The Long Now Blog » The Big Here

Warning: Your reality is out of date

Alexander Rose — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 22:36:24 +0000

This artist rendering provided by the European South Observatory shows some of the 32 new planets astronomers found outside our solar system.

This article was sent in by Samuel Arbesman Research Fellow in Health Care Policy at Harvard Medical School. It was originally printed in the Boston Globe.

When people think of knowledge, they generally think of two sorts of facts: facts that don’t change, like the height of Mount Everest or the capital of the United States, and facts that fluctuate constantly, like the temperature or the stock market close.

But in between there is a third kind: facts that change slowly. These are facts which we tend to view as fixed, but which shift over the course of a lifetime. For example: What is Earth’s population? I remember learning 6 billion, and some of you might even have learned 5 billion. Well, it turns out it’s about 6.8 billion.

Or, imagine you are considering relocating to another city. Not recognizing the slow change in the economic fortunes of various metropolitan areas, you immediately dismiss certain cities. For example, Pittsburgh, a city in the core of the historic Rust Belt of the United States, was for a long time considered to be something of a city to avoid. But recently, its economic fortunes have changed, swapping steel mills for technology, with its job growth ranked sixth in the entire United States.

These slow-changing facts are what I term “mesofacts.” Mesofacts are the facts that change neither too quickly nor too slowly, that lie in this difficult-to-comprehend middle, or meso-, scale. Often, we learn these in school when young and hold onto them, even after they change. For example, if, as a baby boomer, you learned high school chemistry in 1970, and then, as we all are apt to do, did not take care to brush up on your chemistry periodically, you would not realize that there are 12 new elements in the Periodic Table. Over a tenth of the elements have been discovered since you graduated high school! While this might not affect your daily life, it is astonishing and a bit humbling.

For these kinds of facts, the analogy of how to boil a frog is apt: Change the temperature quickly, and the frog jumps out of the pot. But slowly increase the temperature, and the frog doesn’t realize that things are getting warmer, until it’s been boiled. So, too, is it with humans and how we process information. We recognize rapid change, whether it’s as simple as a fast-moving object or living with the knowledge that humans have walked on the moon. But anything short of large-scale rapid change is often ignored. This is the reason we continue to write the wrong year during the first days of January.

Our schools are biased against mesofacts. The arc of our educational system is to be treated as little generalists when children, absorbing bits of knowledge about everything from biology to social studies to geology. But then, as we grow older, we are encouraged to specialize. This might have been useful in decades past, but in our increasingly fast-paced and interdisciplinary world, lacking an even approximate knowledge of our surroundings is unwise.

Updating your mesofacts can change how you think about the world. Do you know the percentage of people in the world who use mobile phones? In 1997, the answer was 4 percent. By 2007, it was nearly 50 percent. The fraction of people who are mobile phone users is the kind of fact you might read in a magazine and quote at a cocktail party. But years later the number you would be quoting would not just be inaccurate, it would be seriously wrong. The difference between a tiny fraction of the world and half the globe is startling, and completely changes our view on global interconnectivity.

Mesofacts can also be fun. Let’s focus for a moment on some mesofacts that can be of vital importance if you’re a child, or parent of a child: those about dinosaurs. Just a few decades ago, dinosaurs were thought to be cold-blooded, slow-witted lizards that walked with their legs splayed out beside them. Now, scientists think that many dinosaurs were warm-blooded and fast-moving creatures. And they even had feathers! Just a few weeks ago we learned about the color patterns of dinosaurs (stripes! with orange tufts!). These facts might not affect how you live your life, but then again, you’re probably not 6 years old. There is another mesofact that is unlikely to affect your daily routine, but might win you a bar bet: the number of planets known outside the solar system. After the first extrasolar planet around an ordinary star made headlines back in 1995, most people stopped paying attention. Well, the number of extrasolar planets is currently over 400. Know this, and the next round won’t be on you.

The fact that the world changes rapidly is exciting, but everyone knows about that. There is much change that is neither fast nor momentous, but no less breathtaking.

