Catastrophic drought is coming back There are two kinds of historians, Brian Fagan says, parachutists and truffle hunters. Parachutists command an overview of the landscape, while truffle hunters dig deeply to uncover marvelous treasures. Fagan is a parachutist. In his talk Fagan emphasized a wide view of human history as it unrolls in the landscape…  Read More

The BBC is reporting on a site in Peru known as the Thirteen Towers. The thirteen notches line up with where the sun sets throughout the year. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/6408231.stm

As reported by Engaget, Sandisk is rumored to be developing 100 year archival memory cards… These may be just the thing for those family photos languishing on your ever detiorating CDRs.

On February 24th the Rosetta spacecraft successfully completed its somewhat hairy slingshot around Mars with a copy of our Rosetta Disk on board. More here: http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/Rosetta/ Here is agreat photo forwarded by Stewart Brand shot from Rosetta as it swung by Mars.

It’s a bit rare that we see such clear and succinct predictions. These three by Ari Emanuel were published at the Huffington Post and were forwarded to me by Paul Saffo: I have three predictions to make this morning: 1) John McCain will not be the Republican Party’s nominee. 2) Hillary Clinton will not be…  Read More

Nice piece by BBC on the latest work on the Antikythera Mechanism. This example of a 2000 year old astronomical computer being reconstructed out of relics from the bottom of the mediterranean is very encouraging for our Clock project… http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/6191462.stm

Non-Singularity scenarios Vinge began by declaring that he still believes that a Singularity event in the next few decades is the most likely outcome— meaning that self-accelerating technologies will speed up to the point of so profound a transformation that the other side of it is unknowable. And this transformation will be driven by Artifical…  Read More

Ignore confident forecasters “What is it about politics that makes people so dumb?” From his perspective as a pyschology researcher, Philip Tetlock watched political advisors on the left and the right make bizarre rationalizations about their wrong predictions at the time of the rise of Gorbachev in the 1980s and the eventual collapse of the…  Read More

A piece in Forbes Magazine Publish And Perish Elisabeth Eaves, 12.01.06, 12:00 PM ET Nothing is safe. Not your e-mails, digital photos or Word files. Not old newspapers or books. When it comes to storing information, everything will disappear into digital obsolescence or crumble to dust. Even White House e-mails, important blueprints and influential works…  Read More

2nd Life takes off What is real life coming to owe digital life? After a couple years in the flat part of exponential growth, the steep part is now arriving for the massive multi-player online world construction kit called “Second Life.” With 1.7 million accounts, membership in “Second Life” is growing by 20,000 per day….  Read More