Rah Simple Scenarios

Scenario planning is a popular way to think about possible futures. In scenario planning, one seeks a modest number of scenarios that are each internally consistent, story-like, describe equilibrium rather than transitory situations, and are archetypal in representing clusters of relevant driving forces. The set of scenarios should cover a wide range of possibilities across key axes of uncertainty and disagreement.

Ask most “hard” science folks about scenario planning and they’ll roll their eyes, seeing it as hopelessly informal and muddled. And yes, one reason for its popularity is probably that insiders can usually make it say whatever they want it to say. Nevertheless, when I try to think hard about the future I am usually drawn to something very much like scenario planning. It does in fact seem a robustly useful tool.

It often seems useful to collect a set of scenarios defined in terms of their reference to a “baseline” scenario. For example, macroeconomic scenarios are often (e.g.) defined in terms of deviation from baseline projections of constant growth, stable market shares, etc.

If one chooses a most probable scenario as a baseline, as in microeconomic projections, then variations on that baseline may conveniently have similar probabilities to one another. However, it seems to me that it is often more useful to instead pick baselines that are simple, i.e., where they and simple variations can be more easily analyzed for their consequences.

For example even if a major war is likely sometime in the next century, one may prefer to use as a baseline a scenario where there are no such wars. This baseline will make it easier to analyze the consequences of particular war scenarios, such as adding a war between India and Pakistan, or between China and Taiwan. Even if a war between India and Pakistan is more likely than not within a century, using the scenario of such a war as a baseline will make it harder to define and describe other scenarios as variations on that baseline.

Of course the scenario where an asteroid destroys all life on Earth is extremely simple, in the sense of making it very easy to forecast socially relevant consequences. So clearly you usually don’t want the simplest possible scenario. You instead want to a mix of reasons for choosing scenario features.

Some features will be chosen because they are central to your forecasting goals, and others will be chosen because they seem far more likely than alternatives. But still other baseline scenario features should be chosen because they make it easier to analyze the consequences of that scenario and of simple variations on it.

In economics, we often use competitive baseline scenarios, i.e., scenarios where supply and demand analysis applies well. We do this not such much because we believe that this is the usual situation, but because such scenarios make great baselines. We can more easily estimate the consequences of variations by seeing them as situations where supply or demand changes. We also consider variations where supply and demand applies less well, but we know it will be harder to calculate the consequences of such scenarios and variations on them.

Yes, it is often a good idea to first look for your keys under the lamppost. You keys are probably not there, but that is a good place to anchor your mental map of the territory, so you can plan your search of the dark.

Terry Hunt and Carl Lipo Seminar Media

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

Thursday January 17, 02012 – San Francisco

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In the most isolated place on Earth a tiny society built world-class monuments. Easter Island (Rapa Nui) is 1,000 miles from the nearest Pacific island, 3,000 miles from the nearest continent. It is just six by ten miles in size, with no running streams, terrible soil, occasional droughts, and a relatively barren ocean. Yet there are 900 of the famous statues (moai), weighing up to 75 tons and 40 feet high. Four hundred of them were moved many miles from where they were quarried to massive platforms along the shores.

Terry Hunt and Carl Lipo began their archeological work on Easter Island in 2001 expecting to do no more than add details to the standard morality tale of the collapse of the island’s ecology and society—Polynesians discovered Rapa Nui around 400-800AD and soon overpopulated the place (30,000 people on an island the size of San Francisco); competing elites cut down the last trees to move hundreds of enormous statues; after excesses of “moai madness” the elites descend into warfare and cannibalism, and the ecology collapses; Europeans show up in 1722. The obvious lesson is that Easter Island, “the clearest example of a society that destroyed itself“ (Jared Diamond), is a warning of what could happen to Earth unless we learn to live with limits.

A completely different story emerged from Hunt and Lipo’s archaeology. Polynesians first arrived as late as 1200AD. There are no signs of violence—none of the fortifications common on other Pacific islands, no weapons, no traumatized skeletons. The palm trees that originally covered the island succumbed mainly to rats that arrived with the Polynesians and ate all the nuts. The natives burned what remained to enrich the poor soil and then engineered the whole island with small rocks (“lithic mulch”) to grow taro and sweet potatoes. The population stabilized around 4,000 and kept itself in balance with its resources for 500 years until it was totally destroyed in the 18th century by European diseases and enslavement. (It wasn’t Collapse; it was Guns, Germs, and Steel.)

What was up with the statues? How were they moved? Did they have a role in the sustainable balance the islanders achieved? Hunt and Lipo closely studied the statues found along the moai roads from the quarry. They had D-shaped beveled bottoms (unlike the flat bottoms of the platform statues) angled 14 ° forward. The ones on down slopes had fallen on their face; on up slopes they were on their back. The archeologists concluded they must have been moved upright—”walked,” just as Rapa Nuians long had said. No tree logs were required. Standard Polynesian skill with ropes would suffice.

“Nova” and National Geographic insisted on a demonstration, so a 5-ton, 10-foot-high “starter moai” replica was made and shipped to Hawaii. After some fumbling around, 18 unskilled people secured three ropes around the top of the statue—one to each side for rocking the statue, one in the rear to keep it leaning forward without falling. “Heave! Ho! Heave! Ho!” they cry in the video, the statue rocks, dancing lightly forward, and the audience at Cowell Theater erupts with applause. Progress was fast, even hard to stop—100 yards in 40 minutes. A family could move one.

Stone statues to ancestors are common throughout Polynesia, but the enormous, numerous moai of Easter Island are unique in the world. Were they part of the peaceful population control and conservative agriculture regime that helped the society “optimize long-term stability over immediate returns” in a nearly impossible place to live?

During the Q & A, Hunt and Lipo were asked how their new theory of Easter Island history was playing on the island itself. Shame at being the self-destructive dopes of history has been replaced by pride, they said. Moai races are being planned. Polynesians were the space explorers of the Pacific. They completed discovering every island in the huge ocean by the end of the 13th century, colonized the ones they could, and then stopped.

Easter Island is not Earth. It is Mars.

