Stewart Brand's Blog, page 35

Centuries of the Bristlecone

The Nevada Museum of Art has a commitment to supporting the creation, study, and preservation of art that explores the boundaries of human environments. In spatial terms that means the Museum collects and exhibits work from the Great Basin outward to the polar regions, the great deserts of the world, and high altitudes, including near space. In temporal terms, that includes materials with roots in deep human time, such as projects with Australian Aboriginal artists—but also artworks that project into the future, which is to say the Long Now.

Jonathon Keats’ proposal to construct a 5,000 year calendrical index linked between the Museum in Reno and Long Now’s site at 11,000 feet in remote eastern Nevada resides simultaneously on many frontiers. This is also a hallmark of our Art of the Greater West collection, which includes work from throughout a super-region that extends from Alaska south to Patagonia, and west across the Pacific to Australia. This physical and metaphorical territory “west of the mountains” is in a perpetual state of discovery. The Museum’s multiple permanent holdings, including its Contemporary Art and large Altered Landscape photography collection, are focused around human interactions with natural, built, and virtual spaces. Jonathon’s calendar will powerfully manifest how these collections, exhibitions, and research projects inhabit this rich confluence.

 

Bill Fox

Director, Center for Art + Environment

Nevada Museum of Art

William Fox will be speaking about the Art of the Greater West at The Interval at Long Now in April 02016. The Center for Art + Environment at the Nevada Museum of Art in Reno is partnering with the artist Jonathon Keats and The Long Now Foundation to realize Centuries of the Bristlecone for a permanent installation at the Museum in 02020. The archive of the project will reside at the Center for Art + Environment, where it will be available to researchers.

Centuries of the Bristlecone
A Living Calendar on Mount Washington
by Jonathon Keats

In pre-Classical Greece, time was kept by cicadas’ songs, the flowering of artichokes, and the migration of cranes. Ballads recounted these annual events, and provided their interpretation. (When the cranes migrated, it was time to plow the fields.) Although constellations also provided guidance, celestial authority was contingent in this three-thousand-year-old calendar, with days arbitrarily added as the stars fell out of sync with nature.

Gradually society made calendars more regular. First the moon was used, and then the sun. Julius Caesar improved the reliability of solar timekeeping by introducing the leap year. By modern reckoning, the Gregorian year is 365.2425 days long, and the movement of our planet has ceded authority to atomic clocks. Time has become abstract. The cranes are late if they migrate in November rather than October; November isn’t deemed ahead-of-schedule.

Undoubtedly the Gregorian calendar is useful for keeping dental appointments and managing multinational corporations. But is it worthy of our trust? Is it more valid than the sounding of cicadas and flowering of artichokes? Should we value mathematical exactitude over ground truth? Working in collaboration with the Long Now Foundation and the Nevada Museum of Art, I plan to provide an alternative to Gregorian time by bringing the calendar back to life.

At the core of my calendrical system will be the most long-lived of timekeepers: Pinus longaeva, commonly known as the bristlecone pine tree. Bristlecone pines have a lifespan that can exceed five thousand years, making the oldest more ancient than Greek civilization. They keep count of the years with annual ring growth, a natural calendar prized by dendroclimatologists because it’s irregular. The thickness of each ring is a measure of environmental conditions in a given year. The growing girth of the tree thus clocks environmental time cumulatively. Sited on Long Now property atop Mount Washington, my living calendars will do so for the next five millennia, visibly tracking time as lived on our planet.

Here is the vision: Around each bristlecone pine will be arranged a double spiral of large stone pillars, indicating the girth the bristlecone can be expected to have in 500 years, 1,000 years and more, as extrapolated from the current average annual ring growth for Mount Washington bristlecones. Each of the stones will be incised with the appropriate year. The steady development of the tree – and concomitant increase of the tree’s diameter – will turn over each successive pillar with the completion of each consecutive time increment, thereby indicating the approximate date. However, as climate change alters the living landscape, the calendar will fall out of step with Gregorian years. Through time, each bristlecone will bear witness to human activity in the Anthropocene. The meaning of the living calendar will change with the changes we bring to the environment.

