Stewart Brand's Blog, page 80

The Lunar 02013

The universe may be governed by quantum probability and uncertainty, but we can nevertheless predict the movements of bodies in our solar system with relative accuracy. For a preview of how the Moon will behave in 02013, this video offers an animated choreography of its phases and libration as it ellipses around our planet.

And for detailed information about specific dates of your choosing, NASA offers this handy tool.

How to Win at Forecasting – an Edge conversation with Philip Tetlock

Former SALT speaker Philip Tetlock spoke with Edge recently about his research into forecasting. In 02005, he published Expert Political Judgement: How Good is it? How Can We Know?, for which he spent over a decade recording and assessing the predictions made by public policy experts. He found them to be not much better than coin-flipping, but was also able to specify that “Hedgehogs” (those holding a single grand theory and fitting events into its framework) did much worse than “Foxes” (skeptical, flexible thinkers).

In his conversation with Edge, he expands on what makes Foxes better predictors, using Nate Silver as a jumping off point, and offers an update on his work since Expert Political Judgement:

Perhaps the most important consequence of publishing the book is that it encouraged some people within the US intelligence community to start thinking seriously about the challenge of creating accuracy metrics and for monitoring how accurate analysts are–which has led to the major project that we’re involved in now, sponsored by the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activities (IARPA). It extends from 2011 to 2015, and involves thousands of forecasters making predictions on hundreds of questions over time and tracking in accuracy.

Exercises like this are really important for a democracy. The Nate Silver episode illustrates in a small way what I hope will happen over and over again over the next several decades, which is, there are ways of benchmarking the accuracy of pundits. If pundits feel that their accuracy is benchmarked they will be more careful about what they say, they’ll be more thoughtful about what they say, and it will elevate the quality of public debate.

By the way, the forecasting contest he mentions is accepting submissions.

The Cambridge Project for Existential Risk

Human technology is undoubtedly getting more powerful every year, and our destructive potential is no exception. The Cold War notion of ‘mutually assured destruction‘ was unthinkable for most of human history, as was the ability to fundamentally alter the climate of the planet on which we rely. As the capabilities of our technologies continue to grow, what are the ways in which we become increasingly able to bring about our own demise as a species?

Martin Rees and Huw Price of the University of Cambridge and the Skype founder Jaan Tallinn teamed up to investigate and mitigate that very possibility. In founding the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at Cambridge University, they explain their motivation:

Many scientists are concerned that developments in human technology may soon pose new, extinction-level risks to our species as a whole. Such dangers have been suggested from progress in AI, from developments in biotechnology and artificial life, from nanotechnology, and from possible extreme effects of anthropogenic climate change. The seriousness of these risks is difficult to assess, but that in itself seems a cause for concern, given how much is at stake.

Rees, Huw and Tallinn agree that scientists need to pay more attention to this issue. The long-term future of humanity is at stake, and we need to understand more clearly the power that we wield in the modern world, and how to avoid using it destructively. The issue can, in fact, be extended beyond our own species. As Stewart Brand concluded his summary of co-founder Martin Rees’ SALT talk:

Now that we are stewards of this planet, we are responsible for maintaining life’s possibilities in this cosmic neighborhood.

Rick Prelinger Seminar Primer

“Lost Landscapes of San Francisco, 7″

Tuesday December 11, 02012 at the Castro Theater, San Francisco

Guerrilla archivist and “media archaeologist” Rick Prelinger has built his career on uncovering, preserving, and sharing alternative takes on American cultural history. He is the founder of the Prelinger Archives , a massive collection of “ephemeral films”: non-fiction video made for educational, industrial, or promotional purposes. Though these films are typically made for short-term usage with a very specific intent, Prelinger sees in this material a window into “secret histories” and untold perspectives on American life.

“I was amazed by these films’ dual character … How they both recorded appearances and sold persuasion – how to behave, what to buy and do. They showed the way things were and the way things were supposed to be. Quite unlike feature (commercial narrative) films, which tended to have a much more synthetic, artificially-constructed world.” – SF360.org

In 02002, when the collection had amassed upwards of 60,000 films, Prelinger sold the Archives to the Library of Congress. Yet his goal is not just to preserve these films: he seeks to share them with the public, in hopes that these arcane “celluloid fossils” become part of our collective cultural history and seed the growth of new stories.

