Stewart Brand's Blog, page 117
July 27, 2010
The future of war
The Long News: stories that might still matter fifty, or a hundred, or ten thousand years from now.
At a recent Long Now seminar, Ed Moses mentioned in passing that we now produce enough bullets each year to kill every person on the planet — twice. We are a violent species; we hunt, we organize in gangs, we go to war. Today the U.S. is prosecuting two wars, and there are hotspots around the world from Darfur to Mexico.
At the same time, global defense spending is rising by 8% a year. We face...
July 25, 2010
Dystopian Utopia
Radoslav Zilinsky's 2007 artwork "The World"
A stunning painting of a possible future (or present depending on how you look at it)… walled cities of techno-utopia surrounded by the rest of the world living in the middle ages. Here is a link to the large version on Zilinzky's site. (Found via Coolvibe.)
July 22, 2010
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.
Watch the video of Frank Gavin's "Five Ways to Use History Well"
Long Quotes
Long Quotes: Quotes related to long-term thinking. A new series. Have a favorite quote? Share it with us in comments.
"No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible."
– Stanislaw Lec
July 21, 2010
Building an Audio Collection for All the World's Languages
The Rosetta Project is pleased to announce the Parallel Speech Corpus Project, a year-long volunteer-based effort to collect parallel recordings in languages representing at least 95% of the world's speakers. The resulting corpus will include audio recordings in hundreds of languages of the same set of texts, each accompanied by a transcription. This will provide a platform for creating new educational and preservation-oriented tools as well as technologies that may one day allow artificial ...
July 19, 2010
Blu's Stop-Motion History of Life
"Long Shorts" – short films that exemplify long-term thinking. Please submit yours in the comments section…
Not only does this amazing stop-motion film document a huge swath of history (all of it, really) – it looks like it took a huge swath of history to make. Thousands of photographs of graffiti evolving and interacting with its environment depict the development of life in the universe to create "Big Bang Big Boom: an unscientific point of view on the beginning and evolution of life… and ...
July 18, 2010
Long Quotes
Long Quotes: Quotes related to long-term thinking. A new series. Have a favorite quote? Share it with us in comments.
"The most important question we must ask ourselves is, 'Are we being good ancestors?'"
– Jonas Salk
July 15, 2010
Malaria Through Millennia
"The malaria parasite has been responsible for half of all human deaths since the Stone Age" is the quote that jumped off the page in a recent article by Sonia Shah in the Wall Street Journal.
Entitled "The Tenacious Buzz of Malaria" the article places malaria in a long term perspective:
Malaria has shaped our trade and settlement patterns, and our demographics. Today, it sickens 300 million every year, and kills nearly 1 million, despite the fact that we've known how to cure it (with...
July 14, 2010
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 Frank Gavin's "Five Ways to Use History Well" (downloads tab)
Ancient Cosmic Light
The European Space Agency has released an amazing new image of our universe, created by the recently launched Planck mission. The image above comes from Planck's first detailed survey of the cosmic microwave background, the universe's "first light."
It is the light that was finally allowed to move out across space once a post-Big-Bang Universe had cooled sufficiently to permit the formation of hydrogen atoms.
Before that time, scientists say, the cosmos would have been so hot that...
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