Subscribe to our Seminar email list for updates and summaries.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 29th, 02013 at 2:03 pm and is filed under Events, Seminars.

Chris Anderson Seminar Tickets

January 28th, 02013 by Austin Brown

Chris Anderson’s book THE LONG TAIL chronicled how the Web revolutionized and democratized distribution. His new book MAKERS shows how the same thing is happening to manufacturing, with even wider consequences, and this time the leading revolutionaries are the young of the world. Anderson himself left his job as editor of Wired magazine to join a 22-year-old from Tijuana in running a typical Makers firm, 3D Robotics, which builds do-it-yourself drones.

Web-based collaboration tools and small-batch technology such as cheap 3D printers, 3D scanners, laser cutters, and assembly robots, Anderson points out, are transforming manufacturing. Suddenly, large-scale manufacturers are competing not just with each other on multi-year cycles, they are competing with swarms of tiny competitors who can go from invention to innovation to market dominance in a few weeks. Anybody can play; a great many already are; a great many more are coming.

“Today,” Anderson writes, “there are nearly a thousand ‘makerspaces’— shared production facilities— around the world, and they’re growing at an astounding rate: Shanghai alone is building one hundred of them.”

“Open source,” he adds, “is not just an efficient innovation method— it’s a belief system as powerful as democracy or capitalism for its adherents.”

This entry was posted on Monday, January 28th, 02013 at 12:19 pm and is filed under Long Now Announcements, Seminars.

Ideas about Long-term Thinking.

The Long Now Foundation - Fostering Long-term Responsibility - est. 01996.

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Personal experimentation: context specific?

A last way that personal experimentation could be worth it for me, yet not already completely covered by others, is that most of the facts one is likely to learn are quite context-specific. That way, everyone in history might have figured out for themselves what the best time and sugar-content for lunch is, and it would be worthless to me.

This also seems quite plausible. It could either be that people are so varied that there is just no good answer to whether it is better for productivity to eat snacks throughout the day or a few big meals for instance. Or it could be that which value of one parameter is best depends on all the other ones, so if you tend to eat more sugar than me and sleep less and laugh more, exercise might make you less sleepy than I.

The latter possibility bodes poorly for those who would experiment a lot. After you have determined the best quantity and timing of exercise, you might go on to try to optimize your sleep or sugar intake and make the original finding worthless.

This explanation would also seem to explain the observations in the last post: that many people do seem quite keen advise on the details of one’s life, but that the content of such recommendations seem a bit all over the place. Perhaps each person’s discoveries really do work well for them, but just look like a sea of noise to all the other people.

Decelerator Helmet

Our increasingly digital culture seems to be following Moore’s law of exponential acceleration – but sometimes you need to slow things down to understand them a little better.

To that end, German artist Lorenz Potthast has built what he calls a Decelerator Helmet. It is what it sounds like: a helmet that allows you to experience the world in slow motion. It’s an aluminum sphere that fits snugly over your head; your only visual connection to the outside world is a small camera, mounted to its exterior, that transmits live, but slow-motion video to an interior display.

Potthast explains that the helmet is meant to “decouple … personal perception from … natural timing:” it’s an experiment in engaging differently with our fast-paced world. Playing around with the flow of time, the artist suggests, exposes its important role in mediating the relationship between our inner experience and the outside world:

The decelerator gives the user the possibility to reflect about the flow of time in general, and about the relation between sensory perception, environment, and corporality in particular. Also, it dramatically visualize[s] how slowing down can potentially cause a loss of presen[ce].

For more information about this and other projects, visit Potthast’s (German-language) website here.

The Decelerator Helmet – A slow motion for Real Life from Lorenz Potthast on Vimeo.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 27th, 02012 at 6:50 am and is filed under Long Term Art.

Launch of the LDCM: Continuing 40 years of Landsat Data

In 1972, NASA launched its first Landsat satellite into orbit. This February, it will launch its eighth.

The new satellite is part of the Landsat Data Continuity Mission, a collaboration between NASA and USGS that will continue adding to 40 years worth of data about the Earth’s surface.

In what is now the longest-running project of collecting satellite imagery of Earth, Landsat data offer an important resource for a variety of endeavors: from cartography to natural disaster management; urban planning to the monitoring of natural resource usage. Moreover, the unprecedented continuity of data offers invaluable insight into the way that Earth has been changing over the past 40 years.

Landsat 8 will be the most advanced of them yet, promising not just the continuation of data collection, but more precise data that will enrich ongoing geological, ecological, and geographical research.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 28th, 02013 at 9:01 am and is filed under Long Term Science, The Big Here.

Analysis Challenge: Can you earn the most Gallery views this month?

One month ago, we launched the Recorded Future Gallery, and we’re delighted that the publicly shared reports have already racked up more than 10,000 views! This fast start is exciting, but we know the surface is only scratched.

So, we’re hosting a contest during February to see which talented analyst using Recorded Future can create the most interesting report! We'll crown a champion the week of March 4.
It’s easy to participate:

During February log in or sign up for freeCreate a report, and publish it to the Gallery.At the end of the month, the author of the most viewed report wins a new iPod 5.

It’s no holds barred for spreading the word, so tweet, link, and promote your work throughout the month to earn more views. For inspiration, there are examples on Analysis Intelligence, and below, you’ll find two featured reports from the Gallery.

While you’re building a killer report for the contest, know that we also have tools specifically designed for power analysts.

Formerly known as Premium, Recorded Future Professional adds the following capabilities to the free Basic toolkit:

Export for visualizations (image, PDF, PPT, HTML) and data (CSV, KML)Private workspace for saving reports and sharing with individualsAdvanced search tools for querying by publication time, source attributes, and language.

Upgrade to Professional from your Recorded Future Basic, or you can purchase a subscription directly.

SAEE: who was right?

Bryan Caplan argues, economists mostly agree with each other, as compared to the results of the investigation, the reports to the general public and the economy (SAEE) Americans and economists:

Leading economists to correlate with the dispute is a political ideology and, to a lesser extent, the party affiliation. Liberal conservative Republican economists agree, like taxes, regulation, expected profits and the salaries of company directors and some of the employment-related problems. Conservative economists are also optimistic about the future of the economy and much more. Note the ideological differences are is a testament to the past or the present performance. Economists
cross-party much the same direction, inequality, real income and real wages over the last two decades.

