Stewart Brand's Blog, page 121

The Evolution of our Matriarchs

Our newest board member and recent Seminar speaker David Eagleman has published his very Long Now Mothers Day essay over at Slate.  Happy Mothers Day to the long line of Mothers who brought us all here!

In honor of Mother's Day, I'm going to spend five seconds thinking about each woman in the proud line of matriarchs who brought me here.My mother left a biology career to become a politician and a painter. She gave up cigarettes in her 30s, shoulders unreconciled issues with her father...

Stewart Brand on Colbert Report

The Colbert Report
Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c


Stewart Brand


www.colbertnation.com








Colbert Report Full Episodes
Political Humor
Fox News

Last night Stewart Brand was on the Colbert Report talking about his most recent book. Stewart is quick to point out that Whole Earth Discipline is a book full of opinions that Long Now as an organization does not take sides on, the end of this interview does mention Long Now and the Clock.

How good are our predictions of the next 30 years?

From Craig et al., Can History teach us? A retrospective examination of long-term energy forecasts for the United States. Annu. Rev. Energy and Environment 27, 83(2002)

Stewart Brand sent in a piece by the Klimazweibel blog covered by Seekerblog.  It shows where the actual US energy consumption came in by 02000 vs the predictions from 01975.  It is interesting to see that we came in well below the lowest (read: most optimistic) prediction.  While the US still uses an amount of energy that...

Nils Gilman, "Deviant Globalization"

The anti-state economy

Gilman described deviant globalization as "the unpleasant underside of transnational integration."

There's nice tourism, and then sex tourism, such as in Thailand and Switzerland. The vast pharmacology industry is matched by a vast traffic in illegal drugs. The underside of waste disposal is the criminal dumping in the developing world of toxic wastes from the developed world. Military activities worldwide are fed by a huge gray market in weapons. Internet communications ...

Eight Thoughts About Timescale

Stewart Brand sent in this blog piece by Warren Senders about time scales.  A good read on how the human mind's primary feature is now operating as a bug…

I'm not sanguine about our ability to solve the climate crisis — and it's not because the monolithic forces of global capitalism won't let us (although they're not helping). It's not because we're too greedy and acquisitive (although we are). It's not because things have progressed too far already for us to stop them (although they...

Man the toolmaker

The Long News: stories that might still matter fifty, or a hundred, or ten thousand years from now.

It used to be thought that what defined us as human is the fact that we make tools. But in the past few decades, toolmaking has also been observed in chimpanzees, dolphins, elephants, otters, octopuses, and several kinds of birds. Still, no other species manipulates matter as relentlessly as humans do. And over the long term, our tools are getting smaller and more sophisticated as we learn...

Buffett's longest bet looking better

Warren Buffett and (l to r) Protégé Partners' Scott Bessent, Jeffrey Tarrant, and Ted Seides.

The second year's results on Buffett's Million Dollar Long Bet are in.  Article from Fortune Magazine below:

By Carol J. Loomis, senior editor-at-large. April 27, 2010: 9:34 AM ET

(Fortune) — Unaudited results are in for the second year of "Buffett's Big Bet" — Warren Buffett's 2008 wager against Protégé Partners that a low-fee index fund will outperform certain funds of hedge funds — and the...

Slow Science

[image error]

Since its inception in 01979 programs like the Long Term Ecological Research Network have been selecting and tracking ecological sites to be monitored over the long-term.   The NSF funded LTER network  hopes to codify what usually occurs by accident in science.  For instance the "Keeling Curve", which was one of the first bits of scientific proof about baseline atmospheric carbon, was not found on purpose.  The Keeling curve was discovered as part of a control for another experiment on...

How to Prevent the Next Global Crisis

Member Tyler Emerson sent in a link to this article by Larry Brilliant on "How to Prevent the Next Global Crisis".  Many of you know Mr. Brilliant as the former director of Google.org, he was also former Long Now Seminar speaker, and is now directing Skoll's Global Threat initiative.

This is also hot on the heels of Eagleman's talk on "Six Easy Steps to Avert the Collapse of Civilization".  It is interesting to see this emerging theme.  It seems like a good sign that long-term thinking is on ...

Debt: The first five thousand years

Anthropologist David Graeber recently sent in his essay on the 5000 year history of debt (orignally published in Mute and Eurozine).  Aside from being an interesting read in general, this effort (which he is just now finishing as a book) is an interesting resource for the Eternal Coin and the Long Finance project.

Throughout its 5000 year history, debt has always involved institutions – whether Mesopotamian sacred kingship, Mosaic jubilees, Sharia or Canon Law – that place controls on...