The Economist has a nice piece on the future of forcasting. Good reading for the upcoming seminar with Paul Saffo and later with Nassim Taleb. The article does a good job pointing out the value of certain types of short-termism: The next rule is: think short-term. An American practitioner, Faith Popcorn, showed the way with […]

Here at Long Now we are now experimenting with new ways of using stone in the Clock after being introduced to Stuart Kendall and Jason Clausen, the stone crafters of Seattle Solstice. They have built new machines to cut stone in ways not before possible. Their work in large stone is machined to tolerances usually. . .   Read More

A lifelog, or lifeblog, is an attempt to fully document every second, every action, every interaction, every keystroke, every conversation of one’s life. In this sense it is quantitative as it accumulates data about a person’s daily activities. But among lifeloggers there is a subgroup of photo lifeloggers who are merely content to photographicly record […]

We have been researching long lasting magnetic properties for use in the Clock of the Long Now. Magnetite or lodestone is a naturally occurring magnetic material that has been known for at least two millennia. These materials have held their magnetism even over geologic time scales which makes them interesting for potential use in the […]

The New York Times and the Hollywood Reporter both have recently written about a new 74-page report from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences called “The Digital Dilemma: Strategic Issues in Archiving and Accessing Digital Motion Picture Materials” (not yet online).

The paper addresses a perennial Long Now concern: the ephemeral nature. . .   Read More

Roger Cadenhead over at the Workbench wrote up his analysis of one of our Long Bets yesterday that is up for review (thanks to Chris Anderson for sending this in). Cory Doctorow over at BoingBoing also did a nice write up. We here at Long Bets will be making our own analysis of course, but […]

This BBC lecture was posted by Edge.org and I thought it would be a good preparation for our upcoming February 25th talk by Craig Venter. Some excerpts:
To begin the process of change we need to start with our children by teaching them in place of memorization, to explore, challenge, and problem solve in. . .   Read More

Above is the first known image ever taken from space and our first image of the really ‘big here’. It was shot from a captured German V2 rocket launched after WWII from White Sands missile range. You can find more about the effort in this excellent article in Air & Space magazine (also the really. . .   Read More

Over 50 years ago the French scientist Allais observed:
“During the total eclipses of the sun on June 30, 1954, and October 22, 1959, quite analogous deviations of the plane of oscillation of the paraconical pendulum were observed…” – Maurice Allais, 1988 Nobel autobiographical lecture.
And back in 01999 NASA reproduced the experiment and the effect. . .   Read More

Artibodies

Art, like the antibodies in our immune system, creates alien forces in service of the whole. It anticipates threats and models them. It is a diversity agent.

Two forms of that process were explained and shown by Ippolito and Blais: perversion, and execution.

One example of the perverse is the software called “Shredder” that. . .   Read More