I can not find the agreement in the past very comforting: financial advice is to give good effects in the future. However, I would point out to the ex post evaluation of the differences, the forecasts are an opportunity. In fact, when Bryan's book was published in 2002, a 5-year projections on the timeline had already come and gone. But there is nothing to prevent the from checking now. [Please note, I'm ready after that, until now, with the purpose to put it before exploring the information.] The results below the fold.

SAEE was in 1996 and the following question:

Over the next five years, do you think the average American living standards to rise, or fall, or remain about the same?

The u.s. median household income (inflation-adjusted) rose from 5 in the course of the year, economists and particularly cautious economists anticipated. [ETA: as well as the personal median income.] The forecast after the household median income peaked in 2007, and is now slightly lower than in 1996. [ETA: median personal income is slightly higher, HT Todd Kuipers.]

A single data point for a bit, but if someone assembled at a series of such predictions, it could be very useful to assess to what extent the different ideologies of the empirical elements are "virtual reality-based." Maybe, because such a project would bring to the arrogance of the ideologues in the competing factions hoping to advance, showing their ideological superiority.

US laissez-faire serves a greater global good

Liberals across the developed world are very concerned by inequality within the United States, as demonstrated by global interest in the Occupy Wall Street movement. This is peculiar because poverty within the United States is less common, and less severe, than it is in most countries around the world. The US does have a high level of inequality for a developed country, but it is not extreme by global standards Unfortunately, this disproportionate concern for Americans leads to attempts to narrow income inequality that may increase poverty and inequality worldwide. [1] I’ll explain how.

The US has long been one of the most innovative countries in the world, and exports the technologies it develops everywhere it can. This is, at least in part, due to its relatively cut-throat culture and laissez-faire economic system. Low taxes and ungenerous welfare mean the benefits of working hard, taking risks and making it big, are higher in the US than most other developed countries. More importantly, weaker regulation in the US means incumbents are less protected from competition, and talented people can more easily start new firms and overturn the status quo. Conversely, daring entrepreneurs are less rewarded in countries which redistribute a great deal of wealth to the poor, or build thickets of regulation that unintentionally (or intentionally) slow down disruptive businesses and technologies. While tempering the ravages of the market may on balance improve the welfare of current Americans, doing so is likely to lead to less experimentation in science, equipment, software, art, business models and so on.

Such innovation generates enormous and enduring positive externalities because the successes are copied at low cost across the world and enrich everyone’s lives. Economic theory would predict that coordinating to stimulate more of these costly but invaluable innovations would be a major concern in international diplomacy. But for some reason it is not, and so it is up to individual countries and the people within them to take these risks on behalf of us all.

Miserly social security and weak regulation in America at most harm 0.3 billion people as long as such policies persist; any resulting innovation spillovers help the remaining, poorer 6.7 billion for centuries to come because improvements in technology persist and compound over time. We all continue to benefit from the hard work of those who developed the telephone and prompted the development of an ever-growing number of related products.

This is not to say that the Occupy movement does not have some important points; it is crucial to oppose the US’s many ‘crony capitalist’ policies which enrich the wealthy while also stifling competition and creative destruction. [2] Nor would the ideal necessarily be a minimal government; there is a prima facie case that government investment in education, R&D, natural-monopoly infrastructure, and so on, can spur technological change. Unfortunately, a higher and higher share of US government spending is going to the opposite: the military, Medicare, Medicaid, unemployment benefits and pensions. These programs are not investments in the future, and generate few if any positive spillovers for future Americans and the rest of the world. And because these programs are funded by taxes on the hard-working and successful, they blunt the incentives to invent things that help the whole of humanity.

Anyone who cares about lowering poverty and inequality, and doesn’t believe that American citizens are dramatically more important than everyone else, should think carefully before encouraging the US to follow the European economic model. If the US were go even further and slip into the sclerotic ‘extractive‘ economic model found in most of the developing world and some of southern Europe, it would be a global catastrophe. Resisting any movement in this direction is one way that heartless US conservatives are inadvertently more compassionate than they look.

Update: Turn out I’m I’m not the first person to notice this problem!

Update 2: Many people below doubt whether the US is more laissez-faire, and whether a laissez-faire model does as a general rule foster innovation. If you doubt these things, at least take away the point that whichever policies you think do stifle innovation, whichever countries they are found in, are much more harmful than they first seem. I will research and write up more on the topic of which broad economic settings lead to the most innovation in the future.

[1] The effect on wealth inequality is unclear, but the effect on ‘welfare inequality’ is likely to be negative.

[2] Though perversely, lousy healthcare policies have led to very high prices for medicine in the US, which has driven investments in new procedures and drugs, which have been borrowed by other countries. My guess is that effort probably would have been better directed at other industries.

Rick Prelinger Seminar Primer

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.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 4th, 02012 at 10:21 am and is filed under Events, Seminars.

Samuel Arbesman on the importance of long-term data

Digital data is exploding in volume and there’s enough money in making sense of it all that it’s garnered its own buzzword lately: big data. In an increasingly measurable world, data-sets of unprecedented size and comprehensiveness are turning up new and genuinely exciting insights. Applied Mathematician Samuel Arbesman points out, though, that many of these data-sets are but snapshots, when it’s timelapse videos we need to really understand something:

Why does the time dimension matter if we’re only interested in current or future phenomena? Because many of the things that affect us today and will affect us tomorrow have changed slowly over time: sometimes over the course of a single lifetime, and sometimes over generations or even eons.

Datasets of long timescales not only help us understand how the world is changing, but how we, as humans, are changing it — without this awareness, we fall victim to shifting baseline syndrome. This is the tendency to shift our “baseline,” or what is considered “normal” — blinding us to shifts that occur across generations (since the generation we are born into is taken to be the norm).