Naturally there are myriad ways in which these calendars will defy expectations. Most certainly some will grow faster than others, subject to fluctuations in microclimates on the mountain, each differently impacted by global climate change. Also bristlecone pines typically grow irregularly, the harshness of their environment recorded in the contour of their trunks. Depending on what transpires in their vicinity, they may turn over pillars out of order. Or a trees may die prematurely, time frozen in hardwood that will take many millennia to decompose.

These uncertainties are integral to the concept. In these calendars, time is alive with contingencies. Through these calendars, we’ll come to terms with where prediction fails us: the limitations of what we can know about the future, and the threat of hubris.

Under the stewardship of Long Now, Mount Washington will host five stone spirals around five trees of different ages at different altitudes. Beginning in the year 2020 – when we anticipate construction to be complete – voyagers will visit each calendar in turn, discovering the date by reading the stones.

Centuries of the Bristlecone will encourage people to visit Mount Washington who might otherwise never see it. Yet these mountain calendars will probably be experienced primarily by word of mouth – a living myth. For that reason, there will be a more broadly accessible dimension to the project: A sixth bristlecone pine will be configured with an electronic dendrometer, an instrument that wraps around the tree trunk, precisely measuring diameter. Data from the dendrometer will be relayed by satellite to a computer that will calculate an exact date based on the tree’s daily increase in girth. The computer will control a monumental mechanical calendar situated in downtown Reno at the Nevada Museum of Art.

Additionally the dendrometer will control a variable Bristlecone Time Protocol, accessible online and via an app for smartphone and smartwatch. The protocol will provide a precise digital indication of seconds, minutes, hours, days, months and years according to the growth of the tree on Mt. Washington.

The bristlecone date will thereby become a fully viable (if notoriously unreliable) alternative to the Gregorian date. People will be able to choose which calendar to follow, and, in the ensuing confusion, will be forced to confront the discrepancy. Is time a universal abstraction or grounded in lived experience? Each calendar will carry conflicting authority, much as stars and artichokes did in pre-Classical Greece.

Call for Participation: The Long Now Foundation Summer Teacher Institute

The Long Now Foundation Summer Teacher Institute
Fostering Long-term Responsibility

Fort Mason Center, San Francisco

August 8-10, 02016

“Civilization is revving itself into a pathologically short attention span. The trend might be coming from the acceleration of technology, the short-horizon perspective of market-driven economics, the next-election perspective of democracies, or the distractions of personal multi-tasking. All are on the increase. Some sort of balancing corrective to the short-sightedness is needed—some mechanism or myth which encourages the long view and the taking of long-term responsibility, where ‘long-term’ is measured at least in centuries.”

-Stewart Brand, Co-founder and President of the Long Now Foundation

Introduction

When today’s students become tomorrow’s civic leaders and entrepreneurs, they will confront global environmental and societal challenges that require long-term strategies and solutions. The Long Now Foundation is offering a new program—the Summer Teacher Institute—to engage with educators to develop middle and high school curricula that will better prepare students for these challenges by cultivating their ability to think critically, frame issues, and solve problems using time frames that include centuries and even millennia.

During a three-day engagement including interactive presentations with Long Now thought leaders and hands-on sessions using Long Now’s multi-media and museum resources, participating teachers will design creative and compelling curricula that foster long-term thinking skills within a wide range of subject areas and disciplines.  Teachers will leave the Institute with a new approach to framing critical thinking and problem solving in a long-term time horizon; concrete curriculum activities to implement in their classrooms that build long-term thinking skills; and a new network of Long Now educators committed to fostering long-term thinking and responsibility among its students and schools.