“Art, culture and science are almost always built upon work that’s come before, and we want to provide access to historical materials so as to enable new authorship.” – aiga.org

Prelinger provides stock footage to filmmakers and companies, but is also dedicated to making his collection freely available in the public domain. To that end, Prelinger opened an “acquisition-friendly” library in San Francisco’s South of Market district in 02004. Open to the public on Wednesdays, it houses a collection of ephemera in both print and video, and encourages creative re-use of the materials in its collection.

Prelinger’s work is available online, as well. He has collaborated with the Internet Archive to provide public access to over 2000 films from his collection. Take a look, for example, at A Trip Down Market Street, filmed from the front of a San Francisco street car, just days before the earthquake of 01906:

Also available is Panorama Ephemera, a feature-length film that Prelinger released in 02004, made with footage from his collection. More recently, he has been working on a series of archival compilation films about San Francisco. Comprising seven annual installments, the Lost Landscapes of San Francisco tell a cultural history of the city through the eyes of home-video makers and ephemeral film footage. In collaboration with The Long Now Foundation, Prelinger has screened installments of the Lost Landscapes at theaters in San Francisco for four consecutive Decembers.

Rick Prelinger shows the 7th installment of his Lost in San Francisco series on December 11th at the Castro Theater in San Francisco. You can reserve tickets, get directions and sign up for the podcast on the Seminar page.

Subscribe to the Seminars About Long-term Thinking podcast for more thought-provoking programs.

Long Now Salon: Where the Berries Meet the Gin

For the Long Now Salon project artisan distillers St George Spirits helped us create a pair of distinctive spirits inspired by long-term thinking. Our gin features juniper berries we harvested from the peaks of our property on Mount Washington in eastern Nevada. In this video Lance Winters, St. George’s Master Distiller, extolls the myriad flavors that our juniper brings to the gin. Here, he and distiller Dave Smith are in the middle of preparing the berries for exposure to the vapors of the nascent gin.

Juniperus communis grows wild in sprawling, low bushes at a height of about 8,000 feet on our Nevada land, interwoven with multi-thousand year old bristlecone pines. The “berries” are not technically fruit but tiny pine cones. From Wikipedia:

The female seed cones are very distinctive, with fleshy, fruit-like coalescing scales which fuse together to form a “berry”-like structure, 4–27 mm long, with 1-12 unwinged, hard-shelled seeds. In some species these “berries” are red-brown or orange but in most they are blue; they are often aromatic and can be used as a spice.

Juniper is the key aromatic ingredient in gin, from which its name derives. Lance tasted a sample of our berries and said we had something special. Taste characteristics that Lance mentions include huckleberry, tart blueberry, pine resin, hops aromatics, chocolate, and Chinese long pepper. You can imagine our excitement at having impressed Lance’s experienced and discerning palate.

We gathered juniper by hand in Nevada while Lance assembled a recipe of botanicals including coriander and cedar that complement the berries and results in a gin we are proud to pair with the launch of our new space. The Salon is designed to be a social hub that fosters long-term thinking and inspires conversation. Remarkable spirits, in every sense, are required.

St George Spirits are famous for their eaux de vies, vodkas, gins, whiskeys and other hand-crafted spirits. Their delicious, inventive products come from a scientific and artistic approach to distillation. They marry cutting edge techniques with an extensive knowledge of the centuries old tradition of distilling eaux de vies. And like the best artists and scientists, they are always up for a new challenge.

It is auspicious that we launch this project as St George reaches an impressive anniversary:

When Jörg Rupf founded St. George Spirits in 01982, he was a lone wolf making elegant eaux de vie in a wine cooler world. In those days absinthe was illegal, craft-produced American gins were unheard of, and there was no such thing as an American single malt whiskey.

We want to congratulate everyone at St George Spirits as they celebrate 30 years in business. To think they’ve accomplished so much and aren’t even a century old.

Our collaboration with them has been fun, inspiring and educational. Their care and expertise helps make our Salon and Founder’s Club bottle keep truly special. Their headquarters is close by to us in Alameda, California and they are open for tours and tastings.