Samuel Arbesman is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Health Care Policy at Harvard Medical School. He is a regular contributor to Ideas. He has started a new website devoted to mesofacts, which can be found at mesofacts.org.

A History of the Sky

Austin Brown — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 23:18:46 +0000

Art project in progress A History of the Sky features lots and lots of time-lapse videos of the sky that are synchronized so that they’re all showing the same time of day. Ken Murphy is the artist that created it and he hopes to one day manifest all the data he’s collecting as a video installation that’s always displaying the skies of the last 365 days. The project was recently featured at the Exploratorium, but it’s still in a need of a home for the installation.

Here’s how it works.

If you’d like to see an installation in person, here are several upcoming opportunities:

Maker Faire UK, at the Life Science Centre Planetarium, Newcastle UK: March 13-14, 2010
Google I/O Conference After Hours Party, at Moscone West, San Francisco: May 19, 2010
Bay Area Maker Faire, at the San Mateo County Event Center: May 22-23, 2010

Resetting the Zero Point of Civilization

Alexander Rose — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 11:55:18 +0000

A pillar at the Gobekli Tepe temple near Sanliurfa, Turkey. (photo: Berthold Steinhilber/Laif-Redux)

The good folks at Atlas Obscura pointed me to this fantastic story on an archaeological find near the Syrian Border in Turkey that pushes back the date of great stonework, and in effect the beginning of known civilization, by many millennia. (snippet below)

Standing on the hill at dawn, overseeing a team of 40 Kurdish diggers, the German-born archeologist waves a hand over his discovery here, a revolution in the story of human origins. Schmidt has uncovered a vast and beautiful temple complex, a structure so ancient that it may be the very first thing human beings ever built. The site isn’t just old, it redefines old: the temple was built 11,500 years ago—a staggering 7,000 years before the Great Pyramid, and more than 6,000 years before Stonehenge first took shape. The ruins are so early that they predate villages, pottery, domesticated animals, and even agriculture—the first embers of civilization. In fact, Schmidt thinks the temple itself, built after the end of the last Ice Age by hunter-gatherers, became that ember—the spark that launched mankind toward farming, urban life, and all that followed.

Global Lives Project Opening Celebration

Austin Brown — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 20:35:53 +0000

Dedicated to bringing together video documentation of the daily lives of disparate global citizens, the Global Lives Project celebrates the opening of its first installation on February 26th at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. This opening is sponsored in part by the Long Now Foundation through a grant from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.

The Global Lives Project’s World Premiere installation will be on view at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts from February 26 – June 20, 2010! The exhibit is part of an artist residency that will evolve over four months. We will be showing, for the first time ever, our series of ten 24-hour videos of daily life from around the planet.

Join Global Lives, Long Now and the YBCA for the opening night celebration on February 26th from 7:30pm to 11:30pm. There will be a cash bar and music from San Franciscans Kid Kameleon, Chief Boima, and Tinker. Global Lives producers and directors will be there to discuss the project.

The event is free, but you’ll want to RSVP so you can be sure to get in!

The Long Zoom of Social Transformation

Stuart Candy — Sat, 12 Dec 2009 23:27:21 +0000

You’ve seen Seattle-based artist Chris Jordan’s work before — at this very blog, for instance. Aside from the unmistakable green thread of ecologically conscientious, socially critical themes running through it, a signature element is his use of scale: a pattern that looks one way at a distance is revealed as something else up close. Often the near and far perspectives comment on each other.

Below appears a set of images of a 2009 work called “E Pluribus Unum” — “Out of many, one” (an important U.S. motto).

Jordan’s website explains:

This large scale mandala depicts the names of one million organizations around the world that are devoted to peace, environmental stewardship, social justice, and the preservation of diverse and indigenous culture.

The actual number of such organizations is unknown, but Paul Hawken’s “Blessed Unrest” project estimates the number at somewhere between one and two million, and growing. If the lines in this piece were straightened out, they would make an unbroken line of names, in a ten point font, twenty seven miles long.

Of course, to read the statistics is one thing; actually to image them is another. This remarkable visualisation helps bring home the scale of social transformation, at the institutional level, which we are currently undergoing.