Program

The Long Now Foundation was established in 01996* to develop projects to challenge our short term attention span and time frame and embody the notion of deep time. It hopes to provide a counterpoint to today’s accelerating culture and help make long-term thinking more common through its ambitious projects such as:

The 10,000 year clock, a mechanical clock that ticks once a year, bongs once a century, and the cuckoo comes out every millennium.
The Rosetta Library, a publicly accessible digital library of human languages.
Revive & Restore, an initiative to selectively bring back extinct species.

The Long Now Summer Teacher Institute is an opportunity for educators to collaborate on creating practical teaching approaches and learning activities that develop long-term thinking among their students with the intention of cultivating graduates with the skills and responsibility to balance the short and long views of civilization.

Imagine…

12th grade history of science students discussing the long-term implications of a world without disease;
6th grade humanities students prototyping what farming looks like in a century;
10th grade science and humanities classes comparing the outcomes of immediate short-term interventions with long-term strategies for living with severe drought;
8th graders exploring urban life by examining a specific city’s history, present and future across centuries to determine what has changed and what remains constant.

The Summer Teacher Institute is designed to take educators through a three day schedule of provocative conversations with experts, field trips, and hands-on problem-solving activities that culminate with the development of implementable curriculum activities.

Schedule

Day 1: Orientation – Exploring long-term thinking and its significance to K12 education

The program on Day 1 will welcome participants and orient them to the purpose and rationale of the Summer Institute by sharing the Long Now Foundation’s history and current projects, such as the 10,000 Year Clock, the Rosetta Project, and Revive & Restore. Participants will take a field trip to The Interval—Long Now’s cafe-museum—to observe thought provoking artifacts such as the robotic chalkboard, the chime generator and orrery for the 10,000 year clock, and others to expand their sense of time horizons. Interactive sessions will include short presentations (live and via video) and hands-on activities with Long Now thought leaders, such as Stewart Brand, Paul Saffo, and Alexander Rose the Executive Director of Long Now. Sessions will focus on immersing participants in key concepts and perspectives of long-term thinking, such as Pace Layering, and how these concepts can support critical thinking and real-world relevance in K-12 curricula.

 Day 2: Application – Hearing from Long Now Teacher Pioneers

On Day 2 participants will hear from 3-4 pioneering long-term thinking educators who have introduced activities in their classrooms that foster long-term thinking and responsibility.  One concept we will explore in depth is Pace Layering, a framework that helps make the abstract idea of time horizon and change concrete. The Pace Layer framework relates well to critical thinking and problem solving in a wide range of disciplines and thematic areas such as sustainability, race and culture, global movements, poverty, current events, art, and innovation.

In large and small groups, discussions will highlight the purpose and process of the curriculum activities, key strategies for integration, and expectations for learning outcomes.  Participants will have the opportunity to engage directly in Pace Layering curriculum activities to experience its potential as a pedagogical tool.  The day will end with each participant brainstorming possible applications in their own classroom or school.

Day 3: Personalization – Creating curriculum prototypes for the classroom

On the final day participants will design their own curriculum activity using flexible design templates and creative processes.  Teachers will work in individual and small group design sessions with feedback and support from Long Now mentor teachers and resources specialists. Teachers will form small group instructional design teams to provide immediate feedback and opportunity for revision.  The day will end with a long-term thinking curriculum showcase and a roadmapping exercise to help the group plan their implementation and mutual support after they leave the Institute.  Two web-based update and sharing sessions will be scheduled to provide support during the school year.

Who should apply?

The Long Now Summer Teacher Institute is well suited to forward thinking, creative educators at the middle and high school level who are interested in trying new teaching approaches and creating curriculum activities that help students build the thinking skills necessary for tackling the global environmental and societal challenges before us.  Classroom teachers, administration, and instructional designers are all welcome to apply, provided they are in a position to work directly with students to implement long-term thinking curriculum activities.

The Long Now Foundations is interested in building a network of educators who will bring a long-term perspective into their classrooms and curriculum.  There is no cost to attend the Long Now Teacher Summer Institute.  All meals and materials will be provided by Long Now. Participants will pay for their lodging and travel.

