The work of Stewart Brand, founding editor of Whole Earth Catalog and Long Now President, is featured in Access to Tools: Publications from the Whole Earth Catalog, 1968 – 1974 at New York City’s Museum of Modern Art through July 26th.

In 1968, Stewart Brand founded an alternative information service and distribution system within a single publication, called the Whole Earth Catalog. Influenced by the work of Buckminster Fuller, the catalog developed into an extensive reference tool for designing the environment, living spaces, and new media practices. In sections titled “Understanding Whole Systems,” “Shelter and Land Use,” “Communications,” “Community,” and “Nomadics,” the catalog publicized a compendium of useful resources, with a primary focus on books. Drawing from the holdings of the MoMA Library, this exhibition surveys many of these publications and gives a history of the catalog itself.

The New York Times says of the exhibition:

So maybe the time is ripe for a deep and wide reconsideration of the Whole Earth vision. In its generous embrace of theory and practice and its range from the cosmic to the mundane it epitomized the best impulses of American democracy. It was and still might be a great tool for thinking about how to rehabilitate our sadly distressed world.

Much of the show can be viewed on the companion exhibition site.

Nearly 400 bird species can be found in the San Francisco Bay Area. In the state of California, there are more than 600 species. North America has 2,000. Zooming all of the way out, the earth is home to over 10,000 bird species. Many bird enthusiasts focus their attention on local avian populations–but, of course, the term ‘local’ is relative. Mike Bergin is the founder of 10,000 Birds and his approach is global in scope.

There are approximately 10,000 bird species on this beautiful planet. Here at 10,000 Birds we expect to not only see but eventually photograph or write about every single one! (We’ll get there eventually…)

Anyway, we have a serious interest in photography to go with our interest in birds and bird identification. We’ve consequently amassed a rather large collection of photos, and rather than hide them away on our hard-drives we’ve decided that you may like to see them instead.

Few people are this truly holistic in their endeavors, but technology is increasing the plausibility of such earth-wide projects. An earlier post on this blog featured two efforts that would make good company for 10,000 Birds: the Encyclopedia of Life and International Barcode of Life. The Encyclopedia of Life seeks to create a single database with organized and concise information about every life form on the planet. The International Barcode of Life champions an efficient method of identifying species through DNA sequencing.

As massively parallel sequencing technologies become more available, the barcode library will enable sophisticated environmental monitoring that uses living organisms as integrators of environmental change and as early warnings of damage. Large-scale, automated monitoring of species presence and abundance in the world’s oceans, inland waters, agro-ecosystems, and plantations will soon be routine.

Open collaboration and creative technologies provide opportunities for people to collectively analyze vast amounts of information, and through these efforts we get clearer glimpses of the big picture, the Big Here. 10,000 Birds is stitching their big picture out of a heck of a lot of smaller ones, and their glimpse of this beautiful hummingbird in Ecuador is lovely.

Gravity Probe B is a satellite that, since 02004, has been conducting an experiment first conceived half a century ago with the goal of testing a theory developed another half-century before that.

Indeed, some of the predictions to come out of Albert Einstein’s Theory of Relativity have taken until now – a century later – to test. Nonetheless, frame dragging has been observed and confirmed.

Wondering what took so long? The New York Times explains that the theory had largely been supported by observations of the planets, the Moon and other satellites, but that direct observation of such a subtle effect required some of the most sensitive instruments and precisely machines objects in history.

To measure these minuscule warps in the very fabric of spacetime, Gravity Probe B used the world’s most perfect gyroscopes, monitored by the most precise gyro-monitors, kept directly oriented to a ‘guide-star’ using a telescope and an Attitude and Translation Control system, all maintained at exactly -455.5 degrees F for 16 months while it orbited the earth in a 400-mile high polar orbit.

More on the gyroscopes:

To measure the minuscule angles predicted by Einstein’s theory, the GP-B team needed to build a near-perfect gyroscope—one whose spin axis would not drift away from its starting point by more than one hundred-billionth of a degree each hour that it was spinning. By comparison, the spin-axis drift in the most sophisticated Earth-based gyroscopes, found in high-tech aircraft and nuclear submarines, is seven orders of magnitude (more than ten million times) greater than GP-B could allow.

The rest of the satellite and it’s mission are documented in luxurious detail on the project’s website.

10,000 years ago what was walking on the land you are on right now?  It turns out in a recent find that a mammoth was in Monterey county on the California coastline ten millennia ago. As is frequently the case, the bones were revealed while tilling agricultural land for the planting season. Mark Hylkema, Santa Cruz District archaeologist for the state Department of Parks, spoke with Kevin Howe of the Monterey County Herald about the find, which could indicate that more fossils might be buried in the area.

