The Berkeley Language Center will be hosting a talk by Long Now’s Dr. Laura Welcher on November 9th. The talk is open to the public and starts at 3:00pm in Dwinelle Hall B-4.

The Rosetta Project at The Long Now Foundation is working to build an open public digital collection of all human language as well as an analog backup that can last for thousands of years–The Rosetta Disk. In the “long now,” the goal is long-term storage and access to information–on the scale that both supports and transcends individual human societies and civilizations. In the “here and now,” the project serves to support and amplify the importance of the world’s nearly 7,000 human languages, the vast majority of which are endangered and, if current trends continue, likely to go extinct in the next 100 years. I’ll present our current work on the Rosetta Project Collection and Disk as well as some new initiatives including the “Language Commons” where we are working to help build the multilingual Web.

There will be a reception afterwards; come say Hello.

Long Now Board Member David Eagleman will be speaking as part of the Bay Area Science Festival presentation “Will We Ever Understand the Brain” on Wednesday, November 2, 02011. Eagleman will discuss with Henry Markram, coordinator of the Human Brain Project, whether the myriad functions of the brain will someday be clear to us, or if they will always be somewhat of a mystery.

The lecture will take place at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco at 7pm. See the California Academy of Sciences’ or the Bay Area Science Festival’s website for details and tickets.

Eagleman is a neuroscientist at the Baylor College of Medicine as well as an author whose works include the fictional Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives and most recently, Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain.

With thousands of languages and writing systems used all over the world, making computers and the web widely accessible has taken a herculean effort, with much yet to be done.

One of the main tools used in the expansion of the web’s global reach is Unicode – a database of over 193,000 characters from 93 different writing systems and the standards for using and representing them.

Unicode is maintained by The Unicode Consortium, which sponsors a conference each year to share knowledge and discuss the future of Unicode.

This year the Internationalization and Unicode Conference will be held October 17th – 19th in Santa Clara, CA.

Long Now’s Dr. Laura Welcher will be delivering a keynote presentation on Tuesday October 18th of her work on The Rosetta Project, a publicly accessible digital library of human languages, and The Language Commons:

The Rosetta Project shares the Unicode vision of a world where people can use communication technology on their own terms – in their own language.

According to World Internet Statistics, over 80% of all web communication is in about ten languages, with over half in either English or Chinese. The remaining 20% represent “everyone else” including about 400 languages with speaker populations above 1 million, which collectively comprise about 95% of everyone on earth.

Because of essential technologies like Unicode, we are poised to see this breadth of human languages flourish online and on mobile devices, providing for these languages a critical new domain of language use in the modern world. I will present several efforts underway at The Rosetta Project including the “Language Commons” that rely on Unicode as an essential technology in building the multilingual Web.

This Saturday September 24th, Long Now brings back Mechanicrawl – a self-guided exploration of the mechanical marvels along San Francisco’s North Shore. A single ticket – free to members of partner organizations – provides access to all the attractions and special demonstrations going on throughout the event, 10:00am – 5:00pm.

You can get your tickets online, either in advance or on the day of the Crawl.

It’s an increasingly rare opportunity, not to mention an astounding sight, to behold the steam engines of the SS Jeremiah O’Brien running, and they’ll be fired up for the day. You can also geek out with Aaron Washington of the USS Pampanito crew over their Torpedo Data Computer, chat with their HAM radio club, drop by Long Now and meet some of the engineers on the 10,000 Year Clock as they demonstrate some of our prototypes, and catch one of the SF Maritime Park’s guided tours of the Balclutha, a square-rigged sailing ship docked at the Hyde Street Pier… before lunch!

There’s tons to do, check out www.mechanicrawl.org for details and ticket info.

Feel free to wander as you’d like between all the different attractions listed on the site, but take a peek at the Demos tab to see the scheduled activities you may want to join in on as well.

We’ve created a public layer in Google Maps that you can see on your smartphone to have all the locations and details at your fingertips during the event and you can follow Mechanicrawl on Twitter (@Mechanicrawl) for updates and reminders.

Come spend the day in the sun (oh, and below-decks) with us!

The Long Now Foundation presents

Mechanicrawl

explore the mechanical marvels along San Francisco’s North Shore!

