Lives of San Francisco
A Summary by Stewart Brand

“You are the soundtrack,” Prelinger told the capacity audience at the Herbst Theater, and they responded to his mostly silent archival films by calling out locations, questions, comments, and jokes.

They saw footage of a 1941 Market Street parade of allies—floats representing Malta, Russia, France. . .   Read More

In the wake of the crumbling Yahoo! behemoth and the clamor of mass Delicious data dumps, it’s worthwhile to stop and ask ourselves just how “archived” is the data that we create and share in these free hosting sites? What kind of promises do these sites make to preserve our information and to care about […]

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After his SALT talk for Long Now called Six Easy Steps to Avert the Collapse of Civilization, David Eagleman mentioned his interest in writing an entire book on the subject. Kevin Kelly suggested he make it an iPad book, though they both acknowledged they didn’t really know what that meant at the time. Eagleman. . .   Read More

Quotes related to long-term thinking. Have a favorite quote? Share it with us in comments. “We’ve had a loss of the sense of the frontier. We have to reclaim that.” – Peter Thiel

This is my hands-down favorite clock for the iPad, and could well be the coolest astronomic/civil clock I’ve ever seen: http://emeraldsequoia.com/eo/ Emerald Observatory has everything a time geek could ever want, plus everything an astro geek would want, all in a stunningly elegant interface. [decription below from Emerald] Emerald Observatory displays a wealth of astronomical […]

John Rennie over at IEEE Spectrum has an excellent article on Ray Kurzweil’s 108 predictions for 02009 from his book Age of Spiritual Machines.  Ray Kurzweil is an avid and fearless predictor who also logged the first of our Long Bets with Mitch Kapor.  I think it is great that people are taking the. . .   Read More

Quotes related to long-term thinking. Have a favorite quote? Share it with us in comments. “Anything worth doing is worth doing slowly” – Mae West

Ask Media Productions created this report on the San Francisco Fire Department’s unique ladder shop. While most cities have moved on to lighter, less-expensive aluminum ladders, San Francisco’s tight, windy streets lined with electric bus-lines demand sturdy, non-conductive douglas-fir. That wood is given 15 years to age in the. . .   Read More

Climate change continues to demand solutions, but a unified global response remains elusive. Even among those who want to address the issue, debate about how rages on. We could cut consumption, increase alternative energy production, develop fusion power, implement population control, seed the atmosphere, block the sun… For every proposed solution, there is a counter. . .   Read More