Hylkema described teeth, tusks and bones as still porous and in good condition

“There were three types of bone conditions noted,” Hylkema reported. “Fragments of ivory tusk, regular looking bone fragments and some that were discolored as though charred or lithified.”

If the bones are charred, he said, it could indicate human association with the remains. Some bone fragments were taken for radiometric tests to determine how old they are.

…The soil level and composition in which they were found indicates that the mammoth died 10,000 to 25,000 years ago, Hylkema said.

Another exciting collection of Ice Age fossils was uncovered last fall at the site of a popular ski resort in the Colorado Rockies. You can see some great photographs from that discovery on the National Geographic website.

“High dwellings are the peace and harmony of our descendants,” the stone slab reads. “Remember the calamity of the great tsunamis. Do not build any homes below this point.”

Jay Alabaster of the AP reports that hundreds of stone markers dot the coastlines of Japan. The oldest of these markers appears to be near 600 years old.

They carry warnings of tsunamis past and instruct readers to get to high ground after earthquakes. Some are even placed at high-water marks to indicate the extent of particular tsunami events.

The village of Aneyoshi grew up as a collection of homes built uphill of some of the markers specifically to be safe. Residents are raised knowing of the stones and their meaning.

“Everybody here knows about the markers. We studied them in school,” said Yuto Kimura, 12, who guided a recent visitor to one near his home. “When the tsunami came, my mom got me from school and then the whole village climbed to higher ground.”

There are those who can recall the 1960 tsunami caused by an earthquake in Chile, but the stone markers form a deeper cultural memory, representing many generations of life in a disaster-prone area and lessons learned from it. “Crude” though they may be, perhaps they provide a useful example for memorializing the recent disaster and for durably preserving its lessons for future generations.

New Scientist recently got in touch with a series of experts to discuss a thought experiment they call Civilization 2.0 – If we had the chance to redesign civilization from the ground up, with all our current knowledge (and the agreement of everyone in the world), how would we do it?

Suppose we could try again. Imagine that Civilisation 1.0 evaporated tomorrow, leaving us with unlimited manpower, a willing populace and – most important – all the knowledge we’ve accumulated about what works, what doesn’t, and how we might avoid the errors we got locked into last time. If you had the chance to build Civilisation 2.0 from scratch, what would you do differently?

They spoke with Geoffrey West (a future SALT speaker) about appropriate size and scale of cities, noting that there seem to be some very predictable patterns to the way life in cities changes as they grow. Apparently many things increase at a steady 15% with each doubling in population of city: energy and resource efficiency, income, wealth, colleges, but also crime, disease and even average walking speed.

In talking to Christopher Flavin and Mark Delucchi, they come to the conclusion that denser, transit-oriented cities (rather than sprawling suburbs) will be important. A combination of top-down planning would establish hubs near fresh water and other useful resources, link them into a large-scale transit system, and then hand over the local design and details to residents. Carlo Ratti is particularly keen on this local-scale wiki-style planning and hopes that in Civilization 2.0, residents will have much more knowledge and influence, thanks to technology, over the planning decisions immediately affecting them.

This local/distributed paradigm also informs their approach to energy – Lena Hansen encourages a locally-producing renewable system for the sake of resilience and efficiency. Then they zoom out a little more and discuss ways that the cost of producing energy could be factored more realistically into the costs of materials and goods and ways that environmental quality and human happiness could better be accounted for in measures of economic well-being.

For governing our new, enlightened civilization, two sides are explored. The first perspective comes from sociologist Robin Dunbar, whose research has shown the upper cognitive limits of the human mind to know and recognize other people. Each person, he’s found, can only recall personal information and maintain a relationship with about 150 other people. Groups adhering to this limit can generally be governed through personal relationships rather than hierarchy and bureaucracy.

Paul Raskin takes a different approach: he proposes a newspaper published once per decade and suggests that the most recent edition’s headline would have to be about what he calls the ‘planetary phase’ of history. He hints at what some have called the ‘anthropocene,’ a geological epoch in which humanity is the major force in earth’s biosphere. Such broad, global effects, he explains, require broad, global control – not necessarily a single world government, but certain goals and values set and enforced on a planetary scale.

In the end, the article also explains that too specific or rigid a design opens civilization up to catastrophe in the face of climatic and ecological change. Historically, we’ve seen societies that run very efficiently in their given environment unable to adapt to changes to that environment and so some flexibility at the cost of efficiency will likely be, in the long-run, worth it.

The full article on New Scientist is available for the next week (if you are willing to go through the free registration), after which it will require a paying subscription. Above, you can find links to information on many of the experts they spoke with as well as the points each contributed to the scenario. Happy planning!

