Sixty-eight years ago, St. Petersburg was known as Leningrad, and counted as one of the Soviet Union’s largest cities. These days, those two names conjure up images of a distant past; an anachronistic, shady corner of European politics and culture.

Yet this series of images, posted a while back on Englishrussia, suggest that. . .   Read More

“Preservation Without Permission: the Paris Urban eXperiment”
Tuesday November 13, 02012 at the Cowell Theater, San Francisco

The Paris Urban eXperiment (known for short as UX) began in 1981 as a boast by a middle schooler and has since grown into a large secretive network of artists, craftspeople, and urban explorers. With over two millennia. . .   Read More

This lecture was presented as part of The Long Now Foundation’s monthly Seminars About Long-term Thinking.

The Decline of Violence
Monday October 8, 02012 – San Francisco
 
Video is up on the Pinker Seminar page for Members.
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Audio is up on the Pinker Seminar page, or you can subscribe to our podcast.
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The. . .   Read More

One of the early ideas for the 10,000 Year Clock was to simply endow a family whose job it would be for 400 generations to just shout out the time every day.  I had no idea there was already someone like that… RIP John Votta. “The Washington Square timekeeper was a link back to a […]

Sometimes a long view can yield a very different perspective than the short view.

Take housing prices, for example. For the past five years or so, the news media have often characterized the housing market as ‘volatile’ and ‘fragile’. The statistics certainly bear this out: from 02000 to 02008, the global housing boom propelled real. . .   Read More

If human societies are founded on the accumulation of knowledge through the ages, then the long-term transmission of information must be the cornerstone of a durable civilization. And as we accelerate ever more rapidly in our expansion of knowledge and technological capability, the development of durable storage methods becomes ever more important.

In the. . .   Read More

Our perception of color may be a matter of optics, ophthalmology, and neurology – but the way in which we think about color is as much a matter of cultural history.

In a pair of blog posts, the online design magazine Imprint offers an illustrated history of the color wheel. From enlightenment thinkers such as Jacob. . .   Read More

Samuel Arbesman is a mathematician and network scientist who has turned his powerful tools of quantification onto science itself. He’ll discuss his book The Half-Life of Facts at the Long Now Museum & Store on Tuesday, October 30th.

Facts change all the time. Smoking has gone from doctor-recommended to deadly. We used. . .   Read More

Tom Chatfield from BBC online writes about the newest flavor of the digital dark age…  Lost tweets and social media:
On January 28 2011, three days into the fierce protests that would eventually oust the Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, a Twitter user called Farrah posted a link to a picture that supposedly showed an. . .   Read More

Worlds: The Kepler Planet Candidates from Alex Parker on Vimeo.

Planetary scientist Alex Parker created an animation of 2,299 extrasolar planet candidates orbiting a single star.  NASA’s Kepler mission has detected these transiting planet candidates since 02009.

In reality, these planet candidates aren’t orbiting around a single star, but rather several thousand. . .   Read More