Participants are encouraged to implement one long-term thinking activity with students within their school year and report back using a simple feedback and evaluation form provided by Long Now.  An honorarium of $225 will be provided to teachers who write up their curriculum activity evaluation in a descriptive, narrative format to share on the Long Now Blog.

The Summer Teacher Institute is limited to 25 middle and high school participants. To apply, please complete this form.  The application deadline is March 1, 02016. For more information contact education@longnow.org.

 

Stephen Pyne Seminar Tickets

 

The Long Now Foundation’s monthly
Seminars About Long-term Thinking

Stephen Pyne on “Fire Slow, Fire Fast, Fire Deep”
TICKETS
Tuesday February 9, 02016 at 7:30pm SFJAZZ Center
Long Now Members can reserve 2 seats, join today! General Tickets $15

 

About this Seminar:

Fire acts in the short-term & long-term. It periodically destroys landscapes with devastating speed, yet, if properly managed, it leads to the long-term health of many ecosystems.

Stephen J. Pyne is a professor at Arizona State University, author of Between Two Fires: A Fire History of Contemporary America (amongst many other books), and considered one of the world’s foremost experts on the history and management of fire.

PanLex Looking for Endangered Language Digital Detectives

Every word

The PanLex project aims to translate every word from every language into every other language. We already have solid groundwork with 10,000 language varieties and 22 million expressions in the PanLex database, but we still have a long way to go, especially with the more obscure and under-documented languages of the world which are most susceptible to extinction. Ethnologue: Languages of the World explains:

Language endangerment is a serious concern to which linguists and language planners have turned their attention in the last several decades. For a variety of reasons, speakers of many smaller, less dominant languages stop using their heritage language and begin using another.… As a consequence there may be no speakers who use the [heritage] language as their first or primary language and eventually the language may no longer be used at all…. Languages which have not been adequately documented disappear altogether.

In light of the fragile situation facing many smaller languages, PanLex is in a hurry to track down existing data on them, and we’d love to get some help from the larger Long Now community.

Digital detectives

We are looking for some intrepid, word-loving, puzzle-solving language sleuths who can help us search for words in some of the world’s most obscure languages. Do you love a challenge? Are you a brave armchair world traveler? Can you defy the needle-in-haystack odds? Let us send you a list of five little-known languages to search on the Internet using your best cyber-snooping creativity. You’ll think of places to hunt that we haven’t. Find a dictionary, glossary, or sociolinguistic research paper with a word list in the appendix. Check social media, booksellers, and library catalogs. Tweet your followers. If you find something, you’ll simply email us the URL or the publication info and we’ll take it from there.

What your research will do

You’ll be our springboard towards gathering words in more than 2,000 languages still needed in our database, shoring up the most neglected and least documented in the world. Indigenous communities, researchers, translators, students, and linguists will have online access to this valuable data. Increased visibility and accessibility of these languages allows the stakeholders to develop their projects in the directions they choose, be it research, education, or language revitalization. Pressure may be relieved on some smaller communities who are in danger of abandoning their mother tongue in favor of a politically dominant language. Your efforts support long-term preservation of linguistic diversity, accessibility of data, and ultimately improved communication. Plus, you may gather an esoteric name or two to complete your next high-brow crossword puzzle.

Getting technical

If you prefer, we can also use some help on the technical side:

designing apps and interfaces
localization tools
mobile apps
graph visualizations
adding links to other linguistic or geographic databases
investigating translation inference algorithms

We’d love to hear from you

Contact us at anderson@panlex.org to volunteer, your support will be greatly appreciated!

Edge Question 02016

It’s been an annual tradition since 01998: with a new year comes a new Edge question.

Every January, John Brockman presents the members of his online salon with a question that elicits discussion about some of the biggest intellectual and scientific issues of our time. Previous iterations have included prompts such as “What should we be worried about?” or “What scientific concept would improve everybody’s cognitive toolkit?“ The essay responses – in excess of a hundred each year – offer a wealth of insight into the direction of today’s cultural forces, scientific innovations, and global trends.