At a TEDx event at Caltech in January, the theme was Feynman’s Vision: The Next 50 Years:

TEDxCaltech was an unprecedented event that brought together innovators, explorers, teachers and learners for an exhilarating day of collaboration, conversation and celebration. We assembled a group of inventive thinkers and creative artists who are pushing the boundaries of their own disciplines. Throughout the day they introduced groundbreaking new ideas, shared inspired stories and gave us a glimpse at the technology of the future. Inspired by Caltech’s own Richard Feynman, Nobel laureate, iconoclast and visionary, the day was an exciting and entertaining intellectual adventure!

At the event, Long Now co-founder Danny Hillis, who worked with Dr. Feynman while developing The Connection Machine, reminisced about becoming friends with the famously eccentric professor and relayed a conversation they had shortly before Dr. Feynman passed away. (Also see Hillis’ essay on this story)

SETI Director Jill Tarter discussed in a 02005 blog post that we recently discovered the possibility of broadcasting humanity’s presence to the universe. SETI’s position for at least the next decade is that we’re not ready.

Any technology that is observable over interstellar distances cannot be more primitive than our own. After only 100 years of manipulating the electromagnetic spectrum, we find ourselves in the midst of an exponential explosion of technology. But it has taken us over 4.5 billion years of planetary and biological evolution to get to where we are today. If there is detectable technology out there, it is statistically improbable that their evolution and development will be fine-tuned to coincide precisely with our current emerging technological capabilities. They will be older, potentially billions of years older since the Milky Way Galaxy was around for at least five billion years before our solar system began to form.

In exploring some of the ways to make this decision, Tarter explains that communication across galactic distances will take protocols we can’t imagine and timescales we’re simply not seriously dealing with yet.

She searched Google and graphed the number of results she found for plans ranging between “The One Year Plan” to “The Two Hundred Thousand Year Plan.” As a point of reference, the green arrow just below 10,000 hits on Google represents the number of results she found when searching for her own name. Plans over one hundred years in scope were most often the result of science fiction and religion, though Y2K and nuclear waste had lead to some longer plans as well. (Long Now is in there right next to the 10,000-year Yucca Mountain plan.)

I did a quick Google Book N-gram viewer search on some of these terms over the last hundred years and found that during the late ’60s there was a peak in books discussing ‘x year plans’, the favorite being 10 year plans. ‘One year -’ and ‘hundred year’ plans show consistently, but few other plans registered at all.

Using data from the Atlas of North American English (ANAE) by William Labov, Sharon Ash, and Charles Boberg combined with his own research, linguist Rick Aschmann created the detailed map above to show regional dialects throughout North America.  One of the coolest features is that he’s linked over 600 YouTube videos to the map, so that clicking a region will take you to video clips of (mostly famous) people raised in that area so that you can hear a sample of the dialect.

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon have done some similar research, though they’re using social media – Twitter specifically – as the data source, rather than just to illustrate linguistic nuance. Jacob Eisenstein and his colleagues looked at 380,000 geo-tagged tweets recently and explored the geographical dialects represented within. They saw differences in the way people abbreviate words to fit the short medium and the slang terms they used in informal messaging and were able to create a statistical model from the variation they saw that could predict the location of a user to within about 300 miles based on the dialect used.

The existence of Twitter and other informal, microblogging platforms affords a newly accessible, low-cost source of data for linguistics researchers since they don’t require labor-intensive in-person interviews to uncover patterns of informal speech:

Studies of regional dialects traditionally have been based primarily on oral interviews, Eisenstein said, noting that written communication often is less reflective of regional influences because writing, even in blogs, tends to be formal and thus homogenized. But Twitter offers a new way of studying regional lexicon, he explained, because tweets are informal and conversational. Furthermore, people who tweet using mobile phones have the option of geotagging their messages with GPS coordinates.

- Carnegie Mellon University

Eisenstein also points out that the identifiable regional variation could be an indicator that the internet is less a force for homogenization than often thought.

The Georgetown University Round Table on Languages and Linguistics later this year will explore many ways in which these, “new worlds of words occasion innovative uses of language and new spaces for constructing identities, forming relationships, and expressing social meanings.” (GURT 2011)

So, expect to see plenty more research mining social media and remember to act normal online so you don’t throw off the results.

These Victorian infographics take a beautiful, hand-drawn approach to the presentation of various geographic and astronomical data.  The image above was published in 1854 and compares various mountains and river systems side-by-side.

Don’t miss the Tableau de L’Histoire Universelle, which represents nations and empires as rivers flowing through history and plenty more at BibliOdyssey.

(thanks to a new member Marianna!)