Ed Lu Seminar Tickets
The Long Now Foundation 23/05/2013 22:11
The Long Now Foundations monthly
Seminars About Long-term Thinking
Ed Lu presents “Anthropocene Astronomy: Thwarting Dangerous Asteroids Begins with Finding Them”
TICKETS
Tuesday June 18, 02013 at 7:30pm Marines’ Memorial Theater
Long Now Members can reserve 2 seats, join today! General Tickets $15
About this Seminar:
In the long now, the greatest threat to life on Earth, or (more frequently) to civilization, or (still more frequently) to cities, is asteroid impact.
Ed Lu is CEO and Chairman of the B612 Foundation, which, in partnership with Ball Aerospace is building an asteroid-detection system called Sentinel, aiming for launch in 2018.
On February 15th of this year, civilization got a wake-up call. A 45 meter asteroid, large enough to completely obliterate a major city, missed Earth by only 17,000 miles, and hours later a smaller rock, 17 meters in diameter, exploded in the air over Chelyabinsk, Russia, injuring 1500 people. Interest in B612s asteroid detection mission spiked accordingly.
Testing the theory of time crystals
The Long Now Foundation 23/05/2013 20:15
As New Age as it may sound, scientists have devised a way to test a theory that proposes so-called “time crystals.”
Crystals are made of matter that is arranged at the atomic level in an ordered pattern. Until February of 02012, that pattern was generally only ever thought of in the three spatial dimensions. It was that month, however, that physicist Frank Wilczek published a paper in which he theorized a crystal with a pattern that repeated not just in space, but also in time.
The way he describes it, a time crystal sounds a lot like a perpetual motion machine, which known physics (and a long history of failed experiments) tells us cannot exist. But Wilczek is no mad scientist – he won the 02004 Nobel Prize in Physics for work on particle physics. Creating a time crystal and observing how it behaves, or if it even can be made, may help unite our understandings of general relativity and quantum mechanics.
To test the theory, a team of Berkeley scientists are working on a way to isolate precisely 100 calcium ions, arrange them in a ring, and rotate them using a magnetic field. According to the scientists who’ve devised this experiment,
it may take anywhere between three and infinity years to complete…
(via Wired)
Geomedia
BLDGBLOG 21/05/2013 04:14
[Image: "Laser Cut Record" by Amanda Ghassaei].An incredible example of what can be done with laser-cutting, Amanda Ghassaei's project "Laser Cut Record" features music inscribed directly into cut discs of maple wood, acrylic, and paper, resulting in lo-fi but playable records.
For what they are, the otherwise scratchy and off-kilter audio quality is actually quite amazing, and the sounds themselves are made all the more haunting and strange by the crackling noise and resonance of the material that hosts them.
[Image: "Laser Cut Record" by Amanda Ghassaei].Some technical details are available at Ghassaei's Instructables page, and you can see the laser-cutting itself at work in the following video.
I'm reminded of a short letter called "Acoustic Recordings from Antiquity," written to the Proceedings of the IEEE in August 1969 by a man named Richard G. Woodbridge III. The somewhat eccentric Mr. Woodbridge explains that he has been researching accidental recording of sounds found, after careful analysis, on the surfaces of physical objects rescued from antiquityin particular, pieces of pottery originally shaped on potters' wheels (seen here as a kind of primordial record platter).
Woodbridge even claims some sounds have been "recorded" as re-playable waves in the slowly drying shapes of oil paintings.
To listen to these lost recordings, the letter suggests, you simply hold a record cartridge near the work of pottery in question, such that the needle of the phonograph can "be positioned against a revolving pot mounted on a phono turntable (adjustable speed) 'stroked' along a paint stroke, etc." When this was done properly, he claimed, a "low-frequency chatter sound could be heard in the earphones."
That is, the voices of people present in the room during the making of the pot could be re-played from the surface of the pot itself.