Paul Hawken’s Seminar About Long-term Thinking that deals with the themes of Blessed Unrest can be found here.

[Images: Chris Jordan]

Bristlecone Pines Feeling Rushed

Austin Brown — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 00:57:57 +0000

Global warming seems to be speeding up the growth of the longest living organisms we know of. Bristlecone pines can live for almost 5,000 years and the information stored in the growth of their rings is a treasure trove of climate data. Because their growth is a function of the weather, analyzing the size of the rings they develop each year can tell us what that period’s climate was like.

At an elevation of 12,000 feet, where almost no rain falls, temperature is the driving influence on tree growth, while lower down, rainfall is the strongest factor in tree growth, Salzer said in an interview.

Matthew Salzer, Malcolm K. Hughes and a team of dendrochronologists from the University of Arizona have just published a paper in which they explain that the outermost rings of Bristlecones – the most recent ones – tend to be significantly larger than most of the earlier ones. In the last 50 years, the trees have been growing faster than they did in the previous 3,700.

Salzer has done work on Mt. Washington for his studies and shared data with Long Now. The information from the trees on the future Clock site has provided Long Now with a helpful understanding of the area’s climate dating back several thousand years.

The current study is an indication that climate change is affecting these trees and the delicate ecosystems that support them. This high-altitude temperature change has significance for more than the Bristlecones and the local environment, however. The mountains this phenomenon is documented in are an important source of snowmelt for much of California and Nevada:

Hughes said that increasing temperatures high in the mountains could have significant effects elsewhere. In many areas of the western U.S., mountains are a key source of water for farms and urban areas at lower elevations.

“If the snow melts earlier, the mountains won’t be able to hold onto water for as long,” Hughes said. “They won’t be as effective as water towers for us.”

Rosetta’s Final Flyby

Austin Brown — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 21:22:41 +0000

The European Space Agency’s Rosetta probe made its final flyby of the Earth on Friday in order to fling itself off towards its target: Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko.

Launched in 02004, Rosetta has made several planetary flybys in order to gain the velocity necessary to approach and eventually orbit the comet so that a small landing craft can touchdown upon and sample some of the comet’s material. Scientists hope that a better understanding of the make-up of a comet will be like a key that will unlock many secrets about the formation of the planets and the development of our solar system.

Included on the craft is one of the early Rosetta Disks produced by Long Now. The highly durable, format-independent linguistic archive will survive as long as the craft continues to orbit Comet 67P. Unlike the Voyager Disks, this terrestrial artifact will remain in our solar system orbiting the comet, which is orbiting the Sun and will continue to do so until it runs into something (which could be quite a while).

You can see lots of great photos and amazing animations on the Rosetta blog, run by the ESA. In addition, there was a lovely little piece in the Guardian highlighting the mission’s long-term nature:

The scientific pay-off from Rosetta could be huge. But contemplate the generosity of vision that made the mission possible. Some of those who lobbied for Rosetta will have died by the time the first results are delivered. Some young scientists who will build their careers on the data from Rosetta were not born when the mission was conceived. If, as Harold Wilson famously observed, a week is a long time in politics, Rosetta is a reminder that we can also think on a celestial timescale.

Quantum to Cosmos Festival

Austin Brown — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 19:54:42 +0000

The Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics is holding its 10th anniversary Quantum to Cosmos Festival this month in Waterloo, Ontario. The 10 day extravaganza has the theme this year of “Ideas for the Future” and seeks to “take a global audience from the strange world of subatomic particles to the outer frontiers of the universe.”

They’ve got lots of great lectures that are free to view online, including several by speakers in our seminar series:

Stewart Brand will be on The Agenda with Steve Paikin Friday night to discuss science’s evolving role in society and on Saturday he’ll be giving his own lecture on his Ecopragmatist Manifesto, Whole Earth Discipline.
Peter Diamandis spoke on Sunday about the X Prize Foundation.
Neal Stephenson spoke with Lee Smolin and Jaron Lanier about using fiction as a window into science and he’ll be joining Tuesday night’s panel on The Agenda with Steve Paikin to discuss our increasingly wired lives.