TICKETS

See giant running steam engines, turn-of-the-century automata, mechanical computers, a wave organ, an 8 foot high mechanical planetarium, vintage steam boats and more…

Saturday September 24, 02011 from 10am to 5pm you can start your crawl at any participating location, see the website for more info

Long Now Members get 2 free tickets, join today! General Tickets $15

Members of these participating organizations also get 2 free tickets, Exploratorium, SF Maritime Park Association & the SS Jeremiah O’Brien

About Mechanicrawl:

Spend a delightful day exploring the mechanical marvels along San Francisco’s North Shore. You’ll be able to map your own route for the event and spend as much time at each location as you’d like. We encourage you to walk, bicycle or use public transport for Mechanicrawl; maps, featured tours and demonstrations and additional info will be listed on the website.

The idea for the Mechanicrawl event grew out of an appreciation of the mechanical wonders of San Francisco, many of which are neighbors along the touristed north edge of the city. Even though the Bay Area has a passionate culture of making and appreciating these types of mechanical achievements, their locations have kept them from being visited by many residents. Our goal for Mechanicrawl is to put together a special event where Bay Area residents can see all of these wonders in relation to each other and gain a new appreciation for San Francisco’s deep Maker roots.

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Keynote Speaker: Dr. Elizabeth Lindsey, National Geographic

Updated Schedule of Events!

Plan to attend in-person or remotely?

RSVP here through EventBrite!

Help us record 50 languages in a single day!

Did you know…

• UNESCO considers the use of one’s native language to be a basic human right?
• Half of the world’s 7,000 languages are endangered and may become extinct this century?
• Over 100 languages are spoken right here in the San Francisco Bay area?

There is something you can do to help document and promote the languages used in your own community! We need your help to meet our goal of recording 50 languages in a single day! How many languages can you help us document? Bring yourself and your multilingual friends and be the stars of your own grassroots language documentation project!

Professional linguists and videographers will be on site to document you and your friends speaking word lists, reading texts, and telling stories. You can also document your language using tools you probably have in your purse or back pocket — a mobile phone, digital camera, or laptop — just bring your device and our team will guide you through the documentation process.

How do your words and stories make a difference? An important part of language documentation is building a corpus — creating collections of vocabulary words, as well as conversations and stories that demonstrate language in use. From a corpus, linguists and speech technologists can build grammars, dictionaries, and tools that enable a language to be used online. The bigger the corpus, the better the tools!

The recordings you make during the event will be added to The Rosetta Project’s open collection of all human language in The Internet Archive. And, you can compete for cool prizes, including an iPad 2 for the participant who records and uploads the most languages during the event!

Please RSVP below and let us know if you plan to attend, and what language or languages you are thinking of recording. Can’t make it to the Record-a-thon? Join us online the day of the event for the virtual Record-a-thon, where you’ll be able to interact with event staff, monitor event progress, listen live to lectures and talks, and submit your own recordings remotely.

We will be in touch soon with more information about the day’s events, and how you can participate! For questions or more information please contact rosetta@longnow.org.

Photo by Pat Tufts

Languages are works of art, great libraries, how-to guides for living on planet Earth, windows into our minds and inalienable human rights. Long Now’s own Dr. Laura Welcher, Director of Operations and The Rosetta Project, spoke on March 3rd to a group of Long Now Members about the beauty, variety and value in the almost 7,000 languages spoken in the world. The event was part of our new Salon Series: occasional, intimate talks held in The Long Now Museum & Store for Members of the Foundation.

Laura’s talk was called The Rosetta Project and The Language Commons and in it she discussed several efforts to preserve linguistic diversity around the world. The Long Now Foundation’s role thus far, she explained, has been to develop and manufacture The Rosetta Disk: a durable, nickel archive of linguistic data. Laura also discussed her work with The Language Commons Working Group – a collaboration of linguists, archivists and programmers working to create an open and accessible encyclopedia of languages and linguistic diversity as a tool for teaching, studying, preserving and sharing languages.

The full audio of Laura’s talk can be streamed from the player below or downloaded as an mp3. You can also click through the slides she presented in the window below the audio player.

If you plan to be in San Francisco next week, there is still time to register for the Personal Digital Archiving Conference. The conference is being held at the Internet Archive on February 24 & 25, 2011. The event blurb says it all:

From family photographs and personal papers to health and financial information, vital personal records are becoming digital. Creation and capture of new digital information has become a part of the daily routine for hundreds of millions of people. But what are the long-term prospects for this data? The combination of new capture devices (more than 1 billion camera phones will be sold in 2010) with the move from older forms of media is reshaping both our personal and collective memories. The size and complexity of personal collections growing, these collections are spread across different media (including film and paper!), and the lines between personal and professional, published and unpublished are being redrawn.

