Age, we have been in a 10,000-year drought. 80% of the time, if we look a million years into the past, we have, on average, twice the precipitation we have now. Most of the past is—and the future will be—wetter and cooler. Which is nice for Nevada! [laughs]

Upcoming seminar speaker and neuroscientist David Eagleman published an excellent piece that appeared in the New York Times yesterday.  While the piece keys on the events of this week, the broader point of the piece touches on an important element of human nature and long-term thinking.  Excerpt:

Some years ago, psychologists posed a deceptively simple question: if I were to offer you $100 right now, or $110 a week from now, which would you choose? Most subjects chose to take $100 right then. It didn’t seem worthwhile to wait an entire week for only $10 more.

And the further an event lies in the future, the less people care about it. So if offered $100 now or $500 18 months from now, many people still take the $100. The consequence is that there’s little difference between President Obama promising 18 months from now versus 18 years from now. In the human ken, both are obscured in the mists of the distant future.

Eagleman is also the author of Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives for which Brian Eno composed a special music concert along side a reading in Sydney earlier this year.

Stewart brand set over this excellently illustrated set of failed predictions listed over at oddee.com. Excerpts below:

“It will be years –not in my time– before a woman will become Prime Minister.”
–Margaret Thatcher, October 26th, 1969.

She became Prime Minister of the United Kingdom only 10 years after saying that, holding her chair from 1979 to 1990. But she wasn’t all that wrong since she is the only woman to have held this post. Maybe she should have added the word “again.”

“Rail travel at high speed is not possible because passengers, unable to breathe, would die of asphyxia.”
–Dr Dionysys Larder (1793-1859)

It may sound impossible to Dr Larder, professor of Natural Philosophy and Astronomy at the University College London back in the 1800, but in 1939 the first high speed train went from Milan to Florence at 165 km/h (102.5 mph). Thankfully no one died. Nowadays these trains go at 200 km/h (125 mph) and faster.

This also reminded of what has become my favorite bathroom reading: The Experts Speak by Christopher Cerf and Victor S. Navasky.  It is a brilliant listing of predictions and quotes like the ones above organized by category.  I have been paying attention to books and listings of future predictions since we started the Long Bets project.  The Experts Speak is most certainly the best compendium  I have come across to date.  It turns out there are several books and lists like this as they are endlessly entertaining.  What is curious though is how little attention is paid to good predictions, I have yet to find a good list or book about successful predictions.  I cant tell if its because there are so few correct predictions, or just because they are less interesting to us.

On a side note, the way I found the book was by a round about recommendation from Douglas Adams of all people.  In his last book Salmon of Doubt Adams discusses The Experts Speak along with Stewart Brand’s original idea for Long Bets as he wrote in Clock of the Long Now.