Published on Wednesday, March 31st, 02010 by Alexander Rose - Twitter: @zander
Kirk Citron, the man behind Long News here on this blog, was invited to give a short talk on it at this years TED conference in Long Beach. They just posted the video which you can see above. Congratulations to Kirk, and big thanks for coming to us with the idea and doing such a great job curating!
Published on Monday, March 29th, 02010 by Alexander Rose - Twitter: @zander
Death Bear visits clients in their homes and accepts love letters, old photos, anything they can't just throw away. The man behind the mask, Nate Hill, says he wants to create art that helps people. (Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times / March 18, 2010)
At The Long Now Foundation we spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to preserve information and artifacts from our increasingly ephemeral culture. A piece in the LA TImes sent in this morning by board member Paul Saffo reminded me of a point that Brian Eno brought up at our first conference on digital preservation: the case for forgetting.
If we were able to save and recall absolutely everything, we have to remember that sometimes the past can be as stifling as it is informative. Many great inventions for instance may never have been created if the inventors actually knew how many great minds failed before them. But aside from innovation there is also the emotional side to memory. This story about the Death Bear project reminds us that there is plenty that we may want to forget, and that by doing so we can liberate our future. (excerpt below)
And while most of his calls are from the lovelorn, others hint at tragedies greater than being dateless on Valentine’s Day.
One man gave Hill a photo of himself and his ex-girlfriend on a beach and said they had served in the Army together. Then he gave Hill his military dog tags. Finally, he handed Hill a bullet.
“He almost started to cry,” said Hill, whose clients know him only as Death Bear and never see his face. “I started walking away and started to break down. I thought maybe something happened to her. Maybe she got shot, maybe she killed herself.”
But Hill never presses clients for details. As a bear, his job is not to make conversation. (read the full article)
Published on Wednesday, March 17th, 02010 by Alexander Rose - Twitter: @zander
Salman Rushdie at Emory University in Atlanta, which is currently exhibiting his personal archive, including personal papers, and electronically produced drafts of his novels.
Stewart Brand sends in this excellent piece in the The New York Times on what I am sure is to be an oft repeated story. As museums ingest invaluable intellectual material from authors and thinkers that increasingly will have never used paper, they are finding that preserving this data is a many layered problem. Huge Kudos goes out to Emory University for pulling together a full emulated environment of Rushdie’s word processor to recreate the digital “environment” for others to see into his process. I suspect this emulation strategy will be used more and more…
Electronically produced drafts, correspondence and editorial comments, sweated over by contemporary poets, novelists and nonfiction authors, are ultimately just a series of digits — 0’s and 1’s — written on floppy disks, CDs and hard drives, all of which degrade much faster than old-fashioned acid-free paper. Even if those storage media do survive, the relentless march of technology can mean that the older equipment and software that can make sense of all those 0’s and 1’s simply don’t exist anymore.
Imagine having a record but no record player.
All of which means that archivists are finding themselves trying to fend off digital extinction at the same time that they are puzzling through questions about what to save, how to save it and how to make that material accessible.
“If you’re interested in primary materials, you’re interested in the context as well as the content, the authentic artifact,” Ms. Farr said. “Fifty years from now, people may be researching how the impact of word processing affected literary output,” she added, which would require seeing the original computer images.
(…continue reading at NYT)
Published on Tuesday, March 16th, 02010 by Danielle Engelman
There is new media available from our monthly series, the Seminars About Long-term Thinking. Stewart Brand’s summaries and audio downloads or podcasts of the talks are free to the public; Long Now members can view HD video of the Seminars and comment on them.
Watch the video of Beth Noveck’s “Transparent Government”
Published on Monday, March 15th, 02010 by Alexander Rose - Twitter: @zander
This artist rendering provided by the European South Observatory shows some of the 32 new planets astronomers found outside our solar system.
This article was sent in by Samuel Arbesman Research Fellow in Health Care Policy at Harvard Medical School. It was originally printed in the Boston Globe.
When people think of knowledge, they generally think of two sorts of facts: facts that don’t change, like the height of Mount Everest or the capital of the United States, and facts that fluctuate constantly, like the temperature or the stock market close.