See more videos on The Long Now Foundation Vimeo page.

Peter Warshall Seminar Media

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

Enchanted by the Sun: The CoEvolution of Light, Life, and Color on Earth

Wednesday November 28, 02012 – San Francisco

Audio is up on the Warshall Seminar page, or you can subscribe to our podcast.

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Light and beauty – a summary by Stewart Brand

“The naturalist’s task,” Warshall began, “is to observe without human-centered thoughts and human-centered agendas, to observe with a Gaian perspective and with the perspective of the organisms you’re watching. The naturalist considers all species in space/time as equally beautiful.” There’s a connection between art and science—between the poetic organization of thought and the pragmatic organization of thought. Light operates at a distance. That inspires anticipation, which becomes yearning, which becomes desire, which becomes hope, which generates transcendence. When an image becomes transcendent for you, it becomes part of how you perceive. “The Sun is the initiator of all sugars.”

Starting 250 million years ago, life rebelled and began generating its own light. There are 40 different kinds of bioluminescence, used for mate attraction, for baiting prey, for deceit. “Danger and beauty always go together. Deceit—not truth—is beauty. A term some art critics use is ‘abject beauty.’” Humans began the second light rebellion by harnessing fire a million years ago. Then came electric lights in the 1880s, and we transformed the light regime and hence behavior of many species. Artists like James Turrell shifted art from reflected light to emitted light, and that is increasingly the norm as we spend our days with screens radiating information into our eyes.

Our eyes are pockets of ocean that let us perceive only a portion of the Sun’s spectrum of light. Bees, with their crystal eyes, see in the ultraviolet. Snakes perceive infrared, and so do some insects that can detect the heat of a forest fire from 40 miles away.

Bowerbird males create elaborate art galleries, even devising forced perspective, to impress females. Young male bowerbirds watch the process for four years to learn the art. Throughout nature, watch for bold patterns of white, black, and red, which usually signal danger.

Every day there is a brief time without danger. At twilight—as daylight shifts to night—all life pauses. “That moment has a contemplative beauty that we cherish. It is a moment of Gaian aesthetic.”

Warshall’s talk, and his life, have been a convergence of art and science. Asked about how scientists could learn more about art, Warshall suggested they go to an art class and learn how to draw. As for how artists can learn more of science, he had two words:

“Outdoors. Look.”

Subscribe to our Seminar email list for updates and summaries.

Long Now Salon: Not A Typical Bar

Jillian Northrup is one half of the design-build team Because We Can who are leading the design for the Long Now Salon. She told us how designing the Salon for Long Now is different from a typical commercial bar project. See more of their design on the Because We Can site (links below).

Jillian mentions the unique design solution they devised for storing our Long Now Bottle Club bottles: raising them into the rafters of the space like chandeliers. In the image of the new design below you can see them in the ceiling above the bar. Here’s how you can reserve your own bottle.

The above video and the rest on the Long Now Vimeo page were produced by Sustainability Media who do our seminar videos. In the future we’ll share a longer documentary including these interviews and more on the whole Salon design project. We hope you enjoy these clips as a sneak peek.

If you’ve been in the Long Now space at Fort Mason you may have noticed our witty etched aluminum signs with phrases like “Carpe Millenium” and the great great great great sign below. Those were also designed by Because We Can. A reminder that long-term thinking goes well with a sense of humor.

Links:

Because We Can
More pics of their Salon design for Long Now
Long Now Vimeo page
Etched aluminum signs

Long Now Salon: Time in a Bottle

Lance Winters, Master Distiller of St. George Spirits, says the nature of his craft is to archive the essence of a time and place. Lance has helped us make an aromatic gin featuring Juniper berries harvested amongst the 5,000 year-old Bristlecone Pines on Long Now’s Nevada site. Our gin will only be served at the Long Now salon space. Supporters of the Founders Bottle Club campaign can reserve a bottle of this rare Long Now spirit and help fund the construction of the salon.

Lance sees parallels between the art eau de vie distillation and the mission of Long Now:

We take a photograph of the way something smells and tastes and we lock that away on the most archival format we can do. You can crack a bottle of our stuff open a hundred years from now and it’s going to smell the same way it did, by and large, as when we distilled it. So we’re able to capture an olfactory slice of time.