[Image: "Laser Cut Record" by Amanda Ghassaei].Woodbridge suggests that this might have alternative applications: "This is of particular interest as it introduces the possibility of actually recalling and hearing the voices and words of eminent personages as recorded in the paint of their portraits or of famous artists in their pictures." So an experiment was orchestrated:
With an artists brush, paint strokes were applied to the surface of the canvas using oil paints involving a variety of plasticities, thicknesses, layers, etc., while martial music was played on the nearby phonograph. Visual examination at low magnification showed that certain strokes had the expected transverse striated appearance. When such strokes, after drying, were gently stroked by the needle (small, wooden, spade-like) of the crystal cartridge, at as close to the original stroke speed as possible, short snatches of the original music could be identified.Through this technique, the overlookedoverlistened?acoustic qualities of various objects, beyond high-brow pottery and oil paintings, can thus be revealed:
Many situations leading to the possibility of adventitious acoustic recording in past times have been given consideration. These, for example, might consist of scratches, markings, engravings, grooves, chasings, smears, etc., on or in plastic materials encompassing metal, wax, wood, bone, mud, paint, crystal, and many others. Artifacts could include objects of personal adornment, sword blades, arrow shafts, pots, engraving plates, paintings, and various items of calligraphic interest.Woodbridge calls the pursuit and revelation of these sounds "acoustic archaeology."
[Image: Like the rings of Saturn, from "Laser Cut Record" by Amanda Ghassaei; in fact, perhaps the rings of Saturn are an unread recording...].But why stop at sounds?
Perhaps in two years' time, we'll watch as Amanda Ghassaei cuts DVDs"the data on a DVD is encoded in the form of small pits and bumps in the track of the disc"with a combined and simultaneous laser-cutter/3D printer ensemble, coating inscribed "small pits and bumps" with reflective metals.
Suddenly, wood, rock, metal, even exposed geology in situ can host visual content. Indeed, perhaps it already does, but we haven't inventedor we simply haven't appliedthe right technologies for decoding it. In other words, we have DVD players; we just haven't, learning from Richard G. Woodbridge III, used them to "read" other materials.
In August 2015, you and some friends hike up to a rock wall in the middle of Utah, and there are DVDs printed all over the surface of the hillside, full-length albums laser-burned into White Rim sandstone, and audio-visual pilgrims carrying deconstructed laser-lens systems, scanning for hidden film fests and warbling soundtracks, swarm every surface all around them.
It's the rise of geomedia.
The next 50 years of land use planning
The Long Now Foundation 17/05/2013 18:09
Since the beginnings of civilization, humans have had reason to think carefully about where to grow food, where to sleep, where to put waste. We call it land use planning and for most of history it’s happened pretty haphazardly. Like other activities, though, we’ve gradually systematized the process, especially as we’ve come up against scarcity and competition. Until we can move significant portions of the population to a new planet, land will only get more scarce, of course, and how we make use of it in the future is an important conversation to have.
Patrick J. Kriger, writing for Urban Land, describes two visions for the next 50 years of American land use planning. One scenario extrapolates forward the trend-line of ever-increasing urbanization:
By 2063, the suburban tract house and the shopping mall will have gone the way of the dinosaurs, and a generation of workers in the knowledge-based economy will flock to high-density, walkable urban mixed-use neighborhoods. Some may live in smart apartment buildings with motorized walls designed to transform bedrooms and offices into dining rooms and home gyms, depending on the time of day, and travel in miniaturized robotic cars that are controlled by a wireless network to minimize congestion.
Another scenario imagines that innovation will allow certain benefits of city-life to be enjoyed in the countryside and that this compromise will shift the trend towards less concentration:
50 years from now, people increasingly will forsake the cities for the rural countryside. They will live in updated, technologically advanced, and economically self-sufficient versions of the 19th-century village. These lower-density micro urban communities will enable their inhabitants to own spacious houses and their own automobiles, but also will allow them to enjoy the same economic opportunities and cultural amenities of urban areas while savoring the pleasures of living close to nature.
