Published on Monday, July 19th, 02010 by Austin Brown
“Long Shorts” – short films that exemplify long-term thinking. Please submit yours in the comments section…
Not only does this amazing stop-motion film document a huge swath of history (all of it, really) – it looks like it took a huge swath of history to make. Thousands of photographs of graffiti evolving and interacting with its environment depict the development of life in the universe to create “Big Bang Big Boom: an unscientific point of view on the beginning and evolution of life… and how it could probably end.”
If this theme piques your interest, by the way, you might want to check out one of our upcoming Seminars About Long-term Thinking featuring Martin Rees: “Life’s Future in the Cosmos.”
Published on Thursday, July 15th, 02010 by Camron Assadi - Twitter: @teiwaz
“The malaria parasite has been responsible for half of all human deaths since the Stone Age” is the quote that jumped off the page in a recent article by Sonia Shah in the Wall Street Journal.
Malaria has shaped our trade and settlement patterns, and our demographics. Today, it sickens 300 million every year, and kills nearly 1 million, despite the fact that we’ve known how to cure it (with parasite-killing drugs) and prevent it (by avoiding mosquito bites) for over a century. And even as the fight against malaria gains momentum, research reveals that malaria’s tentacles continue to dig ever deeper.
Part of malaria’s wicked genius is that since ancient times, it has fooled us into thinking it is a trivial problem, easily solved. Diseases such as yellow fever, or plague, or polio, have always filled us with dread. But not malaria. Almost all of our attempts to squelch it, from thousands of years ago to today, have treated the disease as a weak foe, allowing malaria to flourish, nearly unchecked, to this day.
Published on Wednesday, July 14th, 02010 by Austin Brown
The European Space Agency has released an amazing new image of our universe, created by the recently launched Planck mission. The image above comes from Planck’s first detailed survey of the cosmic microwave background, the universe’s “first light.”
It is the light that was finally allowed to move out across space once a post-Big-Bang Universe had cooled sufficiently to permit the formation of hydrogen atoms.
Before that time, scientists say, the cosmos would have been so hot that matter and radiation would have been “coupled” – the Universe would have been opaque.
Planck is funded to create four of these surveys, each more precise than the last:
“We know that eventually as the data get better and better, what you end up getting to are the limitations of what you know about the instrument,” explained Professor Jaffe.
“And so, by running Planck for longer we can learn a lot more about the instrument itself and thereby remove a lot of the contaminating effects that are just because of the way it produces its noise.”
Published on Tuesday, July 13th, 02010 by Stewart Brand
History-savvy Policy
Why do policy makers and historians shun each other? Gavin observed that policy people want actionable information, certainty, and simple explanations. Meanwhile historians revel in nuance, distrust simple explanations and also distrust power and those who seek it. Thus historians keep themselves irrelevant, and policy makers keep their process ignorant.
Gavin proposed five key concepts from history that can inform understanding and improve policy dramatically…
About this Seminar:
President of the Royal Society, England’s Astronomer Royal, Lord Martin Rees brings a lifetime of cosmological inquiry to a crucial question: What if human success on Earth determines life’s success in the universe?
He thinks that civilization’s chances of getting out of this century intact are about 50-50. He is hopeful that extraterrestrial life already exists, but there’s no sign of it yet. But even if we are now alone, he notes that we may not even be the halfway stage of evolution. There is huge scope for post-human evolution, so that “it will not be humans who watch the sun’s demise, 6 billion years from now. Any creatures that then exist will be as different from us as we are from bacteria or amoebae.”
Appropriately, Rees’s Long Now talk will be at the Chabot Space & Science Center in the hills above Oakland, in the planetarium.
• Twitter- up to the minute info on tickets and events
• Long Now Blog – daily updates on events and ideas
• Facebook – stay in touch through our fan page
• Long Now Meetups- join one or start your own
Published on Wednesday, July 7th, 02010 by Paul Saffo
Boulding’s long-present anticipated our Long Now. It is a reminder that the core concept of being in the middle of history, rather than it’s beginning or end is a useful concept at multiple time frames, whether very long or very short.