Arbesman spoke last year at a Salon event at The Long Now Foundation on his book, The Half-Life of Facts. He explained that there are patterns in the ways our scientific knowledge changes over time. Much of what we take to be true today has a half-life: it will decay at a predictable rate as new science overturns our current understanding. Long data, of the type he champions in this recent article, is essential to unearthing these types of insights and avoiding a static understanding of a dynamic world.

(The image above is a page from a notebook of Isaac Newton’s.)

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 31st, 02013 at 7:53 am and is filed under Long Term Science, Long Term Thinking.

Long data: Solar storms are projected to

As Samuel Arbesman in a recent article in the long data one might think, the activities of the information in the world today, the Sun will be able to tell what it is going to do tomorrow. But the exact last centuries has given us an understanding of the predictive patterns of solar storm activity.  This collection of data and the long insights, there is no guarantee you can view only the ads that are related to yours, but it keeps running the worldwide electrical and telecommunications infrastructure.

Long now trainee Sandy Curth writes:

Scientists at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center recently posted their predictions of solar cycle 02013. This coming fall is projected to peak at the 24th 11-year sunspot cycle. While this may sound like a scary, that's really prepared for the lowest since 01906. Although the expected solar activity and its implications for this year does not violate a number of records, the source of these predictions is an exceptional example of the long-term thinking of data stretching back more than 350 years.

Since the beginning of the 18th century astronomers have consistently noted a number of spots on the Sun's sunspot observation from the star catalogue of the Chinese astronomer Gan De 364BCE records. Belgian Solar influences Data Analysis Center to provide the information on an annual basis, the monthly sunspot 01700 01750 and daily from 01874. A modern solar forecasts are created to analyze trends and to measure activity caused by the Sun, the Earth magnetic field.

NASA solar physicist, Dr. David Hathaway tells the details of:

The techniques used to predict, at least during the period and amplitude of the sunspot. Relationships have been found in the next cycle of the previous cycle, the maximum size and the activity of sunspots and the length of the preceding period of at least the size of the.

Are those who are using measurements of changes in the Earth's magnetic field and before sunspot minimum of the most reliable methods. These changes in the Earth's magnetic field is known to be caused by solar storms, but the precise links between themselves and the future of solar activity is still uncertain.

The second is a change in the level of solar activity mode at a wavelength of 10.7 cm radio radiation from the Sun (2.8 GHz frequency). This magnetic flux is measured on a daily basis since 1947. That is why Dotin solar activity has a tendency to follow the Sun's ultraviolet changes that affect the Earth's upper atmosphere and ionosphere. Many of the models used in the upper atmosphere 10.7 cm flux (F 6.6) as input to the atmospheric density and satellite drag.

To predict the behavior of the sunspot cycle is quite reliable when the cycle is well underway (about 3 years after at least sunspot number [See Hathaway, Wilson and Reichmann solar physics; 151, 177 (1994)]). Before that time, however, the projections are less reliable, but just as important. Satellite orbits and space design often require information on solar activity levels years in advance.

While many solar systems are still a mystery, the researchers are able to anticipate the working well enough for our communication satellites, and time to prepare for a powerful geomagnetic storms, which can cover the entire city.

First solar storm recorded in September was caused by the significant flaws and 01859 as far as is known, the developing countries of the world telegraph system and the northern lights as far south as the Caribbean. In recent times, less severe storm 01989 was referred to the six million Canadians without power for nine hours. Predict the next big solar event becomes so important as to predict the next hurricane in terms of our infrastructure.

In the past seriously is a clear route to a good prognosis, but the composure to collect a seemingly useless to facilitate predictions of future thinkers is worth considering. Astronomers centuries ago had concrete applications of the data, they are stored in the Sun. Fortunately, however, they took the time to carefully gathering and compiling what they could see that today, when the researchers understand the potentially devastating effect on the harsh solar storm, they should be priceless.

Debuting New Source Analysis Tools

Those of you following Recorded Future for a while will remember a visualization that allowed you to explore reporting on events by different source attributes. We're excited to reintroduce that functionality in the form of a new Source Map view available now in the Basic and Professional suite of tools. This visualization allows analysts to compare how events are reported across media types and source locations as well as what sources are most prominent, fastest to report, and positive or negative on particular events.

Below you'll find examples for several of the aforementioned uses. Click on the images to explore the new Source Map live in Recorded Future, and be sure to try out the different filtering options available via the "Customize View" menu.

The view is able to deconstruct a set of events according to the media category of reporting sources: blog, mainstream, niche, government, etc. See a live example here.

Click for live view

The Source Map can be used to display how events were reported based on the location of those media sources. The data is structured at the country level, so in the above example, you can see that United States, New Zealand, and Australian media outlets are dominating coverage of recent events related to North Korea.

Click for live view

Sources will often focus their energy on different subjects, rely on particular individuals for quotes, or skew the news in one direction or another. The organization of subject matter reported by different sources allows analysts to better understand those biases.

There are many other dimensions of source data to be explored in Recorded Future. Above, you'll see sources reporting on recent Microsoft events described by the sentiment of their reporting on the company. Other ways to evaluate the data include identifying those sources that report most frequently on a subject, most frequently break news of events, and even locations of events sorted by country of reporting sources.

Give the new features a try, and let us know what you think!

Terry Hunt & Carl Lipo Seminar Primer

Thursday January 17, 02013 at the Cowell Theater, San Francisco

Archaeologists Terry Hunt and Carl Lipo study cultural evolution and diversity. Their research tries to answer questions about how small communities develop into complex societies, and how cultures change and spread over time. They’ve focused much of their work on the Southern Pacific, a big stretch of ocean, dotted by tiny islands, that poses somewhat of a conundrum to archaeologists and anthropologists: how did human populations ever manage to spread out across these isolated locales?

Easter Island, or Rapa Nui, is a particularly intriguing case. More than 2,000 miles removed from its nearest (inhabited) neighbor, the island is small and relatively poor in natural resources. Nevertheless, Rapa Nui was home – for a while at least – to an industrious society most known for its construction of nearly 900 giant statues, or moai. Scholars and researchers have pored over the mystery of how a small community was able to build such impressive statues, and why the population ultimately perished in the 18th century.