He lists the core factors that will influence these trends as population growth and demographic shifts, advances in technology and design, climate change, scarcity and abundance (water in particular), and the decentralization of production.
Human population is both growing faster than ever and expected to level off in the next century (though exactly where remains open to debate). Alluding to these facts, Enrique Peñalosa, the former mayor of Bogotá, Colombia, points out in his essay in The Atlantic that,
It is unlikely that city building on the scale to be seen through 2050 will happen ever again.
In other words, the population and urbanization explosion we are currently living through is an event, not a permanent reality.
As Kriger points out, the average lifespan of a residential building is 53 years; for commercial it’s 65. Decisions being made and designs being drafted now will have profound impacts on the quality of life, economic prospects, and environmental impact of the next 2 to 3 billion citizens of Earth. The approaches described in these two essays will determine how well we manage this event and they will establish how we utilize one of our most precious resources – the Earth’s surface – for generations to come.
In the Box: A Tour Through the Simulated Battlefields of the U.S. National Training Center
BLDGBLOG 17/05/2013 17:36
[Image: Photo courtesy of Venue].(This post originally published on Venue).
Fort Irwin is a U.S. army base nearly the size of Rhode Island, located in the Mojave Desert about an hour's drive northeast of Barstow, California. There you will find the National Training Center, or NTC, at which all U.S. troops, from all services, spend a twenty-one day rotation before they deploy overseas.
[Image: Photo courtesy of Venue].Sprawling and often infernally hot in the summer months, the base offers free tours, open to the public, twice a month. VenueBLDGBLOG's ongoing collaboration with Edible Geography's Nicola Twilley, supported by the Nevada Museum of Art's Center for Art + Environment and Studio-X NYCmade the trip, cameras in hand and notebooks at the ready, to learn more about the simulated battlefields in which imaginary conflicts loop, day after day, without end.
[Images: Photos courtesy of Venue].Coincidentally, as we explored the Painted Rocks located just outside the gate while waiting for the tour to start, an old acquaintance from Los Angelesarchitect and geographer Rick Millerpulled up in his Prius, also early for the same tour.
[Image: Photo courtesy of Venue].We laughed, said hello, and caught up about a class Rick had been teaching at UCLA about the military defense of L.A. from World War II to the present. An artificial battlefield, beyond even the furthest fringes of Los Angeles, Fort Irwin thus seemed like an appropriate place to meet.
[Image: Photo courtesy of Venue].We were soon joined by a small group of other visitorsconsisting, for the most part, of family members of soldiers deployed on the base, as well as two architecture students from Montréalbefore a large white tour bus rolled up across the gravel.
Renita, a former combat videographer who now handles public affairs at Fort Irwin, took our names, IDs, and signatures for reasons of liability (we would be seeing live explosions and simulated gunfire, and there was always the risk that someone might get hurt).
[Image: Photo courtesy of Venue].The day began with a glimpse into the economics and culture of how a nation prepares its soldiers for war; an orientation, of sorts, before we headed out to visit one of fifteen artificial cities scattered throughout the base.
[Image: Photo courtesy of Venue].In the plush lecture hall used for "After Action Reviews"and thus, Renita apologized, air-conditioned to a morgue-like chill in order to keep soldiers awake as their adrenalin levels crashwe received a briefing from the base's commander, Brigadier General Terry Ferrell.
With pride, Ferrell noted that Fort Irwin is the only place where the U.S. military can train using all of the systems it will later use in theater. The base's 1,000 square miles of desert is large enough to allow what Ferrell called "great maneuverability"; its airspace is restricted; and its truly remote location ensures an uncluttered electromagnetic spectrum, meaning that troops can practice both collection and jamming. These latter techniques even include interfering with GPS, providing they warn the Federal Aviation Administration in advance.