But in between there is a third kind: facts that change slowly. These are facts which we tend to view as fixed, but which shift over the course of a lifetime. For example: What is Earth’s population? I remember learning 6 billion, and some of you might even have learned 5 billion. Well, it turns out it’s about 6.8 billion.
Or, imagine you are considering relocating to another city. Not recognizing the slow change in the economic fortunes of various metropolitan areas, you immediately dismiss certain cities. For example, Pittsburgh, a city in the core of the historic Rust Belt of the United States, was for a long time considered to be something of a city to avoid. But recently, its economic fortunes have changed, swapping steel mills for technology, with its job growth ranked sixth in the entire United States.
These slow-changing facts are what I term “mesofacts.” Mesofacts are the facts that change neither too quickly nor too slowly, that lie in this difficult-to-comprehend middle, or meso-, scale. Often, we learn these in school when young and hold onto them, even after they change. For example, if, as a baby boomer, you learned high school chemistry in 1970, and then, as we all are apt to do, did not take care to brush up on your chemistry periodically, you would not realize that there are 12 new elements in the Periodic Table. Over a tenth of the elements have been discovered since you graduated high school! While this might not affect your daily life, it is astonishing and a bit humbling.
For these kinds of facts, the analogy of how to boil a frog is apt: Change the temperature quickly, and the frog jumps out of the pot. But slowly increase the temperature, and the frog doesn’t realize that things are getting warmer, until it’s been boiled. So, too, is it with humans and how we process information. We recognize rapid change, whether it’s as simple as a fast-moving object or living with the knowledge that humans have walked on the moon. But anything short of large-scale rapid change is often ignored. This is the reason we continue to write the wrong year during the first days of January.
Our schools are biased against mesofacts. The arc of our educational system is to be treated as little generalists when children, absorbing bits of knowledge about everything from biology to social studies to geology. But then, as we grow older, we are encouraged to specialize. This might have been useful in decades past, but in our increasingly fast-paced and interdisciplinary world, lacking an even approximate knowledge of our surroundings is unwise.
Updating your mesofacts can change how you think about the world. Do you know the percentage of people in the world who use mobile phones? In 1997, the answer was 4 percent. By 2007, it was nearly 50 percent. The fraction of people who are mobile phone users is the kind of fact you might read in a magazine and quote at a cocktail party. But years later the number you would be quoting would not just be inaccurate, it would be seriously wrong. The difference between a tiny fraction of the world and half the globe is startling, and completely changes our view on global interconnectivity.
Mesofacts can also be fun. Let’s focus for a moment on some mesofacts that can be of vital importance if you’re a child, or parent of a child: those about dinosaurs. Just a few decades ago, dinosaurs were thought to be cold-blooded, slow-witted lizards that walked with their legs splayed out beside them. Now, scientists think that many dinosaurs were warm-blooded and fast-moving creatures. And they even had feathers! Just a few weeks ago we learned about the color patterns of dinosaurs (stripes! with orange tufts!). These facts might not affect how you live your life, but then again, you’re probably not 6 years old. There is another mesofact that is unlikely to affect your daily routine, but might win you a bar bet: the number of planets known outside the solar system. After the first extrasolar planet around an ordinary star made headlines back in 1995, most people stopped paying attention. Well, the number of extrasolar planets is currently over 400. Know this, and the next round won’t be on you.
The fact that the world changes rapidly is exciting, but everyone knows about that. There is much change that is neither fast nor momentous, but no less breathtaking.
Samuel Arbesman is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Health Care Policy at Harvard Medical School. He is a regular contributor to Ideas. He has started a new website devoted to mesofacts, which can be found at mesofacts.org.
Published on Friday, March 12th, 02010 by Kirk Citron
The Long News: stories that might still matter fifty, or a hundred, or ten thousand years from now.
Today, humans speak to each other in nearly 7,000 languages; it’s estimated that 90% of those languages will be gone by 02050, displaced by English, Spanish, or Chinese. Meanwhile, there’s a broader question about how well we’re preserving the rest of the world’s cultural heritage. But while we may be losing our collective memories, the thoughts of individuals are more and more likely to live on.
