Stewart Brand's Blog, page 124

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 Beth Noveck's "Transparent Government"

Warning: Your reality is out of date

This artist rendering provided by the European South Observatory shows some of the 32 new planets astronomers found outside our solar system.

This article was sent in by Samuel Arbesman Research Fellow in Health Care Policy at Harvard Medical School.  It was originally printed in the Boston Globe.

When people think of knowledge, they generally think of two sorts of facts: facts that don't change, like the height of Mount Everest or the capital of the United States, and facts that fluctuate...

Memory loss

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

Today, humans speak to each other in nearly 7,000 languages; it's estimated that 90% of those languages will be gone by 02050, displaced by English, Spanish, or Chinese. Meanwhile, there's a broader question about how well we're preserving  the rest of the world's cultural heritage. But while we may be losing our collective memories, the thoughts of individuals are more and more likely to...

What Is Time?

Wired Science has posted a thought-provoking interview with Caltech theoretical physicist Sean Carroll about the arrow of time, which points from past to future. We all perceive this arrow and can measure its passage with clocks, but very little is understood about how and why it works that way. Carroll explains:

We remember the past but we don't remember the future. There are irreversible processes. There are things that happen, like you turn an egg into an omelet, but you can't turn an...

A History of the Sky

Art project in progress A History of the Sky features lots and lots of time-lapse videos of the sky that are synchronized so that they're all showing the same time of day.  Ken Murphy is the artist that created it and he hopes to one day manifest all the data he's collecting as a video installation that's always displaying the skies of the last 365 days.  The project was recently featured at the Exploratorium, but it's still in a need of a home for the installation.

Here's how it works.

If...

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 Alan Weisman's "World Without Us, World With Us"

David Eagleman Ticket Info

The Long Now Foundation's monthly Seminars About Long-term Thinking presents David Eagleman on "Six Easy Steps to Avert the Collapse of Civilization"Thursday April 1, 02010 at 7:30 pm at the Herbst Theater in San FranciscoLong Now Members can reserve 2 seats, join today!or you can purchase tickets for $10 each.

About this Seminar:
David Eagleman may be the best combination of scientist and fiction-writer alive. Sum, his collection of afterlife alternatives, made a stunning literary debut last...

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 Beth Noveck's "Transparent Government" (downloads tab)

137 Years of Future

Boing Boing notes that Popular Science has put up their whole 137 year historical archive on line in partnership with Google.  While you cant search by issue, you can do keyword searches.  I hope more long standing publications follow suit, this is a real treasure trove, especially the advertisements…

Search the Popular Science Archive

Thanks to Chaz for sending this in.

Long Now Media Update

Dot.Gov

Noveck began with the example of patents, first devised in Renaissance Florence and Venice to protect techniques such as glass manufacture. In England, conferring a monopoly on a tool or technique became a prerogative of the king. In contemporary America, the process of getting a 20-year monopoly on your invention from the US Patent Office is mired in a morass of litigation costs, a huge backlog, insufficient reviewers with insufficient science education, and what Noveck calls "an...