According to conventional theories, the answers to those questions serve as a warning to our modern global population. Many scholars believe that the population depleted what little natural resources their island had in order to satisfy an ever-growing obsession with their society’s statue-building cult, thereby causing their own “ecocide.” In order to move these massive stone figures, people felled the palm trees that were once abundant on the island and turned them into logs. But with the disappearance of these trees, other species quickly went extinct as well. No longer able to sustain itself, Rapa Nui society collapsed into chaos and ultimately perished.

“It seemed obvious to researchers that Rapa Nui was a clear case of human recklessness, over-population, over-exploitation, and cultural collapse. Given contemporary concerns about our own environmental future, Rapa Nui offered the quintessential case of “ecocide,” as Jared Diamond (2005) dubbed it. The case for “ecocide” seemed consistent with some accounts from early European visitors, some of the oral traditions, Heyerdahl’s views of pervasive warfare and cultural replacement, and the emerging palaeo-ecological evidence. Rapa Nui provided a compelling story and environmental message that held relevance in today’s urgent global crisis (e.g. Kirch 1997, 2004).” (Hunt & Lipo 2007:85)

Nevertheless, Lipo and Hunt found reason in the archaeological record to question that theory. They traveled to Easter Island, where they ran a creative, hands-on experiment that put one simple assumption to the test: did the islanders really use logs to move their statues?

“When people are asked, how did your ancestors move the statues, the answer was always, ‘they walked’. … For the Rapa Nui, that was the answer, and … the foreigners asking the question, they thought, ‘oh, well that’s silly, you know, how crazy.’”

Hunt and Lipo built a precise, 15-ton replica of a moai from concrete, and asked a small group of people to see if they could make it “walk”: to move it forward in an upright position, using only ropes. A PBS feature documents their process of trial and error – and eventual success.

By confirming this simple hypothesis – that the Rapa Nui did not need logs to move their moai – Hunt and Lipo are able to offer a new theory about how the islanders interacted with their environment, and what caused their eventual decline. In their book, The Statues That Walked: Unraveling the Mystery of Easter Island, they take their insight as the basis for a new view of cultural evolution in the Southeastern Pacific: rather than a symbol of reckless environmental destruction, the Easter Island statues are a testament to human innovation and creative use of the environment. Hunt and Lipo argue that the islanders were actually inventive ‘users’ of their island’s resources, and adept at maximizing its agricultural capacities. Rather than a dangerous, self-destructive obsession, the statues were in fact instrumental to a culture of sustainability. The eventual demise of the Easter Island population was caused by a confluence of complicated factors, with an important role played by European conquerors and the foreign pests and diseases they brought with them. Easter Island still serves as an object lesson – but now of the complex and globally interwoven dynamics of cultural and ecological change.

Terry Hunt and Carl Lipo discuss their findings and the lessons we might learn from the fate of Rapa Nui on January 17th at the Cowell Theatre. You can reserve tickets, get directions, and sign up for the podcast on the Seminar page.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 8th, 02013 at 9:40 am and is filed under Events, Seminars.

Global Trends 2030: Applying Long Term Thinking to Global Questions

January 14th, 02013 by Charlotte
In December, the Atlantic Council’s Strategic Foresight Initiative hosted a conference entitled Global Trends 2030: US Leadership in a Post-Western World

. Organized to coincide with the release of the National Intelligence Council’s Global Trends 2030: Alternative Worlds report, the conference brought policy makers together with futurists to discuss the global “megatrends” that might shape the next two decades. Attendees included Chuck Hagel, the current nominee for Secretary of Defense, as well as Long Now Board member Paul Saffo.
Examining different areas of inquiry, speakers applied long-term thinking to economic and political questions of global concern: from the role of the USA in global politics to the relationship between individual and state. A panel discussion on the potential impact of emerging technologies explored the revolutionary potential of 3D printing and robotics, and analyzed the role of technology in creating economic opportunity.
Conference participant Marriette DiChristina has written up a summary of the conference in Scientific American; to read more about what was discussed at the conference, you can download the SFI and NIC report.
This entry was posted on Monday, January 14th, 02013 at 9:41 am and is filed under Long Term Thinking.

Charles Mann on the State of the Species

November 26th, 02012 by Austin Brown



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)
This entry was posted on Monday, November 26th, 02012 at 10:32 am and is filed under Long Term Thinking.
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Long Now Salon: Not A Typical Bar

November 29th, 02012 by Mikl Em
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:
This entry was posted on Thursday, November 29th, 02012 at 11:00 am and is filed under Long Now Salon.

Peter Warshall Seminar Primer

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Wednesday November 28, 02012 at the Cowell Theater, San Francisco

 

Peter Warshall’s work is aimed at helping people understand the cultural and ecological systems in which they’re embedded. He studied biology at Harvard, anthropology under Claude Lévi-Strauss, and has worked in communities and companies the world over, consulting on conservation and helping build consensus among groups with diverse and often conflicting environmental needs.

He was an editor and contributor to the Whole Earth Review, where he often expressed his deep understanding of ecology and human nature through poetic, interdisciplinary essays. In 1998, he offered a brief exploration of the similarities between painting and ecology, discussing, for example, trends in composition and color and how they relate to the analysis of ecosystems:

Henri Matisse (in his cutout phase), Gustav Klimt, and Paul Klee experimented tirelessly with configurations of patches of color: different sizes, the shape of each patch, the orientation of “floating” patches with the canvas’s straight edges and with other patches inside the artwork’s boundaries. Landscape ecologists similarly ponder patches such as beaver ponds in a watershed or forest groves dotted among evenly textured farmlands. The “right” configuration can bring harmony to either canvas or landscape. To conservation biologists, for instance, the size and shape of a patch of forest may mean the difference between protection of a rare warbler’s home or nest parasitism by cowbirds. Informed intuition serves both painters and naturalists well.

- Art as Landscape/Landscape as Art

To bolster one’s informed intuition about place, he offers a quiz that Kevin Kelly once declared a Cool Tool. It starts with a simple declaration to “Point North,” and concludes by asking if you can “Name two places on different continents that have similar sunshine/rainfall/wind and temperature patterns to here.”

