Boing Boing notes that Popular Science has put up their whole 137 year historical archive on line in partnership with Google.  While you cant search by issue, you can do keyword searches.  I hope more long standing publications follow suit, this is a real treasure trove, especially the advertisements…

Search the Popular Science Archive

Thanks to Chaz for sending this in.

Long Now Digital Research Director Kurt Bollacker was recently published in New Scientist discussing the challenges in maintaining data for the long haul:

It seems unavoidable that most of the data in our future will be digital, so it behooves us to understand how to manage and preserve digital data so we can avoid what some have called the “digital dark age.” This is the idea—or fear!—that if we cannot learn to explicitly save our digital data, we will lose that data and, with it, the record that future generations might use to remember and understand us.

It’s a fairly long and comprehensive piece with lots of good advice and a good description of how the Rosetta Disk tries to address some of these problems.

Read the full article at New Scientist.

John Brockman’s Edge has posted the responses from its members to their Annual Question.  This year they wanted to know, “How is the internet changing the way you think?”

There are over 160 short essays from members of ‘The Third Culture,’ or “those scientists and other thinkers in the empirical world who, through their work and expository writing, are taking the place of the traditional intellectual in rendering visible the deeper meanings of our lives, redefining who and what we are.”

There are quite a few Long Now Foundation Board Members that have contributed as well as plenty of SALT speakers, past and present.  Here’s a list with links to their thoughts on how the internet is changing their thoughts:

Long Now Foundation Board Members:

• Danny Hillis
• Stewart Brand
• Kevin Kelly
• Brian Eno
• Esther Dyson
• Peter Schwartz
• Paul Saffo

Long Now Seminar Speakers:

• Clay Shirky
• Nicholas Nassim Taleb
• George Dyson
• Sam Harris
• Peter Diamandis
• Daniel Everett
• Juan Enriquez
• David Eagleman (scheduled for 4/1/10)

Officially inaugurated in 02002, the Bibliotheca Alexandrina is an attempt by Egypt and the city of Alexandria to recreate, in spirit if not content, the original Library of Alexandria.  The Ptolemaic dynasty of Egypt created what was at the time, the worlds largest library in the third century BC in the Egyptian city of Alexandria.  Though historical accounts disagree as to how, why and when, this massive repository of centuries of scholastic work was burned down and lost to the ages.

Long Now Board Member Michael Keller sent in notice of his event coming up at Stanford University on December 2nd in which Dr. Ismail Serageldin will be discussing his work as the Director of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina and his hopes for better dialogue between the West and the Muslim world:

Stanford University Libraries is pleased to present two lectures by Dr. Ismail Serageldin.

At 2:00 pm: The New Library of Alexandria: A Beacon of Knowledge

At 4:30 pm: For a Better Dialog Between the West and Muslims

Refreshments will be provided after the second lecture.

The lectures are being held in the Dinkelspiel Auditorium.  Call 650-736-9538 or email sonialee@stanford.edu for details/reservations.

Of Note: The Bibliotheca Alexandrina has a complete copy and physical backup of the Internet Archive.

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!

Stewart Brand’s TED @ State Department talk is now up on the TED site.  The talk is a bit of preview of his new book coming out this fall, as well as the expanded talk he will be giving in our series on October 9th in San Francisco

[from The Technium]

Cities are technological artifacts, the largest technology we make. Their impact is out of proportion to the number of humans living in them. As the chart above shows, the percentage of humans living in cities averaged about one or two percent for most of recorded history. (The chart’s Y axis is a logarithmic scale of percentage.) Yet almost everything that we think of when we say “culture” arose within cities. After all, the terms “city” and “civilization” share the same root. But the massive citification, or urbanization, that characterizes the technium today is a very recent development. Like most other charts depicting the technium, not much happens until the last two centuries. Then populations booms, innovation rockets, information explodes, freedoms increase, and cities rule.Cities may be engines of innovation, but not everyone thinks they are beautiful, particularly the megalopolises of today, with their sprawling rapacious appetites. They seem like machines eating the wilderness, and many wonder if they are eating us as well. Is the recent large-scale relocation to cities a choice or a necessity? Are people pulled by the lure of opportunities, or are they pushed against their will by desperation?  Why would anyone willingly choose to leave the balm of a village and squat in a smelly, leaky hut in a city slum unless they were forced to?