There are many other scientists and thinkers on the schedule, and each of these lectures will become available online shortly after the live event, so keep checking back on the full list to see what’s new. (A play button will appear on the icon for each event once the video is released.)

Observational Time with John Goodman

Simone Davalos — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 21:55:38 +0000

John Goodman is an engineer that admires intuition, a reluctant artist who enjoys elegant approximations. His best known creation,
The Annosphere, was recently showcased at the Cambridge Science Festival in Massachusetts, where he lives and works.

The Annosphere tells time, but more usefully, it presents time. It shows you sunrise and sunset, the start of spring and the winter solstice. It lets you see on your desk what you can’t see in the world: the steady pace of time, the subtle day to day changes in sunlight and shadow, the cycles that run through each year.

The Annosphere is emblematic of what Mr. Goodman calls an intuitive grasp of time – time that is told by instinct, season and cultural benchmark, rather than being parceled out in minutes and seconds. He tells an illustrative story: Once, in a hotel in Europe, he noticed that the shower knob was demarcated in degree readings. He got to musing on the fact that he had no idea, in degrees, how hot he liked his shower. “The shower had degree readings on the knob, but who knows the exact temperature they like their shower? The right way to set a shower is where it’s comfortable, the right way to measure time is the same.”

“Can you wake yourself up at a specific time without an alarm clock?” He adds, “It’s easy!”

Mr. Goodman once told his wife to set her alarm for 8:15, and he would wake her up at 8am. For him, time is just as much an art of observation as it is ticking off minutes and seconds. Through having a grasp on what the room looked like at certain times of day, coupled with knowing things like his own sleep habits and other cues for his sense of timing, he was able, much to his wife’s disbelief, to get her to work on time without the use of the alarm clock.

He makes a note of other intuitive methods for judging time – there is apocryphal story that states the day that farmers let the boars and sows breed, they would notch their fingernails at the point they emerged from their skin. When the notch had grown all the way out, the sow was ready to give birth. Likewise, cultural celebrations such as the lunar new year and mid-autumn festivals encourage people to think about the changing points of the year, and prepare mentally and physically.

After all this explanation of gut feeling for time and representing it in mechanical form, the irony that lies with the construction of the Annosphere is the fact that Mr. Goodman must use, and enjoys using, highly precise machinery to build something whose measurements are, at best, approximate. Sometimes, the machines he uses to build the end result are far more complex than the Annosphere itself. To Goodman, “The practice is a meditation.”

Also meditative is watching the Annosphere perform its calculations, which, says Goodman, is also a part of the process – “Writing down the instructions for a thing is not as easy as seeing the thing go – people should be able to interpret the machine on their own.” Like the Clock Of The Long Now, the Annosphere is an elegant bridge between the natural and the mechanical; a reminder of an inherent human ability that is often overlooked in a world of rush hours, work schedules and carefully boxed out minutes and seconds.

Wheel of Stars

Austin Brown — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 17:52:22 +0000

Via BoingBoing this morning comes a wonderful ambient music generating clock of the stars. Jim Bumgardner created this piece and explains it thusly:

To make this, I downloaded public data from Hipparcos, a satellite launched by the European Space Agency in 1989 that accurately measured over a hundred thousand stars. The data I downloaded contains position, parallax, magnitude, and color information, among other things.

I used this information to plot the brightest stars, and cause them to revolve about Polaris (the North Star) very slowly, as the stars appear to do. Like the night sky, this is a sidereal time clock — it takes nearly 24 hours for the stars to fully rotate. You’ll notice some familiar constellations, such as the Big Dipper in there. As the stars cross zero and 180 degrees, indicated by the center line, the clock plays an individual note, or chime for each star. The pitch of the chime is based on the star’s BV measurement (which roughly corresponds to color or temperature). The volume is based on the star’s magnitude, or apparent brightness, and the stereo panning is based on the position on the screen (use headphones to hear it better).

Enjoy!