Some recent news stories about losing, or preserving, human culture:
1. What we have here is a failure to communicate:
65,000-year-old language goes extinct
Why half of the world’s languages are in serious danger of dying out
2. Goodbye to all that:
Machu Picchu, Barcelona church on threatened list
3. Culture goes back further than we imagined:
Oldest ‘writing’ found on 60,000-year-old eggshells
Modern behavior found half-million years earlier than previously thought
4. Speak, memory:
Device turns thoughts into speech
Researchers show brain waves can ‘write’ on a computer
Brain scanners can tell what you’re thinking about
New camera promises to capture your whole life
We invite you to submit Long News story suggestions here.
Published on Thursday, March 11th, 02010 by Camron Assadi - Twitter: @teiwaz
Wired Science has posted a thought-provoking interview with Caltech theoretical physicist Sean Carroll about the arrow of time, which points from past to future. We all perceive this arrow and can measure its passage with clocks, but very little is understood about how and why it works that way. Carroll explains:
We remember the past but we don’t remember the future. There are irreversible processes. There are things that happen, like you turn an egg into an omelet, but you can’t turn an omelet into an egg.
And we sort of understand that halfway. The arrow of time is based on ideas that go back to Ludwig Boltzmann, an Austrian physicist in the 1870s. He figured out this thing called entropy. Entropy is just a measure of how disorderly things are. And it tends to grow. That’s the second law of thermodynamics: Entropy goes up with time, things become more disorderly. So, if you neatly stack papers on your desk, and you walk away, you’re not surprised they turn into a mess. You’d be very surprised if a mess turned into neatly stacked papers. That’s entropy and the arrow of time. Entropy goes up as it becomes messier.
So, Boltzmann understood that and he explained how entropy is related to the arrow of time. But there’s a missing piece to his explanation, which is, why was the entropy ever low to begin with? Why were the papers neatly stacked in the universe? Basically, our observable universe begins around 13.7 billion years ago in a state of exquisite order, exquisitely low entropy. It’s like the universe is a wind-up toy that has been sort of puttering along for the last 13.7 billion years and will eventually wind down to nothing. But why was it ever wound up in the first place? Why was it in such a weird low-entropy unusual state?
That is what I’m trying to tackle. I’m trying to understand cosmology, why the Big Bang had the properties it did. And it’s interesting to think that connects directly to our kitchens and how we can make eggs, how we can remember one direction of time, why causes precede effects, why we are born young and grow older. It’s all because of entropy increasing. It’s all because of conditions of the Big Bang.
For a deeper exploration of the arrow of time and the cosmology of why it exists, Carroll’s recently published book is From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time.
Published on Wednesday, March 10th, 02010 by Austin Brown
“Long Shorts” – short films that exemplify long-term thinking. Please submit yours in the comments section…
Art project in progress A History of the Sky features lots and lots of time-lapse videos of the sky that are synchronized so that they’re all showing the same time of day. Ken Murphy is the artist that created it and he hopes to one day manifest all the data he’s collecting as a video installation that’s always displaying the skies of the last 365 days. The project was recently featured at the Exploratorium, but it’s still in a need of a home for the installation.
If you’d like to see an installation in person, here are several upcoming opportunities:
Published on Wednesday, March 10th, 02010 by Danielle Engelman
There is new media available from our monthly series, the Seminars About Long-term Thinking. Stewart Brand’s summaries and audio downloads or podcasts of the talks are free to the public; Long Now members can view HD video of the Seminars and comment on them.
Watch the video of Alan Weisman’s “World Without Us, World With Us”
Published on Tuesday, March 9th, 02010 by Danielle Engelman
About this Seminar:
David Eagleman may be the best combination of scientist and fiction-writer alive. Sum, his collection of afterlife alternatives, made a stunning literary debut last year and now appears in 21 languages. Simultaneously he is a neuroscientist at Baylor College of Medicine, specializing in time perception.
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