Warshall leads us on a journey from inside our brains out into nature and on up to the Sun on November 28th at the Cowell Theater. You can reserve tickets, get directions and sign up for the podcast on the Seminar page.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 13th, 02012 at 11:32 am and is filed under Long Now Announcements, Seminars.

Looking Back on the 21st Century

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November 5th, 02012 by Charlotte

“These days, excess energy is very expensive, but for most people it just doesn’t matter. Most communities are locally self-sufficient. Everyone grows food using permaculture principles. Agricultural monoculture became deeply unfashionable during the great GM disease outbreaks of the 2030s. During the chaos, we were smart enough to keep the Internet going. Giving up broadcast television meant wireless broadband really took off. That, combined with holographic conferencing, meant that people finally could really live anywhere they liked while working somewhere else. With no need to travel for meetings, commuting vanished like a bad dream. Of course, the need for real human contact didn’t. most towns, villages, and districts have communal working areas, paid for out of local taxes in local currencies, which let you work together with your friends and neighbors these mix/meet spaces are incredibly creative.”

Perhaps this is how the people of the year 02100 will look back at the developments of the 21st century. Or maybe it’ll look more like this:

“It is five minutes to midnight on New Year’s Eve at the end of the last day of the twenty-first century. In Dar es Salam, one of the wealthiest cities in the United States of Southern Africa (USSA), revelers from across the region have traveled on the Trans-Africa high-speed train network to witness the arrival of the new century at a massive fireworks display and international gathering in East Africa’s “harbor of peace.” Wearing a variety of light, thermo-regulated fabrics in bright, fashionable colors, party-goers and families mill around in droves at the city’s popular waterfront overlooking the Indian ocean, its warm waters an ancient conduit of intercontinental trade.”

These scenarios appear in The Futurist’s series on Exploring the year 2100. The magazine recently invited members of the World Future Society to imagine what human life might look like in 02100, and the result is a diverse collection of essays that offer colorful glimpses of possible futures. The collection also features an article by futurist and Long Now Board member Paul Saffo, who predicts that we’ll live longer, more curious, and more spiritual lives:

“In 2020, science’s relentless explanatory logic had believers on the run, but in the decades that followed, it became clear that an ever stranger, more capacious universe had ample room for the divine, the spiritual, the mystical, and the mysterious.”

To read more about these and other glimpses of the future, pay a visit to the World Future Society’s corner of the web!

This entry was posted on Monday, November 5th, 02012 at 10:09 am and is filed under Futures.

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Long Now Salon: Where the Berries Meet the Gin

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December 3rd, 02012 by Mikl Em

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 10,000 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.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 3rd, 02012 at 2:55 pm and is filed under Long Now Salon.

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Help Long Now build a new space for long-term thinking

AppId is over the quota AppId is over the quota November 15th, 02012 by Alexander Rose - Twitter: @zander

The Long Now Foundation is creating a new place for ideas, and it will serve great cocktails!

We have begun a campaign to transform our space in Fort Mason into a salon, museum, cafe and bar.  We invite you to check out the video and if you can, please support us by reserving a Founders Bottle of one of the amazing spirits created exclusively for the project by St George Distillery in Alameda. We welcome group and company donations as well if the bottles are out of your personal price range.

Thank you for your support,

Alexander Rose
executive director
The Long Now Foundation

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 15th, 02012 at 2:22 pm and is filed under Long Now Announcements.

Lazar Kunstmann and Jon Lackman Seminar Media

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

Tuesday November 13, 02012 – San Francisco

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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.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 27th, 02012 at 2:09 pm and is filed under Long Now Announcements, Seminars.

Civilization versus Forestation: Bristlecone Pines in the Anthropocene

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“Trees and forests are repositories of time; to destroy them is to destroy an irreplaceable record of the Earth’s past.”

Whether we’ve grown up in the big city, a small town, or in the middle of the woods, most of us are familiar with the concept of tree rings. As children, we were taught that a tree is a kind of natural clock: count its rings, and find out how old it is. But what we may not all have learned, is that tree rings can tell a larger story.

Dendrochronology, or the science of tree-ring dating, has discovered that the rings on a tree not only record the number of years a tree has lived; they also preserve the memory of what those years were like. The thickness and coloration of tree rings speak of droughts and storms, unusual heat, excessive cold – even of sunspots. Trees are a living record of long-term climate change, geological evolution, and of life on earth in general.

Unfortunately, Ross Andersen recently wrote in Aeon magazine, human civilization has a long history of wiping out that record. In fact, the practice of deforestation may be as old as civilization itself. We felled trees for practical purposes: because we needed wood to build houses, fires, and weapons, or because we needed open space to cultivate our crops. But Andersen suggests we might be driven by a deeper motivation, as well:

“…a suspicion of forests as dark, shadowy places is written into the basic texts of Western culture. In Greek mythology, Dionysus, the ivy-wreathed god of the ‘wooded glens’, threatens civilization with a return to animalistic primitivism. In the Old Testament, Yahweh commands Hebrews to burn down sacred groves wherever they find them. Christian culture has traditionally identified the forests as a pagan stronghold, a gloomy haven for witches and outlaws. In Dante the forest is demon-haunted and evil, the underworld out of which the hero must ascend. For Descartes the forest is the precursor to enlightenment, the physical embodiment of confusion, the maze that the light beams of reason must penetrate.”

Early on in human history, Andersen writes, our small numbers and limited technology kept our resentment relatively contained. But as civilization expanded, we developed the capacity to destroy trees on an ever faster and larger scale. We’ve now managed to overpower the forests we so resented: our rate of destruction has become greater than their rate of growth.

Our powers of deforestation have grown to such heights, Andersen writes, that they now threaten to affect a particularly remote and hardy species: bristlecone pines.

Among the oldest living creatures on earth, bristlecone pines have a particularly significant story to tell about the history of time on Earth. Preferring cool and dry climates, bristlecones have thrived for millennia in remote areas beyond the reach of pests, parasites, and predators. Its particular biological properties allow it to continually regenerate itself; provided it is left alone in a comfortable, alpine environment, bristlecones could – hypothetically – live forever.