Oldest Living Things in The World

Kevin Kelly — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 00:37:37 +0000

Besides the canonical Bristlecone Pine, there are many other organism on earth that will outlive you. Photographer Rachel Sussman has been traveling around the world to find and photograph them. I’m surprised by the number and variety of long-lived organisms. I very much like that she includes the low lifes — lichen and so forth. You can keep up with her investigations with her intelligent blog.

Atlas Obscura

Alexander Rose — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 11:16:53 +0000

Kent Corbell sends in this wonderful website, the Atlas Obscura. A crowd-sourced, yet curated collection of the worlds most wondrous treasures. As a collector of such places I was amazed to find many many new sites to me. Including a clock museum in Austria that apparently has a 8820 year clock, a site in the wilds of north east India that has bridges made of living tree roots, and a 92 foot tall aeolian wind harp nearly in my back yard… amazing.

650 Million Years in 1.2 Minutes

Kevin Kelly — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 17:09:02 +0000

This ultra time-lapse simulation of tectonic drift shows how dynamic our home planet it. The clip portrays the most recent 400 million-year geological history of the continents of Earth, and a prediction of its next 250 million years, all in 70 seconds. I love the way New York comes crashing into London in the far future. (Thanks, Stewart Brand)

The Long Book

Kevin Kelly — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 18:39:16 +0000

Good things can be done over long times. Oxford University, with its multi-century history and perspective, is one of the few institutions to support very long-term projects. Oxford University Press will this year release a book that has taken almost 45 years to finish. It’s the world’s largest thesaurus — and includes almost the entire vocabulary of English. The project was begun in 1965. (Thanks, Joe Stirt)

According to the BBC report:

The work was nearly destroyed in a fire in 1978, but despite the building being gutted, a metal filing cabinet protected the files. A spokesman said the final tome would contain over 230,000 categories with 800,000 meanings. The thesaurus was nearly completed in 1980, but the team decided to include words from updated versions of the Oxford English Dictionary. This added almost 30 years more work to the project.

One wonders what other kinds of things could we do if we were willing to devote half a century to it?

According to Oxford U Press the book features:

A unique thesaurus resource – the very first historical thesaurus to be compiled for any of the world’s languages
The largest thesaurus resource in the world, covering more than 920,000 words and meanings from Old English to the present day based on the Oxford English Dictionary
Synonyms listed with dates of first recorded use in English, in chronological order, with earliest synonyms first
Uses a thematic system of classification, with synonyms and related words forming part of a detailed semantic hierarchy
Comprehensive index enables complete cross-referencing of nearly one million words and meanings
Contains a comprehensive sense inventory of Old English
Includes a free fold-out colour chart which shows the top levels of the classification structure

You can preorder the “Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary: With Additional Material from A Thesaurus of Old English” at Amazon for $316.

Galactic Center Rising

Kevin Kelly — Mon, 18 May 2009 22:17:18 +0000

A shift in time can shift our perspective, which is why time lapse photography can be so powerful. Here is a simple time lapse of the night sky, using a wide-angle lens. You get a Big Here/Long Now experience.

But the Canon 5D used to capture this was modified by replacing the standard infrared filter that normally ships inside the camera (which also block out the deep reds) with a special filter to permit near infrared photography. Thus the reds you see here that most cameras won’t capture. You can buy fully modified Canon 5D cameras, ready for astrophotography, from here.

Here are the technical specifics by William Castleman:

The time-lapse sequence was taken with the simplest equipment that I brought to the star party. I put the Canon EOS-5D (AA screen modified to record hydrogen alpha at 656 nm) with an EF 15mm f/2.8 lens on a weighted tripod. Exposures were 20 seconds at f/2.8 ISO 1600 followed by 40 second interval. Exposures were controlled by an interval timer shutter release (Canon TC80N3). Power was provided by a Hutech EOS203 12v power adapter run off a 12v deep cycle battery. Large jpg files shot in custom white balance were batch processed in Photoshop (levels, curves, contrast, Noise Ninja noise reduction, resize) and assembled in Quicktime Pro. Editing/assembly was with Sony Vegas Movie Studio 9.