Stewart Brand's Blog, page 125

Resetting the Zero Point of Civilization

A pillar at the Gobekli Tepe temple near Sanliurfa, Turkey. (photo: Berthold Steinhilber/Laif-Redux)

The good folks at Atlas Obscura pointed me to this fantastic story on an archaeological find near the Syrian Border in Turkey that pushes back the date of great stonework, and in effect the beginning of known civilization, by many millennia. (snippet below)

Standing on the hill at dawn, overseeing a team of 40 Kurdish diggers, the German-born archeologist waves a hand over his discovery here...

The Global Lives Project

Last Friday evening, Long Now joined the Global Lives Project in celebrating their world premiere opening at San Francisco's Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.  Through a huge volunteer effort, Global Lives has produced ten films – each 24 hours long – that visually capture the everyday life of ten people around the planet.  And on Friday we could view them all, at the same time, in the same room.  Ten huge screens hung from the ceiling of the Yerba Buena Forum and around a thousand people...

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 Alan Weisman's "World Without Us, World With Us" (downloads tab)

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

Humanity's impact, nature's resilience

Weisman's book, The World Without Us, grew out of two questions, he said. One was, "How can I write a best-seller about the environment?" The answer to that was the second question: "How would the rest of nature behave without the constant pressure we put on it?"

On the border of Ukraine and Belarus is a small intact remnant—500,000 acres—of the primordial forest that once covered Europe from Siberia to Ireland. In the Puszcza Bialowieska, with its...

3 Long Now Events in 8 Days

Long Now has three events coming up over the next 8 days and we wanted to be sure you all had the right info for reserving tickets and making it out to all three.

Alan Weisman on "World Without Us, World With Us." Wednesday February 24, 02010 at 7:30 pm at the Herbst Theater in San Francisco. Long Now Members can reserve 2 seats free, or you can purchase tickets for $10 eachLong Now and Global Lives Project celebrates the opening of its first installation on Friday February 26th at the Yerba...

Aspiral

I always keep an eye out for sprial clock dial designs as it has always seemed to be a great way to make longer term dials on a clock face.  Jaeger-LeCoultre does it with a 1000 year dial on a limited edition run of their Atmos Du Millenaire Atlantis (seen below).  But the video above from a team in London called Aspiral is the first successful use of the spiral I have seen that allows you to know which rung of the spiral you should read.  Very fun. (Thanks to William Gibson's twitter feed...

Mechanical Computing Videos

Operators enter data into a "computer"

Patrick Tufts sent in these absolute gems.  Historical training videos for mechanical computers from the US Navy which used them as fire control computers.  It is so easy to forget where modern computers got their start.  We assume they are all gray boxes with monitors attached, but back in the good old days they were gray boxes with all kinds of sighting windows, levers, dials and whirring gears and cams.  So much more fun…

Basic Mechanisms in Firing...

Avoiding a Digital Dark Age

Long Now Digital Research Director Kurt Bollacker was recently published in New Scientist discussing the challenges in maintaining data for the long haul:

It seems unavoidable that most of the data in our future will be digital, so it behooves us to understand how to manage and preserve digital data so we can avoid what some have called the "digital dark age." This is the idea—or fear!—that if we cannot learn to explicitly save our digital data, we will lose that data and, with it, the record...

No More New Old Knowlege

King's College London president Rick Trainor announced recently that the university would be closing the chair of paleography, the UK's only one.  Held by Professor David Ganz, the chair of paleography is the position that overseas a discipline many consider to be a vital component of historical research.  Paleography is the study of ancient manuscripts and has pieced together and deciphered many of the texts that have provided the basis for our knowledge of history.

Budget cuts are the...

Nixon's other war

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

In 1971, President Nixon declared "war on cancer." In the forty years since, the U.S. has spent some $200 billion on research, but we've only cut the death rate by 5% (measured since 1950). Cancer still accounts for 13% of deaths worldwide. Still, there have been some recent developments that might show some promise:

1. This must be good news:

Scientists crack 'entire genetic code' of cancer

2....