Unfortunately, however, the changes of the Anthropocene seem to be catching up with the bristlecones.

“In 2005, a researcher from Arizona’s tree-ring lab named Matthew Salzer noticed an unusual trend in the most recent stretch of bristlecone tree rings. Over the past half century, bristlecones near the tree line have grown faster than in any 50-year period of the past 3,700 years, a shift that portends ‘an environmental change unprecedented in millennia,’ according to Salzer. As temperatures along the peaks warm, the bristlecones are fattening up, adding thick rings in every spring season. … This might sound like good news for the trees, but it most assuredly is not. Indeed, the thick new rings might be a prophecy of sorts, a foretelling of the trees’ extinction.”

As climate change gradually warms the Earth, bristlecones have been climbing ever higher up their mountain ranges in search of the isolation they prefer. Eventually, however, there will be no place left for them to go. As their surroundings warm up, pests, parasites, and other effects of global warming will invade their habitat, threatening these trees with extinction. Salzer’s finding is, indeed, a warning sign.

“If global warming drives these trees to extinction it will signal an evolution in the technology of deforestation. In the past we have menaced trees with axes and torches, but now it will be the hot, aggregated exhaust of our civilizations. Deforestation once arose out of our animosity towards particular forests, those that stood in the way of our future homes and crops. But deforestation is becoming delocalized; it is becoming an unavoidable byproduct of our existence, a diffuse, Earth-spanning emanation no tree can escape – even those that take root at the far reaches of the bio-inhabitable world.”

Read: The Vanishing Groves by Ross Anderson in Aeon Magazine

This entry was posted on Friday, January 11th, 02013 at 9:46 am and is filed under Long Term Thinking, The Big Here.

Slow Journalism and A Long Walk: Paul Salopek’s Out of Eden

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January 9th, 02013 by Andrew Warner

On January 10th, 02013, Pulitzer prize winning journalist Paul Salopek will begin a seven year journey on foot from Ethiopia to Patagonia, following the footsteps of the first migration of humans across the planet 60,000 years ago. The journey will not be an easy one. It consists of 21,000 miles of wildly varying terrain and environments, with only what Salopek can fit in his backpack. Salopek will be writing “narrative core samples” every hundred miles to get an embedded, on-the-ground look at the issues that are defining our age.

The concept behind this journey is “Slow Journalism”, which Salopek describes best:

The sheer volume of news being generated from professional journalists, citizen journalists, from tweets and blogs or what have you, is nearly self-defeating. It’s a tsunami of information. It’s almost unprocessable. We don’t need more information. We need more meaning. … It takes great slowing down to see how the great global stories of our day, whether they be climate change, conflict, poverty, or mass migration, are interconnected. The world isn’t flat. It’s deeply corrugated. And some of the best stories lie hidden in the corrugations.

Salopek will be posting updates here, as well as on Twitter @PaulSalopek.

Salopek also created a short interactive media introduction to the project with the help of Long Now volunteer Ahmed Kabil.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 9th, 02013 at 10:39 am and is filed under Long Term Thinking, The Big Here.

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Aspirin: A 3,500-Year Old Remedy

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Aspirin is not only a miraculous cure-all; it’s also an ancient one.

In its purified chemical form, aspirin (or salicylic acid) is only a little over 100 years old. But the compound is also found in several plants – and in this form, it has been used for over 3,500 years.

Its pain-reducing and anti-inflammatory properties were already known to Hippocrates, who found salicylic acid in the leaves and bark of willow trees and used it, among other things, to ease the pain of childbirth. He most likely learned of this medicine from ancient Egyptian and Sumerian medical texts, which recommend the use of willow leaves for treating inflammation (Mackowiak 2000).

The healing potential of willows was recognized the world over – from the Roman Empire to ancient China, and, in the new world, among Native American tribes as well. In Europe, too, willow leaves were used medicinally, until, in the late nineteenth century, the Bayer pharmaceutical company figured out how to manufacture salicylic acid in a laboratory and market it for mass consumption (The Naked Scientist).

Today, modern medical research may have given us renewed insight into the workings and benefits of this over-the-counter pill, but aspirin is ultimately the product of a history that spans several millennia.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 14th, 02012 at 8:52 am and is filed under Long Term Science.

A taste of the mountain

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Please join us for a special tasting of the Bristlecone Gin and help support the Salon project at the same time.  We have just received the first bottles of the hand crafted Bristlecone Gin from St George Spirits, and it is incredible.  My favorite quote from an early taster: “It tastes like I’m drinking the mountain.”

If you are looking for a great last minute holiday gift, please consider a couple tickets to what should be a really fun evening.
https://bristleconegin.eventbrite.com/

The evening will consist of a little education about gin, our new space, as well as several unique tastings that include the gin and a tasting of the pure bristlecone distillate itself.  We will also be doing tastings of one of the whiskeys from St George, as well as the Long Now wine. And to cleanse the palate there will be wine, beer, cheese and snacks available all evening.  Each guest will also get to take home a specially etched shotglass to remember the evening.

If you do choose to make a further donation by becoming a member of the bottle club, you can deduct the price of your tasting ticket from the bottle donation.  So if you are considering donating at a higher level, this is a great chance to come check out the gin.

All proceeds from these tastings go directly to the Salon project, so please let your friends know about it.  If there is enough interest we will open up more tasting dates.  The evening runs from 5:30-8:30 on Tuesday January 22nd at Long Now and you are welcome to show up anytime before 8pm as we do the tastings in small groups.  But the earlier you arrive, the longer we have to spend with you, so please come early and hang out!

If you are already a bottle donor, or would like to become one before this event, please contact us at donate@longnow.org and you will not have to purchase tickets.

(Please note this is a 21 and over event)

You can see more about the Salon Project here:
https://longnow.org/salon/

More about St George Spirits here:

http://www.stgeorgespirits.com/

Thanks!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 18th, 02012 at 1:25 pm and is filed under Long Now Announcements.