Oddly, it's worth noting that Fort Irwin also houses the electromagnetically sensitive Goldstone Deep Space Communications Complex, part of NASA's global Deep Space Network. As science writer Oliver Morton explains in a paper called "Moonshine and Glue: A Thirteen-Unit Guide to the Extreme Edge of Astrophysics" (PDF), "when digitized battalions slug it out with all the tools of modern warfare, radio, radar, and electronic warfare emissions fly as freely around Fort Irwin as bullets in a battle. For people listening to signals from distant spacecraft on pre-arranged frequency bands, this noise is not too much of a problem." However, he adds, for other, far more sensitive experiments, "radio interference from the military next door is its biggest headache."
[Image: Photo courtesy of Venue].Unusually for the American West, where mineral rights are often transferred separately, the military also owns the ground beneath Fort Irwin, which means that they have carved out an extensive network of tunnels and caves from which to flush pretend insurgents.
This 120-person strong insurgent troop is drawn from the base's own Blackhorse Regiment, a division of the U.S. Army that exists solely to provide opposition. Whatever the war, the 11th Armored is always the pretend enemy. According to Ferrell, their current role as Afghan rebels is widely envied: they receive speci
Skyfall
BLDGBLOG 17/05/2013 00:20
Although the Earth itself will be coming to its fiery and magmatic end in 7 billion years' time, its nighttime skies will be undergoing an extraordinary slow-motion light-show: the merging of the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies.An animation released last summer by NASA, called "What the Night Sky Will Look Like Over the Next 7 Billion Years" and embedded above, depicts the glowing filaments of these two galaxies, like plate tectonics in space, crashing together, gravitationally distorting one another, and then merging in a featureless cloud of light.
[Image: Via HubbleSite].In his weird, brilliant, and unimaginably dense book The Invention of the Zero poet Richard Kenney exclaims, "Imagine, all new constellations! ...a seethe / and flume of unfamiliar skies."
But such skies are not merely the domain of speculative poetry, as they are, in fact, on their way, roiling toward us in billion-year-long collisions that we, as a species, will never see the true light of.
[Image: Via HubbleSite].Im reminded of an essay by geologist Steven Dutch, at the University of Wisconsin, Green Bay, called The Earth Has A Future, originally published in the May 2006 issue of Geosphere.
Advocating what he calls a futurist approach to the planetary sciences, Dutch points out that a million years is relatively short in geologic terms. For example, even the fastest plates, moving on the order of 15 cm/yr, will have moved only 150 km in a million years, enough to have very significant local geological effects but scarcely enough to be casually noticeable on a globe.
However, Dutchs futurist approach to landscape studies becomes particularly fascinating when he turns his attention upward, to the sky, looking out beyond the Earth to what stars and their constellations might look like in roughly one million years. Dutch predicts, for instance, that distant star patterns like Orion should be recognizable for several hundred thousand years, but many constellations will have changed noticeably.
In other words, the sky is alwayseven nowadrift, already fulfilling Kenney's "seethe and flume of unfamiliar skies."
[Image: Via HubbleSite].But that's just a million years. Multiply that by seven-and-a-half thousand, and the heavenly distortions torquing through the skies above us become magical even to contemplate.
(Related: Pruned's Proposal for an Ideas Competition Seeking Design Proposals for a Pavilion for Viewing the Coming Intergalactic Collision between Andromeda and the Milky Way).
Eyeball
BLDGBLOG 16/05/2013 20:56
[Image: The throwable eyeball from Bounce Imaging].A throwable building-mapping sphere from Bounce Imaging was recently chosen by PopSci for a 2013 Invention Award. The "throwable, expendable, baseball-size probe," in PopSci's words, "has a shock-absorbing shell embedded with six cameras, plus clusters of near-infrared LEDs to light up dark rooms (for the cameras)."