This year, Brockman asks:

WHAT DO YOU CONSIDER THE MOST INTERESTING RECENT [SCIENTIFIC] NEWS? WHAT MAKES IT IMPORTANT?

Scientific topics receiving prominent play in newspapers and magazines over the past several years include molecular biology, artificial intelligence, artificial life, chaos theory, massive parallelism, neural nets, the inflationary universe, fractals, complex adaptive systems, superstrings, biodiversity, nanotechnology, the human genome, expert systems, punctuated equilibrium, cellular automata, fuzzy logic, space biospheres, the Gaia hypothesis, virtual reality, cyberspace, and teraflop machines. … Unlike previous intellectual pursuits, the achievements of the third culture are not the marginal disputes of a quarrelsome mandarin class: they will affect the lives of everybody on the planet.

You might think that the above list of topics is a preamble for the Edge Question 2016, but you would be wrong. It was a central point in my essay, ”The Third Culture,” published 25 years ago in The Los Angeles Times, 1991 (see below). The essay, a manifesto, was a collaborative effort, with input from Stephen Jay Gould, Murray Gell-Mann, Richard Dawkins, Daniel C. Dennett, Jared Diamond, Stuart Kauffman, Nicholas Humphrey, among other distinguished scientists and thinkers. It proclaimed:

The third culture consists of those scientists and other thinkers in the empirical world who, through their work and expository writing, are taking the place of the traditional intellectual in rendering visible the deeper meanings of our lives, redefining who and what we are.

“The wide appeal of the third-culture thinkers,” I wrote, “is not due solely to their writing ability; what traditionally has been called ‘science’ has today become ‘public culture.’Stewart Brand writes that ‘Science is the only news. When you scan through a newspaper or magazine, all the human interest stuff is the same old he-said-she-said, the politics and economics the same sorry cyclic dramas, the fashions a pathetic illusion of newness, and even the technology is predictable if you know the science. Human nature doesn’t change much; science does, and the change accrues, altering the world irreversibly.’ We now live in a world in which the rate of change is the biggest change.” Science has thus become a big story, if not the big story: news that will stay news.

This is evident by the continued relevance today of the scientific topics in the 1991 essay that were all in play before the Web, social media, mobile communications, deep learning, big data. Time for an update. …

Contributors include: Long Now President Stewart Brand, Long Now Board Members Kevin Kelly, Peter Schwartz, Paul Saffo, and many of our past Seminar speakers.

 

 

 

 

Apollo 17 Digital Archive

Relive the sights and sounds of Apollo 17 – the final mission of NASA’s Apollo program, on its 43rd anniversary.  Ben Feist, a developer from Toronto, has built an interface to experience the Apollo 17 mission that syncs the 300 hours of mission audio, 22 hours of video, and 4,200 pictures, along with commentary from the astronauts, into a realtime playback of the mission that you can experience in its entirety.

DOTS—Long-Term, Human-Readable Archival Data Storage

Via Alexis Madrigal’s TinyLetter, Real Future, DOTS is a Digital Optical Technology System developed by Eastman Kodak in the 01990s, and abandoned in 02002. In 02008, a team of digital imaging experts and former Kodak employees founded Group 47 to buy the DOTS patents and continue development. They succeeded in 2011.

Unlike magnetic and optical storage solutions, which must be protected from data corruption, physical degradation, and environmental damage, DOTS physically encodes data on an archival tape coated in a phase-change alloy. The alloy is resistant to temperature extremes, electromagnetic pulses, and other common environmental hazards (though it is vulnerable to acids—including, apparently, Sprite), while the tape itself is made of archival materials.