“A favorite concept of mine is the 200-year present, a way of thinking about change. The 200-year present began 100 years ago with the year of birth of the people who have reach their hundredth birthday today. The other boundary of the 200-year present, 100 years from now, is the hundredth birthday of the babies born today. If you take that span, you and I will have had contact with a lot of people from different parts of that span. So think in terms of events over that span and realize how long change takes. You can see how difficult it has been to create these bodies and new ways and how in many ways we are slipping backward; but in other ways we are not. I take comfort to know that super-power hegemony has a very limited lifespan (decline and fall of Rome, the Ottoman Empire).”
Wikimania is a conference for users of the wiki projects operated by the Wikimedia Foundation. Topics of presentations and discussions include Wikimedia Foundation projects, other wikis, open source software, and free content.
Attendance is €15 per day, or €40 for all three days and you can register here.
If you have questions, you can contact Wikimania directly through this page.
Published on Friday, July 2nd, 02010 by Contessa Trujillo
Atlas Obscura, “a compendium of the world’s wonders, curiosities and esoterica” in collaboration with Long Now has created a new category just for us called Long Now Locations.
The Long Now Locations serve as a compendium and ongoing collection of objects and places that exhibit long-term thinking, intended or not. Along with the character of Atlas Obscura, many of the Long Now Locations are also mysterious and curious in nature.
Ranging from items that were created with a long-term mindset and intention, as were the Oak Beams at New College Oxford, to items that accidentally survived and now serve as long-term examples, telling a story and giving important information regarding past civilizations and their knowledge and capabilities, like the Antikythera Mechanism.
We encourage Long Now supporters to explore the Long Now Locations collection and add your own experiences with places and items of long-term nature, and maybe even some examples of poor long-term thought or planning. Sign up with an Atlas Obscura to start contributing your stories.
Obscura Day 02010
In addition to Long Now Locations, on Saturday March 20 02010, Long Now collaborated with Atlas Obscura on the first, of what we hope will be many an Obscura Day. Taking part in a day of 80 events, expeditions, back-room tours and hidden treasures in 20 countries worldwide, Long Now’s Museum & Store opened our doors to over 80 Obscura Day explorers for an evening of merry-making and conversation around the Long Now and the 10,000 Year Clock.
After exploring the Musee Mechanique alongside owner Dan Zelinsky, the San Francisco Obscura Day party roved down along the historic Aquatic Park and over into Fort Mason where an after-party was held at the Long Now Museum & Store to close Obscura Day’s world-wide events and festivities.
Long Now and Atlas Obscura staff and guests gathered to mingle around prototypes of the 10,000 Year Clock of the Long Now. Amongst the Orrery, Chime Generator, and Tungsten Bobs. Alexander Rose, Executive Director of Long Now and Project Manager/Designer of the 10,000 Year Clock, gave an introduction to the clocks various prototypes. Clock engineers, Greg Staples and Paolo Salvagione were also in attendance to answer questions and give demonstrations of the various prototypes.
Here is a wonderful video and summary on the day from Atlas Obscura:
The day started with folks hiking out to an abandoned railroad tunnel Australia to see bioluminescent glow worms, and ended some 30 hours later with San Francisco obscuraphiles watching an amazing demonstration of parts of the 10,000-Year Clock at the Long Now Foundation. In between, we walked the lost River Fleet in London, visited amazing anatomical museums in Paris, Washington, Boston, and Philadelphia, toured the world’s largest treehouse in Tennessee, circumnavigated one of the largest holes in the world in Butte, made shiny mud balls in Albuquerque, and photographed an unbuilt suburb in the Mojave desert.
Want to be updated on future Atlas Obscura events and tours? Sign up here.