To deploy the Explorer, an emergency worker links it to a smartphone or tablet and chucks the ball into danger. It immediately begins taking photos and testing for methane, carbon monoxide, and dangerously high temperatures. A microprocessor inside the ball then stiches the photos together and converts the raw data for transmission over Wi-Fi. Just seconds after the toss, a wrap-around panoramacomplete with environmental warningsappears on the synced device.The usefulness of this as a tool for cave mapping, or even as a new piece of kit for semi-autonomous, non-destructive archaeological investigations, seems both obvious and worth tracking in the future.
Unsurprisingly, however, the MIT Technology Review points out that the "ball-sized device could be particularly useful for the military," as it is lightweight, extremely portable, and, because of its low cost, it "could be abandoned, if necessary." Teams of soldiers, arriving at a building or city of which no accurate maps or floorplans exist, could thus toss these little baseball-like devices into the darkness ahead and achieve tactical awareness within secondsunless, of course, WiFi-hijacking counter-measures send back deliberately incorrect plans and layouts to the unsuspecting soldiers.
Warfare, here, would become a weird sort of architectural sorcery, casting spatial spells on one another, broadcasting ghosts and mirages to the screens of an approaching enemy.
Bounce Imaging's research is interesting to put into the context of another building-mapping project currently underway at MIT: Maurice Fallon's "automatic building mapping" project
which functions by way of a wearable LiDAR pack, sort of like a forward-scanning Iron Man chest piece, that allows for real-time mapping of a structure's internal layout.
As you can see in the above video, though, the design aesthetic of the scanning pack is, at least right now, workaday and extremely pragmatic; I would thus love to see what students from, for example, the Design Interactions department at London's Royal College of Art could do with it, putting together a shell or housing unit for the scanner itself. Take a look at the recently all-over-the-internet project called Eidos, by which RCA students promise to "sharpen your senses" through a set of beautifully-made wearable devices.
[Image: Part of the Eidos system by RCA students Tim Bouckley, Millie Clive-Smith, Mi Eun Kim, and Yuta Sugawara].But I'll leave this for now, as a forthcoming interview soon to be published over at Venue, with Georgia Tech roboticist Henrik Christensen, picks up many of these threads with great interest.
Disruptive Technology
The Long Now Foundation 15/05/2013 15:48
We are social animals: its by connecting and communicating with others that weve managed to survive, thrive, and become as gods on planet Earth.
The development of communications technologies has dramatically expanded our ability to connect with the world around us. Wireless networks now allow us to communicate in real-time with people on the other side of the globe; and with the portability of tablets and smart phones, global connectedness has become integral to even the most mundane aspects of our daily lives. Its no surprise, then, that were always on the lookout for new ways and places to log in to the world wide web.
Nevertheless, new research suggests that the use of technology does not always facilitate greater connectedness. In fact, it may occasionally be experienced as quite disruptive.
Several recent studies have shown that people consider the experience of overhearing a person talk on a cell phone far more annoying than listening to two people converse; more so, even, than being surrounded by white noise. These wireless halfalogues are so disruptive, researchers argue, because they awaken our innate tendency to make sense of communicative stimuli. Faced with a one-sided conversation, our brain is co-opted by the instinct to fill in the conversational gaps, and can no longer focus on anything else.
These findings recently led The Atlantic Cities to question whether we really want to expand wireless coverage on subways and other forms of public transportation. Though it may be nice to have access to an app that tells you when to expect the next train, we may not want to encourage our fellow passengers to disturb our commute with their cellular halfalogues.
This thought echoes some early skepticism about Google Glass, the tiny wearable computer that is currently being tested by developers. Worried that it will create dangerous distractions and eliminate the last remnants of our public privacy, the New York Times reports, several establishments and even states have sought to pre-emptively ban the device. These concerns suggest that there is a time and place for online communications and that our pursuit of innovative communicative technology should perhaps involve a debate about whether, and where, we might impose boundaries on its use.
