Here’s a great comic strip by Tom Gauld:

See also: Das Rad.

(Sent in by Mark Watkins, via BoingBoing)

Now and When: Installation detail for Proof by Margaret Tedesco & Matt Borruso

The San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery is hosting a series of conversations about time in conjunction with their current show Now and When. On Wednesday August 18th, Alexander Rose will join Jeannene Przyblyski of the San Francisco Bureau of Urban Secrets in a discussion of “linear and not so linear” approaches to time.

There are 30 seats available for this talk and they must be reserved by calling or emailing the SFAC Gallery (415.554.6080 or sfac.gallery@sfgov.org) no later than 24 hours prior to the event date.

The event will run from 6:30pm to 8:00pm and will be held in the SFAC Main Gallery at 401 Van Ness at McAllister inside the Veteran’s Building.

From the event website:

Curated and moderated by Gallery Assistant Shannon Green, these conversations will introduce the artists’ work in the exhibition and the guests’ demarcation of time in their own professions. As the events unfurl, the discussion will be opened up for audience participation. The aim of this programming is to make the art of Now and When and ideas of time more accessible and meaningful.

During his Seminar, Jesse Schell recommended a number of books and other resources that have informed his conception of the Gamepocalypse.  Here’s a list of the books for the curious:

• Authenticity, by James H. Gilmore and B. Joseph Pine II
• Finite and Infinite Games, by James P. Carse
• The Singularity is Near, by Ray Kurzweil
• The Innovator’s Dilemma, by Clayton M. Christensen
• The Rational Optimist, by Matt Ridley
• Good to Great, by Jim Collins
• Punished by Rewards, by Alfie Kohn

He also mentioned a movie called Frequently Asked Questions About Time Travel, a website called Couch to 5K, and plenty of other fascinating things.  Oh, he’s on twitter too: @jesseschell

“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.

Entitled “The Tenacious Buzz of Malaria” the article places malaria in a long term perspective:

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.

From low tech solutions like bed nets to high tech lasers that shoot mosquitoes in mid air, and many international programs against malaria and the development of a vaccine, humans continue to work to fight the disease. But as the article states, “We’ve all been underestimating malaria for millennia.”

Sonia Shah is the author of a newly published book, The Fever: How Malaria Has Ruled Humankind for 500,000 Years.

Photo credit: James Gathany, CDC

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).”

- Elise Boulding Interviewed by Julian Portilla — 2003

(forwarded to me by Stuart Silverstone)

Long Now’s Executive Director Alexander Rose will be presenting a live webinar on StimulusTV.com.  The broadcast is hosted by Steven Latham and will last about 30 minutes.  Registration is free and open to the public.

What will happen in the next 10,000 years?
Tuesday, June 29th, 02010
4:00 – 4:30 pm PST
StimulusTV.com

Beer is as old as civilization itself and Dogfish Head Craft Brewery is giving you a chance to try some of the oldest known brews.  Scientific American gives us this story on three ancient reconstituted recipes by Dogfish Head.  The unexpected fruit of molecular anthropology, these beer recipes come from chemical analyses of ancient pottery.

If you’ve a taste for vintage, there’s also a beer made with 45 million year old yeast that was harvested from a weevil trapped in fossilized amber!

For thousands of years emperors, clerics, nobles and kings all over the world have erected slabs of stone called stelae as markers to indicate a boundary, either phsyical or temporal.  They commemorate battles won, loved ones lost, borders, holocausts, and laws.  Some stelae have been vital sources of information on past societies; many still stand after millenia.

Outside the Everhart Museum in Scranton, four ceramic stelae have been erected by an artist named Jordan Taylor.  The four-ton blocks will sit in Nay Aug Park, marking the entrance to the museum, until they erode “and follow the watershed as far as the Chesapeake Bay, back to the lie of the land”.  Rather than a king’s accomplishment or a claimed territory, they mark the absence of boundary, the dissolution of moment and material into matter and spacetime.

“I look forward to watching the stelae from season to season, year to year. They are sentinel. Yet we too share that role. We will keep watch over them, bearing witness to their transformation from art back into the earth.”

- Cara A. Sutherland, Executive Director, Everhart Museum

From Craig et al., Can History teach us? A retrospective examination of long-term energy forecasts for the United States. Annu. Rev. Energy and Environment 27, 83(2002)

Stewart Brand sent in a piece by the Klimazweibel blog covered by Seekerblog.  It shows where the actual US energy consumption came in by 02000 vs the predictions from 01975.  It is interesting to see that we came in well below the lowest (read: most optimistic) prediction.  While the US still uses an amount of energy that would be unsustainable if adopted worldwide, it does look like all those energy efficiency programs that we started back in the seventies had a real impact…

Stewart Brand sent in this blog piece by Warren Senders about time scales.  A good read on how the human mind’s primary feature is now operating as a bug…

I’m not sanguine about our ability to solve the climate crisis — and it’s not because the monolithic forces of global capitalism won’t let us (although they’re not helping). It’s not because we’re too greedy and acquisitive (although we are). It’s not because things have progressed too far already for us to stop them (although they have).

It’s because we humans aren’t very good at thinking in different timescales. We’re basically monkeys, and we have monkey minds. Our species-wide ADD started out as a feature, but in our present situation, it’s a bug.

Senders goes on to list his 8 thoughts, some of which cross over territory covered in this blog and Long Now content in general, but he does a great job re-synthesizing it.  You can read his full article on his blog.