Stewart Brand's Blog, page 116

Long Now Media Update

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Jesse Schell's "Visions of the Gamepocalypse"

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.

Mainframe dark age

The usual "digital dark age" story we see are the ones where people lose data because a platform obsolesces.  Business Week is running an interesting story about a computer platform that has refused to obsolesce, and it is the people who are leaving it behind – The Mainframe.  It turns out that there are still over 10,000 Mainframe computers out there churning away at major companies – representing a $3.4 billion dollar market segment.  Who knew right?

One part of the story that is poorly...

Long Now Media Update

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.

Listen to the audio of Martin Rees's "Life's Future in the Cosmos" (downloads tab)

Martin Rees, "Life's Future in the Cosmos"

Cosmic Life

The pace of astronomic discovery, said the Astronomer Royal, keeps increasing with the constant improvement in our sensing technology. The recent discovery of the accelerating expansion of the universe (dark energy) revolutionized cosmology, and with the launch of the Kepler Telescope in 2009, we are beginning to detect and study Earth-sized planets around distant stars.

Since the Moon landings, humans in space have done little of scientific interest, but unmanned probes have...

Long Quotes

Long Quotes: Quotes related to long-term thinking. A new series. Have a favorite quote? Share it with us in comments.

"Human history can be viewed as a slowly dawning awareness that we are members of a larger group. Initially our loyalties were to ourselves and our immediate family, next, to bands of wandering hunter-gatherers, then to tribes, small settlements, city-states, nations. We have broadened the circle of those we love. We have now organized what are modestly described as...

The Secret Powers of Time

Philip Zimbardo's talk on the Secret Powers of Time wonderfully illustrated in pseudo-realtime by RSA animate. (found via caterina.net)

Jesse Schell's Recommended Reading

During his Seminar, Jesse Schell recommended a number of books and other resources that have informed his conception of the Gamepocalypse.  Here's a list of the books for the curious:

Authenticity, by James H. Gilmore and B. Joseph Pine II
Finite and Infinite Games, by James P. Carse
The Singularity is Near, by Ray Kurzweil
The Innovator's Dilemma, by Clayton M. Christensen
The Rational Optimist, by Matt Ridley
Good to Great, by Jim Collins
Punished by Rewards, by Alfie Kohn

He also...

Long Now Media Update

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.

Listen to the audio of Jesse Schell's "Visions of the Gamepocalypse" (downloads tab)

Jesse Schell, "Visions of the Gamepocalypse"

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Visions of the Gamepocalypse

In a glee-filled evening, Schell declared that games and real life are reaching out to each other with such force that we might come to a condition of "gamepocalypse—where every second of your life you're playing a game in some way. He expects smart toothbrushes and buses that give us good-behavior points, and eye-tracking sensors that reward us for noticing ads, and subtle tests that confirm whether product placement in our dreams has worked.

The reason games are ...

Durable Ephemerality

Jeff Rothenberg once said "Digital information lasts forever – or five years, whichever comes first."  This is basis of an interesting debate between New York Times writer Jeffrey Rosen who recently published "The End of Forgetting," and Scott Rosenberg's rebuttal on his blog. (Excerpt from Rosenberg below)

But Rosen is too busy hatching plans for "expire dates" on social-network postings and other artificial-forgetting schemes to give his head the Janus-turn his subject demands. The idea...