Stewart Brand's Blog, page 111

Long Now Media Update

WATCH
All Nineteen Speakers in the
"Long Conversation"

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.

Rachel Sussman, "The World's Oldest Living Organisms"

The Missing Science of
Biological Longevity
A Summary by Stewart Brand

Creative photographer Sussman showed beautiful slides of very elderly organisms. The captions were as crucial as the images—naming the species, the place, and the approximate age. You can see many of them here.

The series began with the only animal—an eighteen-foot brain coral in the waters of Tobago, thought to be 2,000 years old. An enormous baobob in South Africa might be 2,000 years old. Then there is the astounding welwitschia mirabilis of the Namibian desert, a conifer that feeds on mist, with the longest leaves in the plant kingdom…

Read the rest of Stewart Brand's Summary here.

Long Now Media Update

WATCH
More of the Nineteen Speakers in the
"Long Conversation"

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.

1,000 years in 5 minutes

Just saw this video of how European borders have been redrawn over the last millennium. If anyone knows who did this I would love to attribute it.

10 centuries in 5 minutes Thanks to our friends over at Atlas Obscura for posting.

10×10,000

CNN is running a story on the 100,000 year Finish nuclear storage bunker.  I hope to see this at some point, I love it when people do projects that make our 10,000 year project seem short sighted…

In Finland they believe they have found a [nuclear waste] solution, with the world's first permanent nuclear-waste repository — "Onkalo" — a huge system of underground tunnels that is being hewn out of solid rock and must last at least 100,000 years.

Work on the concept behind the facility commenced in 1970s and the repository is expected to be backfilled and decommissioned in the 2100s. None of the 40 people working on the facility today will live to see it completed.   [read complete story]

Thanks to Kevin Berry and @jetjocko for sending this my way.

Rick Prelinger Ticket Info

The Long Now Foundation's monthly
Seminars About Long-term Thinking

Rick Prelinger on
"Lost Landscapes of San Francisco, 5″
TICKETS
Thursday December 16, 02010 at 7:30pm Herbst Theatre on Van Ness
Long Now Members can reserve 2 seats, join today! • General Tickets $10

About this Seminar:

Rick Prelinger, a guerrilla archivist who collects the uncollected and makes it accessible, presents the fifth of his annual Lost Landscapes of San Francisco screenings. You'll see an eclectic montage of rediscovered and rarely-seen film clips showing life, landscapes, labor and leisure in a vanished San Francisco as captured by amateurs, newsreel cameramen and industrial filmmakers.

New material this year will include test flights over the unbuilt dunes of the Sunset District, Prohibition-era libertines partying in Golden Gate Park and drinking in their cars, lost travelogues and scenes from San Francisco countercultures.

Suzanne Ramsey, aka Kitten on the Keys, will be back to open for Rick again this year; she will regale us with vintage tunes and a vivacious style that has entertained crowds from here in San Francisco to the Cannes Film Festival.

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Long Now Media Update

WATCH
1 – 6 of Nineteen Speakers in the
"Long Conversation"

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: Michael Cronin

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



"It is often said that what people strive for is the greatest happiness of the greatest number, but it is worth bearing in mind that the greatest number have not yet been born. Therefore, when we speak about the greatest good, what we really mean is the longest good. There is not much we can do to improve the quality of life of those who are already dead on this island, but we can do immeasurable good to improve the quality of lives of those who will be born or come to live on this island. In order to give force to this notion of the longest good, we need to make the taking of long-term responsibility the most important political and cultural issue of our time."

– Michael Cronin

Long Now Media Update

LISTEN

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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.

Who Needs a Library Anyway?

I just received this nice piece on the future of books and libraries from our friends at Stanford Libraries:

Who Needs a Library Anyway?

When then-President Gerhard Casper rhetorically asked this question, 12 October 1999 – as the title of his remarks at the dedication of the Bing Wing – there was much talk in the air about the imminent demise of libraries. Were these not a bunch of dinosaurs about to be smacked by the meteoric impact of the Web? Was the book not rapidly becoming an anachronism, a fetish object of a dying pulp-based culture? Many of us, with President Casper, disagreed with these glib notions then. But that was several generations ago, on the timescale of the information world around us. How have we fared since on the extinction short list?

Last month, forecaster and chair of our Advisory Council Paul Saffo delighted a select group of our donors with a talk about books, revolutions, and timescales. In a dense web of connected thoughts, he tied the great information revolution of the late 15th century to that of the late 20th, likening the titanic publisher-scholar Aldus Manutius to Steve Jobs, linking the once-revolutionary idea that a printed book is what it is (not a cheap knock-off of a proper manuscript) to the emerging identity of digital works as being something other than bad substitutes for physical books. He reminded us of an intrinsic life-cycle law of objects: things fade, or even disappear, after about a half-century, even (or particularly) Aldine editions or 1960s bestsellers. I am reminded that we avidly collect medieval "binding fragments," i.e., pieces of manuscripts, mostly on vellum, that were cut up and recycled as stiffeners in bindings of later books, a practice we would now consider barbaric and wasteful (and very expensive). Apparently, after a century or so of European printing, manuscripts were considered expendable, rendered technically obsolescent by the printing press (and the scholarly efflorescence it made possible).

Universities and their libraries have been around for a fairly long time, say 700 or 800 years. The great university libraries that we are familiar with – those with millions of volumes addressing myriad subjects and disciplines – evolved through the vast post-war growth of academic research, coincidentally about a half-century ago. Are they – or, should I say, we – suffering decrepitude and irrelevance? I offer as evidence our experience with the New Graduate Student Orientation program last month, detailed later in this issue. It seems that Stanford's new crop of grad students, arguably the most savvy and motivated class of information users alive, are quite aware they need libraries. Some of them may even need Aldine editions or binding fragments. All of them will use electronic resources on various sorts of devices. Whatever the form, the libraries will stand ready to help them obtain and use the stuff of scholarship.

Also past the half-century mark,

Andrew Herkovic