Well, every city begins as a slum. First it’s a seasonal camp, with the usual free-wheeling make-shift expediency. Creature comforts are scarce, squalor the norm. Hunters, scouts, traders, pioneers find a good place to stay for the night, or two, and then if their camp is a desirable spot it grows into an untidy village, or uncomfortable fort, or dismal official outpost, with permanent buildings surrounded by temporary huts. If the location of the village favors growth, concentric rings of squatters aggregate around the core until the village swells to a town. When a town prospers it acquires a center — civic or religious — and the edges of the city continue to expand in unplanned, ungovernable messiness. It doesn’t matter in what century or in which country, the teaming guts of a city will shock and disturb the established residents. The eternal disdain for newcomers is as old as the first city. Romans complained of the tenements, shacks and huts at the edges of their town that “were putrid, sodden and sagging.”  Every so often Roman soldiers would raze a settlement of squatters, only to find it  rebuilt or moved within weeks.

Babylon, London, and New York all had seamy ghettos of unwanted settlers erecting shoddy shelters with inadequate hygiene and engaging in dodgy dealings. Historian Bronislaw Geremek states that “slums constituted a large part of the urban landscape” of Paris in the Middle Ages. Even by the 1780s, when Paris was at is peak, nearly 20% of its residents did not have a “fixed abode” — that is they lived in shacks. In a familiar complaint about medieval French cities, a gentleman from that time noted: “Several families inhabit one house. A weaver’s family may be crowded into a single room, where they huddle around a fireplace.” That refrain is repeated throughout history. Manhattan was home to 20,000 squatters in self-made housing. Slab City alone, in Brooklyn (named after the use of planks stolen from lumber mills), contained 10,000 residents in its slum at its peak. In the New York slums “nine out of ten of the shanties have only one room, which does not average over twelve feet square, and this serves all the purposes of the family.”

San Francisco was built by squatters. As Rob Neuwirth recounts in his wonderful book Shadow Cities,  one survey in 1855 estimated that “95 percent of the property holders in [San Francisco] city would not be able to produce a bona fide legal title to their land.” Squatters were everywhere, in the marshes, sand dunes, military bases. One eyewitness said, “Where there was a vacant piece of ground one day, the next saw it covered with half a dozen tents or shanties.” Philadelphia was largely settled by what local papers called “squatlers.”  As late as 1940, one in five citizens in Shanghai was a squatter. Those one million squatters stayed and kept upgrading their slum so that within one generation their shantytown became one of the first 21st  century cities.

That’s how it works. Over time slums gain permanency. Ad hoc shelters are upgraded, infrastructure extended, and makeshift services become official. What was once the home of poor hustlers becomes, over the span of generations, the home of rich hustlers. Propagating slums is what cities do, and living in slums is how cities grow. The majority of neighborhoods in almost every modern city are merely successful former slums. The squatter cities of today will become the blue-blood neighborhoods of tomorrow.

Slums of the past and slums today follow the same description. The first impression is and was one of filth and overcrowding. In a ghetto a thousand years ago and in a slum today shelters are haphazard and dilapidated. The smells overwhelming. But there is vibrant economic activity. Every slum boasts eateries, and bars. And most have rooming houses, or places you can rent a bed. They have animals, fresh milk, grocery stores, barber shops, healers, herb stores, repair stands, and strong armed men offering “protection.” A squatter city is, and has always been, a shadow city, a parallel world without official permission, but a city nonetheless.