The Extinction Orchestra
BLDGBLOG 14/05/2013 19:20
[Images: From Marguerite Humeau's Opera of Prehistoric Creatures; photos by Stuart Bailes and Felipe Ribon].Designer Marguerite Humeau reconstructs the voices of extinct animals based on speculative extrapolations from their skull structure.
As she described her work in an interview with We Make Money Not Art last month, the project is an attempt "to resuscitate the sound of prehistoric creatures by reconstructing their vocal tracts," casting large resonation chambers that then whistle, bleat, bellow, and moan, offering fictionalized bodily soundtracks for multi-million year-old landscapes.
Appropriately called The Opera of Prehistoric Creatures, it includes sonic reconstructions of three species of extinct mega-fauna, including the Ambulocetus, or "Walking Whale," an Entelodont, or the terrifying-sounding "Terminator Pig," and a Mammoth Imperator.
[Images: From Marguerite Humeau's Opera of Prehistoric Creatures; photos by Felipe Ribon Dirk van den Heuvel].Partial reconstructions of their skeletons, combined with the speculative sounds of their long-lost calls, form what Humeau calls "semi-real, synthetic ruins." They stand like bleached monuments in the gallery space: resurrected animal bodies singing dead songs for the 21st century.
Briefly, and unrelatedly, I'm reminded of the extraordinary point made in Adrienne Mayor's fantastic book The First Fossil Hunters, where we read that one of the reasons for ancient myths of cyclops, giants, and titans was, in effect, bad paleontology. In other words, the ancient Greeks and other civilizations around the Mediterranean simply got their fossils wrong, reconstructing old bones not as the mammoths they really were
[Image: From The First Fossil Hunters by Adrienne Mayor].but as truly massive, humanoid forms with odd, singular holes in the middles of their skulls (actually a nostril, not a cyclops eye), lording over tiny humans who quaked miserably beside them.
[Image: From The First Fossil Hunters by Adrienne Mayor].In any case, you can listen to Marguerite Humeau's soundscape of extinct animal calls here.
Spaceship Earth
The Long Now Foundation 13/05/2013 19:20
OVERVIEW from Planetary Collective on Vimeo.
In 01963, Buckminster Fuller wrote:
Our little Spaceship Earth is only eight thousand miles in diameter, which is almost a negligible dimension in the great vastness of space. Our nearest star our energy-supplying mother-ship, the Sun is ninety-two million miles away Our little Spaceship Earth is right now travelling at sixty thousand miles an hour around the sun and is also spinning axially, which, at the latitude of Washington, D.C., adds approximately one thousand miles per hour to our motion. Each minute we both spin at one hundred miles and zip in orbit at one thousand miles. That is a whole lot of spin and zip. Spaceship Earth was so extraordinarily well invented and designed that to our knowledge humans have been on board it for two million years not even knowing that they were on board a ship. And our spaceship is so superbly designed as to be able to keep life regenerating on board despite the phenomenon, entropy, by which all local physical systems lose energy.
Taking Fullers words to heart, Stewart Brand once argued that we will never get civilization right until we recognize ourselves as travelers aboard a spaceship, and famously claimed that a photograph of the whole vessel might do the trick.
Indeed, a new short film by Planetary Collective documents and celebrates the transformative power of what it calls the Overview Effect. Ever since the crew aboard Apollo 8 first turned its camera back toward our planet, space travelers and ordinary earth-bound citizens alike have been struck by the emotions elicited by images of the whole Earth, floating in the darkness of space. Bringing astronauts together with philosophers, the video attempts to put these reactions into words and echoes Stewart Brand by suggesting that whole-earth consciousness can be the seed of long-term responsibility.
To have that experience of awe is to, at least for the moment, let go of yourself. To transcend the sense of separation. So its not just that they were experiencing something other than them, but that they were, at some very deep level, integrating, realizing, their interconnectedness with that beautiful, blue-green ball.
(Image credit: NASA)
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