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

AppId is over the quota AppId is over the quota December 10th, 02012 by Austin Brown

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.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 10th, 02012 at 12:00 pm and is filed under Futures, Long Bets, Seminars.

Report on the First De-Extinction Meeting and Other Revivalist News

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January 7th, 02013 by Stewart Brand

36 scientists, 25 presentations, 5,000 words to cover them all.  Lots of news.

 

Also the first announcement of the TEDx DeExtinction conference in Washington DC on March 15.

Introducing our now-full-time reviver of passenger pigeons, Ben Novak, with Martha, the world’s last passenger pigeon, in the backrooms of The Smithsonian.

 

Ben Novak is going to be working with Beth Shapiro’s group at UC Santa Cruz on world-class ancient DNA analysis, bearing down on the passenger pigeon and band-tailed pigeon (closest living relative) genomes. Additionally, Kim Vassershteyn is now a Long Now employee, often at the office, working on Revive and Restore matters, mostly the TEDx currently.  A listserv we set up for all the scientists at the October meeting is showing rich traffic.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 7th, 02013 at 8:40 am and is filed under Revive & Restore.

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Long Now Salon: Time in a Bottle

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November 28th, 02012 by Mikl Em

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.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 28th, 02012 at 12:18 pm and is filed under Long Now Salon, Long Term Thinking.

Rick Prelinger Seminar Tickets

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November 12th, 02012 by Austin Brown

Rick Prelinger, a guerrilla archivist who collects the uncollected and makes it accessible, presents the 7th of his annual Lost Landscapes of San Francisco screenings. You’ll see an eclectic montage of rediscovered and rarely-seen film clips showing life, landscapes, labor and leisure in a vanished San Francisco as captured by amateurs, newsreel cameramen and studio filmmakers.

New sequences in this year’s high-definition feast will include the Japanese-American community in the Western Addition before redevelopment; shipwrecks off the Northern shoreline; 1930s demonstrations for China Relief; even more Sutro Baths scenes; family films from the Mission, Richmond, Sunset and Excelsior Districts; rediscovered films of San Francisco transit; and newly discovered, never-shown documentary footage of the Tenderloin and waterfront. Much of the show will be scanned from Kodachrome and original 35mm material.

As usual, this year’s Castro Theatre screening is an interactive experience: audience members will BE the soundtrack, identifying places and events, asking questions, loudly discussing San Francisco’s past and future as the film unreels.

Finally, if you have family or historical films of San Francisco, it’s not too late to help out — please contact Rick through The Long Now Foundation, and we’ll arrange to have your films scanned and possibly included in this year’s show!

This entry was posted on Monday, November 12th, 02012 at 10:32 am and is filed under Long Now Announcements, Seminars.

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The Bedrock of Politics

AppId is over the quota AppId is over the quota November 6th, 02012 by Alex Mensing

NPR’s Robert Krulwich recently shared on his blog a fantastic stitching together of processes that operate on vastly different time scales: geology, economics and politics. It took the eye of a geologist – Steven Dutch – to recognize the deep-time significance of a narrow corridor of counties running through Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and into the Carolinas that voted majority Democratic in the 02008 U.S. presidential election. That swath of land is largely populated by African Americans, which is the most immediate part of the answer, but the story begins about 100 million years ago during the Cretaceous Period.

The Deep South had a shoreline that curled through the Carolinas, Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi, and there, in the shallow waters just offshore, were immense populations of floating, single-celled creatures who drifted about, trapped sunshine, captured carbon, then died and sank to the sea bottom. Those creatures became long stretches of nutritious chalk.When sea levels dropped and North America took on its modern shape, those ancient beaches — so alkaline, porous and rich with organic material — became a “black belt” of rich soil, running right through the South.

That’s the geology part of the equation. Then comes the economics – when Europeans began farming crops like cotton in the South, they were using slaves. The most fertile areas were where slavery was most profitable, so the percentage of the population that was black became the highest in the region. That demography – or, at least, very significant traces of it – remains today, and is responsible for the political part of the story.This, says marine biologist McClain, explains that odd stretch of Obama blue; it’s African-Americans sitting on old soil from ancient organisms that turned sunshine into fertilizer.

Stewart Brand, co-founder of The Long Now Foundation, has described what he calls ‘layers of time,’ (described on our website). Different sorts of processes operate on different time scales, and those processes are layered one on top of the other – there is a sort of foundational order to them. Nature operates slowly. Culture operates more quickly, and is based on nature. The political landscape is many layers above the geological landscape. This story illustrates brilliantly one of the ways in which geology shines through the millennia to shape the quicker, more malleable processes of our human activities.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 6th, 02012 at 10:10 am and is filed under Long Term Science, Long Term Thinking.

Terry Hunt and Carl Lipo Seminar Tickets

AppId is over the quota AppId is over the quota January 4th, 02013 by Andrew Warner

Was it ecocide? The collapse of the mini-civilization on Easter Island (Rapa Nui) has long been considered one of the great Green morality tales. Once the people there cut down the last tree, story goes, they were doomed. Their famous statues were an arms race that completed the exhaustion of their all-too-finite resources. Moral of the story: Easter Island equals Earth Island: we must not repeat its tragedy with the planet.

It’s a satisfying tale, but apparently wrong. The reality is far more interesting.

In fact the lesson of Rapa Nui is how to get ecological caretaking right, not wrong. Its people appear to have worked out an astutely delicate relationship to each other and to the austere ecology of their tiny island and its poor soil. They were never violent. The astonishing statues appear to have been an inherent part of how they managed population and ecological balance on their desert island. (Their method of moving the huge statues was clever and surprisingly easy—they walked them upright. See the amazing demonstration video!) The famous collapse came from a familiar external source—European diseases and enslavement, the same as everywhere else in the Americas and the Pacific.

All this is in a thoroughly persuasive book by an archaeologist and an anthropologist who did extensive fieldwork and historical study on Easter Island— THE STATUES THAT WALKED: Unraveling the Mystery of Easter Island, by Terry Hunt and Carl Lipo. The authors present their case live in January’s SALT talk.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 4th, 02013 at 11:08 am and is filed under Long Now Announcements, Seminars.