Just as importantly, DOTS is also meant to withstand the onset of a digital dark age. The data, which may include words and images as well as digitally encoded information, is transferred to the alloy using a laser, which changes the alloy’s index of refraction. In other words, the blank portions of the tape are shiny, while the data-bearing portions are dull. The result, though written at a microscopic scale, is visible under normal magnification.

Each tape begins with a Rosetta Leader(TM)—a human-readable, microfiche-scale, page that explains the storage format, and includes instructions for building a DOTS reader. According to Group 47 president Rob Hummel, even if there were no way to build the reader, it would be possible to decode the data using nothing more than the instructions in the Rosetta Leader and a camera. “While it would be very tedious,” he says in a video describing the system, “at least it wouldn’t be impossible.”

In tests, DOTS has been shown to remain archival for at least 100 years—short enough, as long-term thinking goes, but far longer than magnetic tape storage or the always-evolving hardware needed to read current digital storage media. As the Group 47 website notes, “Competing technologies (magnetic tape, hard drives) require a complex and expensive system of data migration within five years, as, beyond this, there is an unacceptably high probability of data loss due to catastrophic media and/or data degradation or outright failure.”

Rick Prelinger Seminar Media

This lecture was presented as part of The Long Now Foundation’s monthly Seminars About Long-term Thinking.

Lost Landscapes of San Francisco, 10

Wednesday December 9, 02015 – San Francisco

Video is up on the Prelinger Seminar page.

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Cocktail Mechanics class at The Interval

 

The Interval at Long Now cocktail classroom series:

“Cocktail Mechanics” class at The Interval (tickets $100 each)

Taught by Jennifer Colliau (Beverage Director of The Interval at Long Now)

The Interval’s new cocktail classroom series will teach you the art and science of making drinks. In small, hands-on classes you will learn the fundamentals and finer points of making exceptional cocktails directly from one of San Francisco’s finest bartenders, our own Jennifer Colliau.

In Cocktail Mechanics, Jennifer explains both fundamentals and finer points while teaching several recipes from behind The Interval bar. Then you take a turn to practice what you’ve learned under her supervision. The Interval will be closed during the class, so you can use all the tools, ingredients and glassware that our bartenders do.

Jennifer will show you how to make both classic cocktails and newer drinks created by some of San Francisco’s top bartenders. Next you and your classmates will stir or shake them yourselves. Of course you’ll also drink your creations, before leaving with copies of all the recipes so you can make them again at home.

Along the way you’ll learn skills you can use with any drink you make: measuring, different mixing methods (and when to use them), the proper glassware for each cocktail, and more. These are the same techniques our bartenders use every day.

Jennifer’s knowledge and attention to detail assure that The Interval’s cocktails are always delicious and true to their recipes. In this class you’ll have the rare opportunity to learn from her, so you can bring that bartending excellence home.

Jennifer Colliau is The Interval’s Beverage Director and a world famous bartender and cocktail historian. She designed and authored The Interval’s drink menu. A recognized authority on classic cocktails and contemporary mixology, Jennifer has been written about or written for publications such as The New York Times, Food & Wine, Wired, 7×7, The Washington Post, and Imbibe Magazine. Her company Small Hand Foods specializes in making artisanal syrups and other authentic ingredients for cocktails old and new. In 02015 the San Francisco Chronicle named Jennifer a “Bar Star” and they have also said the drinks on our menu are “some of the most finessed in town.”

Eric Cline Seminar Tickets

 

The Long Now Foundation’s monthly
Seminars About Long-term Thinking

Eric Cline presents “1177 B.C: When Civilization Collapsed”
TICKETS
Monday January 11, 02016 at 7:30pm SFJAZZ Center
Long Now Members can reserve 2 seats, join today! General Tickets $15

 

About this Seminar:

In 1177 B.C., the Bronze Age came to a sudden end, and with it the end of the dominance of the Minoans, Mycenaeans, Trojans, Hittites, and Babylonians– empires that had ruled for over a millennium. Eric Cline’s research paints a vivid picture of these thriving cultures and the complex causes that led to this “First Dark Age.”