Stewart Brand's Blog, page 110

Long Quotes: Peter Thiel

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

Emerald Observatory iPad app

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 information all on one screen, in a unique but understandable format.

Times of rise and set for the Sun, the Moon, and the 5 classical planets
Times of the beginning and ending of twilight
Heliocentric orrery (display of the planets in orbit around the Sun)
Altitude and azimuth for the same bodies (one body at a time)
Current phase and apparent orientation and relative size of the moon
Current regions of day and night on a world map
The Equation of Time, solar time, UTC time, and sidereal time
Month, day, year, and leap-year indicator
Daily alarm
Displayed times are synchronized via NTP to "atomic clock" standard
Uses iPad location, or the latitude and longitude may be set manually

A setting is available to allow the display to stay on continuously.

Tap on the display to move forward by a month, day, year, or minute.

If you are having any trouble with the application whatsoever, please see our FAQ on the support page listed below and then contact us through that page if your problem is not resolved. We take pride in responding promptly to all support email requests.

Is Kurzweil's future arriving?

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 time to do an analysis of the predictions, and finding out how sticky it can sometimes be to adjudicate such things.

Kurzweil also stands by his claim that computer displays built into eyeglasses would project images into users' eyes because some such systems do exist, and says, "The prediction did not say that all displays would be this way or that it would be the majority, or even common." Similarly, he defends his claim that translation software would be "commonly used" to allow people speaking different languages to communicate by phone by pointing to smartphone apps that emerged at the end of 2009. He allows that one could quibble about how "common" their use is. [read the complete article]

Wherever you fall on these issues, I think Kurzweil deserves praise for making public predictions, along with those like Rennie and Annisimov who take any predictor to task.

Long Now Media Update

WATCH
Lera Boroditsky's "How Language Shapes Thought"

There is new media available from our monthly series, the Seminars About Long-term Thinking. Stewart Brand's summaries and audio downloads or podcasts of the talks are free to the public; Long Now members can view HD video of the Seminars and comment on them.

Long Quotes: Mae West

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

Heirloom Design at the SFFD Ladder Shop

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 ladder shop before it's shaped into planks and rungs and can be maintained for decades afterwards – the Department's oldest ladder still in use was originally built in 1918.

Inside the Ladder Shop at the San Francisco Fire Department from AdamKaplan on Vimeo.

(via Laughing Squid)

Long Now Media Update

LISTEN

(downloads tab)

Model & Fix the Climate in 'Fate of the World'

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-argument, an opportunity cost, or unintended consequences. And those don't even begin to address the questions of how climate change itself will actually manifest – what kinds of changes and disasters will we have to mitigate with new technology, mass migration, or cultural and behavioral re-training?

Exploring all these interacting forces and possibilities might be a bit overwhelming, but if it also gets your creative, geoengineering juices flowing, there's a video game you might want to look into. An Oxford based game design studio called Red Redemption will soon release Fate of the World, in which you as the player control a global environmental agency and play out the next 200 years:

Fate of the World is a dramatic global strategy game that puts all our futures in your hands. The game features a dramatic set of scenarios based on the latest science covering the next 200 years. You must manage a balancing act of protecting the Earth.s resources and climate versus the needs of an ever-growing world population, who are demanding ever more food, power, and living space.

The head of Oxford's Climate Dynamics Group, Dr. Myles Allen has contributed to the climate modeling the game uses and Red Redemption are making a conscious effort to design this game as an engaging educational tool. By providing access to academic-quality climactic models in a strategic game format, they hope to better inform the public about the challenges climate change presents, as well as get people focused on finding solutions based on the best evidence available.

Long Quotes: John Kao

Quotes related to long-term thinking. Have a favorite quote? Share it with us in comments.



"We need to see our work on innovation as involving disciplined practice, not the quest for short-term wins. This is an obvious problem in our instant-gratification, quarterly-earnings-based culture in which corporate managers (and politicians) are evaluated and rewarded based on their success at maintaining a continuous upward trend that produces immediate results. At times, it seems like the question 'What have you done for me lately' approaches the status of a business model. If resource allocation, decision-making processes, and career-path planning all obey a short-term logic, while the important challenges facing both organizations and society are mostly long term, isn't the disconnect obvious?"

– John Kao

Kevin Kelly and Steven Johnson

This is an event that we had hoped to host this fall but could not because of our very busy production schedule.  A conversation with (Long Now Seminar speaker) Steven Johnson and (Long Now board member and speaker) Kevin Kelly who both released complimentary books in October – Steven Johnson's Where Good Ideas Come From, and Kevin Kelly's What Technology Wants. Luckily this excellent event did in fact happen at the New York Public Library and was hosted by NPR's Robert Krulwich, enjoy