So, you should expect Long Now gin to taste like this:

More videos about the Long Now salon and related projects on the Long Now Vimeo page.

Lazar Kunstmann and Jon Lackman Seminar Media

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

Preservation without Permission: the Paris Urban eXperiment

Tuesday November 13, 02012 – San Francisco

Video is up on the Kunstmann and Lackman Seminar page for Members.

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Audio is up on the Kunstmann and Lackman Seminar page, or you can subscribe to our podcast.

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Preservation Without Permission – a summary by Stewart Brand

Their video showed clandestine urban “infiltration” (trespassing) at its most creative. Paris’s Urban Experiment group (UX), now in their fourth decade, have a restoration branch called Untergunther. They evade authorities to carry out secret preservation projects on what they call “nonvisible heritage.”

Being clandestine, they do not reveal their activities except for instances that become publicized in the media; then they reveal everything to set the record straight (and embarrass the media along with the authorities). In the video presented by Untergunther member Lazar Kunstmann and translator Jon Lackman, we see a hidden underground screening room and bar beneath the Trocadero in Paris’s Latin Quarter. When police discover it and shut it down, the equipment is surreptitiously removed to a site deeper in the city’s vast network of underground passages, where film showings continue to this day. One year the group’s annual film festival was staged and performed overnight in one of Paris’s great monuments, the Panthéon, built in 1790. In the video (excerpt here) we see a small boy slipping through newly crafted underground passageways, picking a lock, opening the cupboard with all the Panthéon‘s keys, and gliding on his skateboard beneath the great dome across the ornate marble floors by Foucault’s original pendulum as film enthusiasts set up a temporary theater and have a clandestine film festival—gone without a trace by dawn.

Elsewhere in the Panthéon the explorers found a neglected old clock displaying stopped time to the public. In 2005 they decided to repair it. They converted an abandoned room high in the monument into a clock shop and hangout. With clockmaker (and UX member) Jean-Baptiste Viot they spent a year completely reconditioning the 1850 works of the clock. Now that it worked again, they thought it should keep time and chime proudly, but someone needed to wind it. They approached the Director of the Panthéon, Bernard Jeannot, who didn’t even know that the monument had a clock. At first dumbfounded, Jeannot publicly embraced the project and applauded Untergunther.

Jeannot’s superiors at the Centre des Monuments Nationaux accordingly fired him (early retirement) and brought suit against Untergunther. The court determined that fixing clocks is not a crime, and in France trespassing on public property is, in itself, not a crime. Case dismissed. Spitefully, the new Director of the Panthéon has made sure the clock remains unwound, and he disabled it by removing an essential part.

Lazar Kunstmann explained (through Jon Lackman) Untergunther’s perspective on cultural heritage, particularly “minor” heritage—the countless objects that embody cultural continuity but don’t attract institutions to protect them. Who is responsible for such “nonvisible” heritage? The protectors should be local, self-appointed, and nonvisible themselves, because exposure of the value of the objects attracts destructive tourists. Preservation without permission works best without visibility.

Since 2005, Untergunther’s new precautions against discovery have successfully kept its ongoing preservation projects hidden. As for the Panthéon clock, that essential part the Director removed to disable it has been purloined to safekeeping with Untergunther. Someday authorities may allow the clock to tick again. In the meantime it is in good repair.

Subscribe to our Seminar email list for updates and summaries.

Charles Mann on the State of the Species

Charles Mann, a former SALT speaker, asks (and gets pretty deep into answering):

Why and how did humankind become “unusually successful”? And what, to an evolutionary biologist, does “success” mean, if self-destruction is part of the definition? Does that self-destruction include the rest of the biosphere? What are human beings in the grand scheme of things anyway, and where are we headed? What is human nature, if there is such a thing, and how did we acquire it? What does that nature portend for our interactions with the environment? With 7 billion of us crowding the planet, it’s hard to imagine more vital questions.

- Orion Magazine

It’s a long and informative essay, and the Japanese concept of hara hachi bu, described near the conclusion, may seem particularly poignant if you’re still recovering from Thanksgiving and Black Friday.

(Image: World Map of Human Migrations)