For individuals, institutions, investors, entrepreneurs, and funding agencies thinking about how best to address these issues, Personal Digital Archiving 2011 will include a variety of examples that may be replicated, and will clarify the technical, social, economic questions around personal archiving.

Long Now’s Laura Welcher will be presenting “An Archive Model with Long Term Benefits” Thursday evening.

Check out the full, provisional schedule HERE. As you will see from this line-up, this is a wonderful opportunity to see and talk to the leading researchers in this area.

You can register HERE. [Deadline: February 24]

Travel and location  information is on the conference website.

Enormous Microscopic Evening examines the museum from a microscopic perspective with CRITTER, a San Francisco-based salon dedicated to expanding the relationships between culture and the environment. The evening will focus on demonstrations and workshops about building and manipulating microscopes. Materials and samples taken from around the museum will be examined. Continuing the theme of microscopy, there will be micro performances (short concerts with tiny instruments) and other related events throughout the museum.

Long Conversation – Pete Worden Announces 100-Year Starship from

As part of our Long Conversation event on October 16th, NASA Ames Director Pete Worden discussed a new DARPA/NASA research endeavor he called the “100 Year Starship” (see above).  This small mention originally reported by Amara Angelica at the Kurzweil AI blog has sparked a bit of a media dust up with over 70 stories including Nature, Wired, MSNBC and even Fox news trying to turn it into a cover up (bizarre considering he announced it).  A few days ago DARPA released an official press release on this project (text of which is below and here is the actual PDF).  The release outlines how nascent and speculative this “project” really is.

At Long Now we are obviously happy to see the press taking interest in such a long-term story.  It seems to have captured quite a bit of imagination — and speculation.  However as you can tell from the press release it is not as though we are going to be hopping on our interstellar space ship tomorrow.  Not only will the ride take at least a century, the road to having the technology is likely a century or two out itself.  Pete Worden, NASA and DARPA should be praised for taking the first steps to think on this scale.  This type of thinking is both rare and brave.

“Throughout history technical challenges have inspired generations to achieve scientific breakthroughs of lasting impact. Several decades ago, for instance, the race to the moon sparked a global excitement surrounding space exploration that persists to this day. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the NASA Ames Research Center have teamed together to take the first step in the next era of space exploration — a journey between the stars.

“The 100-Year Starship study will examine the business model needed to develop and mature a technology portfolio enabling long-distance manned spaceflight a century from now. This goal will require sustained investments of intellectual and financial capital from a variety of sources. The yearlong study aims to develop a construct that will incentivize and facilitate private co-investment to ensure continuity of the lengthy technological time horizon needed.

“‘The 100-Year Starship study is about more than building a spacecraft or any one specific technology,’ said Paul Eremenko, DARPA coordinator for the study. ‘We endeavor to excite several generations to commit to the research and development of breakthrough technologies and cross-cutting innovations across a myriad of disciplines such as physics, mathematics, biology, economics, and psychological, social, political and cultural sciences, as well as the full range of engineering disciplines to advance the goal of long-distance space travel, but also to benefit mankind.’

“DARPA also anticipates that the advancements achieved by such technologies will have substantial relevance to Department of Defense (DoD) mission areas including propulsion, energy storage, biology/life support, computing, structures, navigation, and others. Beyond the DoD and NASA, these investments will reinvigorate private entrepreneurs, the engineering and scientific community, and the world’s youth in a bold quest for the stars.

“The 100-Year Starship study looks to develop the business case for an enduring organization designed to incentivize breakthrough technologies enabling future spaceflight.”

[October 28th 02010, DARPA news release. Media with inquiries, contact DARPA Public Affairs, DARPAPublicAffairsOffice@darpa.mil]

(Update:  Another good analysis and update from the Centauri Dreams blog)

Photo by Jessie Levandov

Opening: Global Lives Project Installation
at The Long Now Museum & Store

Wednesday November 10
6:00 – 8:00 pm

We’ll be celebrating the opening of a Global Lives Project installation at the Long Now Foundation Museum & Store on the evening of November 10th. Please join us for drinks, snacks and some words from Global Lives Project Founder and Executive Director, David Evan Harris. Global Lives Project filmmakers Ya-Hsuan Huang and Jason J. Price will also be in attendance to answer questions.