The improvisation and creative energies unleashed by a squatter city are so attractive that we build them just for the pleasure of their raucousness. Take Burning Man, the arts festival arising every year in the Nevada desert. It is a bona fide squatter city built and run semi-legally by its inhabitants. It is, in essence, a slum with porta potties. It draws 40,000 residents who bang together huts, shanties, tents, and make-shift shelters, and then, like any other slum, trade, barter, and share their few skills and belongings. The owner-built architecture of Burning Man is thrilling, and the gift economy bracing. Because this futuristic slum is so dense and temporary, it has one of the highest concentrations of creativity I’ve seen anywhere.
Like any city, a slum is highly efficient. Maybe even more than the official sections because nothing goes to waste. The rag pickers and resellers and scavengers all live in the slums and scour the rest of the city for scraps to assemble into shelter, and to feed their economy. Slums are the skin of the city, its permeable edge that can balloon as it grows. The city as a whole is a wonderful technological invention which concentrates the flow of energy and minds into computer chip-like density. In a relatively small footprint, a city not only provides living quarters and occupations in a minimum of space, but a city also generates a maximum of ideas and inventions.

The squatter city at Black Rock, Nevada

As Stewart Brand notes in the City Planet chapter of his upcoming book Whole Earth Discipline, “Cities are wealth creators; they have always been.”  He quotes urban theorist Richard Florida who claims that 40 of the largest megacities in the world, home to 18% of the world’s population, “produce two-thirds of global economic output and nearly 9 in 10 new patented innovations.” A Canadian demographer figured that “80 to 90 percent of GNP growth occurs in cities.” The raggedy new part of each city, its squats and encampments, often house the most productive citizens. As Mike Davis points out in Planet of Slums, “The traditional stereotype of the Indian pavement-dweller is a destitute peasant, newly arrived from the countryside, who survives by parasitic begging, but as research in Mumbai has revealed, almost all (97 percent) have at least one breadwinner, and 70 percent have been in the city at least six years…”  Slum dwellers are often busy with low paying service jobs in nearby high rent districts; they have money but live in a squatter city because it’s close to their work. Because they are industrious, they progress  fast. One UN report found that households in the older slums of Bangkok have on average 1.6 televisions, 1.5 cell phones, a refrigerator; two-thirds have a washing machine and CD player, and half have a fixed line phone, video player and a motor scooter. In the favelas of Rio, the first generation of squatters had a literacy rate of only 5%, but their kids were 97% literate. (more…)

Today a million copies of the  International Herald Tribune were distributed that were dated 6 months from now… after the Copenhagen climate talks.

In a front-page ad in today’s International Herald Tribune, the leaders of the European Union thank the European public for having engaged in months of civil disobedience leading up to the Copenhagen climate conference that will be held this December. “It was only thanks to your massive pressure over the past six months that we could so dramatically shift our climate-change policies…. To those who were arrested, we
thank you.”

There was only one catch: the paper was fake.

Looking exactly like the real thing, but dated December 19th, 2009, a million copies of the fake paper were distributed worldwide by thousands of volunteers in order to show what could be achieved at the Copenhagen climate conference that is scheduled for Dec. 7-18, 2009.

The effort was orchestrated through a joint effort bythe always amazing Yes Men and Greenpeace. While this is not the first time someone has produced an artifact from the future as a way to change the way people are acting now, this is certainly one of the most ambitious efforts.  Kudos.

One of my favorites parts of the paper are the ads like the one from BP below:

 Spark radio show has a segment that includes interviews with Brewster Kahle on the Internet Archive, and Ed Burtynski about his idea for 10,000 photography and the Clock of the Long Now.

Alex Steffen sent in a note about this interesting new service that allows your estate to elegantly handle your digital assets, passwords, accounts etc after your passing.

As people increasingly document their lives digitally, and move the majority of their interactions to the internet, there is a strange undeadness that happens to their online presence after they are gone.  I have had first hand experience with this in my family last year, it is very difficult to get all the passwords and account logins sorted so that you can set everything straight once someone is gone. I would love to hear from someone who has used this service…

I am not exactly sure how much better it is than telling a trusted a friend or relative where to find this information, or using an lawyer to hang onto it.  But their plans start at free for a limited account, and go up to $299 for a lifetime paid unlimited account, so that is likely less than you would spend with a lawyer, and I suspect this is easier to keep updated.

It is good to see economies popping up around long term storage of digital assets.  However the idea of storing those assets for long periods of time with an internet startup is likely a dubious venture at best.