Published on Friday, October 21st, 02011 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.
Published on Wednesday, October 19th, 02011 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.
Published on Tuesday, October 11th, 02011 by Austin Brown
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.
Published on Wednesday, October 5th, 02011 by Alexander Rose - Twitter: @zander
On September 30th 02011 Long Now lost of one of our own, emeritus board member Roger Kennedy. Roger came to Long Now while we were trying to find a Clock site back in 01998. He jumped in immediately leading us on amazing road trips throughout the south west. His knowledge of ancient America was beyond encyclopedic, and his joy of the high desert contagious. Roger’s direct guidance led us to the limestone cliffs and ancient bristlecones of Mt Washington near the Great Basin National Park, a site we eventually purchased. Roger’s generosity and sage wisdom will be missed always. Farewell Roger.
Published on Tuesday, September 27th, 02011 by Danielle Engelman
Ecologically, the past is always present if you know where and how to look. Paleontologist-biologist-artist Laura Cunningham spent 20 years exploring California’s archives and relic lands to reconstruct exactly what life used to look like here over the past 10,000 years. Her beautiful images and her insights about long-period ecological change are collected in her new book, A STATE OF CHANGE: Forgotten Landscapes of California.
Like many regions, California is busy restoring portions of the natural environment to previous conditions—native meadows, riparian woodlands, salt marshes, old-growth forests, along with the animals that used to populate them. But there is no static past to restore TO. With Cunningham’s guidance we can choose to restore to a particular period: say, before the white invasion; or, during the Medieval Warm Period; or, before the human invasion; or, during the Ice Ages. With her inspiration, we can begin to envisage the ecological changes coming over the next 10,000 years.
Published on Wednesday, September 21st, 02011 by Austin Brown
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!
Published on Friday, September 16th, 02011 by Stewart Brand
To acquire “the meta-skill of acquiring skills,” Ferriss recommends approaching any subject with some contrarian analysis: “What if I try the opposite of best practices?” Some conventional wisdom—”children learn languages faster than adults” (no they don’t)—can be discarded. Some conventional techniques can be accelerated radically. For instance, don’t study Italian in class for a year before your big Italy trip; just book your flight a week early and spend that week cramming the language where it’s spoken. You can be fluent in any language with mastery of just 1,200 words.
That’s what Ferriss calls the “minimum effective dose” for learning a language. The equivalent with any skill or goal is worth identifying. A regular 5 minutes of kettlebell swinging can tone the body rapidly; 30 grams of protein within 30 minutes of waking makes your slow-carb diet effective; just 20,000 “early evangelists” for your book in its first 2 weeks guarantees it becomes a best seller.
With any skill, “solve for extremes and anomalies.” Look at who’s best and how they do it, but especially look for those who are surprisingly good—the wispy girl who can deadlift 405 pounds—because they’re doing it with technique rather than genes, and technique is learnable.
How do you manage the self-discipline to bear down on learning a skill? Ferriss suggests you begin by treating your new regime as a trial (vowing permanence can be discouraging)— give it 2 weeks or 5 serious sessions. By that point early rewards from the discipline will keep you going. You have to measure to detect the rewards (“What gets measured gets managed”–Peter Drucker), and score-keeping lets you make your progress a competitive game with others—which becomes its own motivation. Make public bets about your specific goals, where you’ll pay painfully if you fail. “Loss aversion” is a surprisingly powerful incentive.
You can get profound effects in an amazingly short time, Ferriss concluded. “Doing the unthinkable is easier than you think.”
PS: A collection of all of these summaries of the SALT talks is available on the Kindle for $3. Foreword by Brian Eno.
Published on Thursday, September 15th, 02011 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.
Published on Friday, August 12th, 02011 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.
Published on Tuesday, August 9th, 02011 by Danielle Engelman
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.
Ideas about Long-term Thinking.
The Long Now Foundation - Fostering Long-term Responsibility - est. 01996.