The Global Lives Project is a collaboratively-built library of human experience gathered from an orphanage in Kazakstan, a corner store in China, a street car in San Francisco and many other locations foreign and familiar. It takes shape online and as a video installation.

Framed by the arc of the day and conveyed through the intimacy of video, we have slowly and faithfully captured 24 continuous hours in the lives of 10 people from around the world. They are screened here in their own right, but also in relation to one another.

There is no narrative other than that which is found in the composition of everyday life, no overt interpretations other than that which you may bring to it.

By extending the long take to a certain extreme and infusing it with the spirit of cinema verité, we invite audiences to confer close attention onto other worlds, and simultaneously reflect upon their own.  The force and depth of human difference and similarity are revealed in this process. Gaps which mark cultural divides feel, at once, both wider and narrower.  This sense – that we, as humans, are both knowable and unknowable, fundamentally different as well as the same – opens a space for dialogue.

-Artist’s Statement 2010

Long Conversation – Pete Worden Announces 100-Year Starship from The Long Now Foundation.

On October 16th, Long Now hosted the Long Conversation as part of our Longplayer event.  Speaking with Peter Schwartz about the future of space travel, NASA Ames Research Center Director Pete Worden announced a collaborative project between Ames and DARPA.  The two agencies have set aside just over a million dollars to begin research on a 100-year starship.

The announcement was first publicized by Amara Angelica writing for the Kurzweil AI blog:

NASA Ames Director Simon “Pete” Worden revealed Saturday that NASA Ames has “just started a project with DARPA called the Hundred Year Starship,” with $1 million funding from DARPA and $100K from NASA.

“You heard it here,” said Worden at “Long Conversation,” a Long Now Foundation event in San Francisco. “We also hope to inveigle some billionaires to form a Hundred Year Starship fund,” Dr. Worden added. (No further details on this are available from NASA at this time.)

“The human space program is now really aimed at settling other worlds,” he explained. “Twenty years ago you had to whisper that in dark bars and get fired.”

It later bounced its way over to Huffington Post and MSNBC’s Cosmic Log.

UPDATE:  On Oct 28th DARPA released this official statement (PDF).  MSNBC also covered it here.

Long Now has been invited by experimental artist Misha Glouberman to be a partner in a commissioned performance he’s created for Ann Hamilton’s Sound Tower – an 80-foot tall site-specific sculpture located on the Oliver Ranch in Geyserville.   This participatory event takes place on Saturday September 25, 02010 in Geyserville California.

Terrible Noises For Beautiful People is a performance where all the sounds are made by the audience, using their voices, in a series of structured improvisations and games led by Misha Glouberman. Glouberman predicts “some amount of yelling, a certain amount of running around, and also some really quiet parts,” and hopes to create an audible environment that will be exciting, alarming, and sometimes beautiful.

The Sound Tower has a resonance for Long Now as both Ann Hamilton and the Clock Team used the Well of St. Patrick in Orvieto, Italy as a source of inspiration.   Ann Hamilton, for this site specific, 8 story high Sound Tower and Long Now, for the underground chamber that the Chime Generator and other Clock components will be placed in for the 10,000 Year Clock.  This is a chance to feel what it may be like to visit part of the Clock.

Limited tickets for the Saturday performance are available for Long Now Members and their guests, there are 2 additional nights of this performance which are open to the public through a partnership with the Arts Council of Sonoma. Please email events (at) longnow (dot) org for more information.

Longplayer San Francisco

1,000 years in three simultaneous acts

TICKETS

Saturday October 16, 02010

Longplayer 7:00am to 11:40pm at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts
Long Conversation 3:00pm to 9:00pm at the Contemporary Jewish Museum

Long Now Members can reserve 1 seat, join today! • General Tickets $28

About this Event:

Jem Finer’s Longplayer is a 1,000 year long composition that’s been playing in one form or another since the beginning of the millennium. For 1,000 minutes this October 16th, it takes the form of 18 musicians playing hundreds of singing bowls on a 60 foot-wide custom-built instrument in YBCA’s Forum.

Longplayer will be presented with the Long Conversation, an epic relay of one-to-one conversations among some of the Bay Area’s most interesting minds.

Interpreting the Long Conversation in real time will be a data visualization performance by Sosolimited; an art and technology studio out of M.I.T.

Tickets are good for all events; the 6 hour Long Conversation, performance by Sosolimited and the 16.6 hour Longplayer performance. Read more about Longplayer San Francisco HERE.

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