The Long History of New World Wine

The Long Now Foundation 02/11/2012 18:58

The term New World Wine may be a bit of a misnomer.

In 01976, a British wine merchant introduced California wines to France by organizing a blind tasting event for local connoisseurs. To everyones great surprise, bottles from California won first place in each category, and thereby earned a place on the international map of fine wine.

This Judgment of Paris may have brought California wine to the global stage, but unbeknownst to many of those tasters (and to many wine lovers today), California has been making wine since long before the 01970s. In fact, Californias winemaking industry may be about as old as the United States itself.

Viticulture was first brought to the Western United States by Spanish missionaries in the 18th century. Because they needed wine for the performance of Mass, these missionaries had brought vine cuttings with them from Mexico, and planted a vineyard by every new mission established in California. In those days, they cultivated and fermented what was known as the “Mission grape,” which had originated in Spain but found its niche in the New World. Until about 01850, most California wine was made from this Mission grape; today, only a handful of producers still grow this varietal.

The Gold Rush of the late 19^th century brought new waves of migrants to California, and gave a new boost to the burgeoning winemaking industry. California offered a favorable climate for grape growing, and with a growing demand for wine, many European settlers tried their hand at cultivating grapes. Armed with new varietals and new winemaking techniques, these growers established the first commercial wineries in Northern California.

In 01920, Prohibition put a damper on the winemaking industry. A few wineries were able to switch to the production of sacramental wine or grape juice, but most were forced to close their doors, and many a vineyard withered. After the twenty-first amendment was passed in 01933, the industry embarked on a long process of recovery, finally culminating in a renaissance during the late 01960s and 70s.

Despite the impact of Prohibition, many of todays most celebrated Northern California wineries have a long legacy that dates back more than a century. Charles Krug Winery was founded in 01861 by a man of the same name, and thereby became the first commercial winery in the Napa Valley. Schramsberg, a producer of sparkling wine, was established just a year later. The brothers Beringer founded their winery in 01876, and Chateau Montelena producers of the Chardonnay that won the Judgment of Paris dates from 1882.

But perhaps the oldest of Northern Californias wineries is located in Sonoma. Founded in 01857, Buena Vista Winery spearheaded the development of the regions winemaking industry. Its founder, ‘Count’ Agoston Haraszthy, introduced new European grape varietals to the area, pioneered new winemaking methods, and established a local viticultural society. It is here that Charles Krug learned how to make wine before he went on to establish his own business in Napa, four years later.

Financial troubles forced Buena Vista to close its doors in the late 19^th century. Despite several attempts at revival, the winery has been unable to reclaim its past glory until recently, that is. In 2011, the winery was bought and then carefully restored by Burgundy Native Jean-Charles Boisset. His goal in this project was not just to produce great wine; Boisset hoped to offer a tribute to Californias long legacy of viticulture.

A lot of people think that the California wine world was born in 1976 after the Judgment of Paris tasting, but no, it started way before, he said. The wines are great, but we can explain to people what a great region it is through its long-lost heritage.

Buena Vista winery reopened its doors this past summer to offer tours of its historic facilities, and tastings of its new bottlings. A great start to a history-themed tour of the Napa and Sonoma valleys, perhaps?

Preserving Virtual Worlds

The Long Now Foundation 01/11/2012 19:30

This is our history, and just a handful of people are saving it.

– PixelVixen707, screen name of Rachael Webster, a fictional character in the alternate reality game Personal Effects: Dark Art

Virtual games are becoming cultural artifacts. Yes, they are commodities, (the global market for video games is forecast to hit $82 billion by 02017) but, beyond entertainment, they also facilitate complex exchanges between many members of society. It would be impossible to provide an accurate record of much of our existing popular culture without archiving games.

Take the online world EA Land, formerly The Sims Online, for example. The service was generating very little revenue, despite the re-branding, resulting in its sudden demise (a common phenomenon in the digital realm). Electronic Arts pulled the plug just weeks after its debut as EA Land its designer became its destroyer. Amidst avatars exchanging hugs and tearful goodbyes, a virtual world winked out of existence with a whimper a whimper that might have only been witnessed by the players had it not been for Stanford archival researcher Henry Lowood. He captured the virtual apocalypse presented in the 11-minute radio piece, Game Over. Roman Mars (now with 99% Invisible) originally produced this episode for Snap Judment along with Robert Ashley’s A Life Well Wasted (an Internet radio program about everything video games).

Preserving video games presents formidable challenges. These nebulous artifacts consist of platforms, operating systems and network communities. The digital content is interactive, which is just as defining as the code itself. These challenges were the subject of Preserving Virtual Worlds (PVW), a two-year collaborative research venture geared towards preserving and exploring the history and cultural impact of interactive simulations and video games saving video games for future generations (02008-02010). In addition to Henry Lowood of Stanford University, Rochester Institute of Technology, the University of Maryland, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Linden Lab collaborated on the project.

PVW focused its investigation on a case set of eight different games, interactive fictions and virtual worlds. The case studies were selected from different time periods in gaming history, different platforms and different degrees of player involvement to maximize the potential problems that might prevent the games from being preserved in the long-term. Based on their investigations into the games, they developed a set of requirements for game preservation.

Unlike a book in a library, computer games have very poorly defined boundaries that make it difficult to determine exactly what the object of preservation should be. Is it the source code for the program? The binary executable version of the program? Is it the executable program along with the operating system under which the program runs? Should the hardware on which the operating system runs be included? Ultimately, a computer game cannot be played without a complex and interconnected set of programs and hardware. Is the preservationists job maintaining a particular, operating combination of elements, or is to preserve the capability to produce an operating combination using existing software and hardware? Is it both? Once these questions of the boundaries of preservation have been addressed, there are a host of other difficulties presenting the would-be preservationist. What information, beyond the game itself, will we need to ensure continuing access to the game? How should librarians, archivists and preservationists go about organizing the bed of information needed to preserve a game? What strategy should we adopt to preserve software in a technological environment in which computing hardware and operating systems are undergoing constant and rapid evolution? Given the costs of preservation of normal library and archival materials, how can we possibly sustain the additional costs of preserving these complex and fragile technological artifacts?

Preserving Virtual Worlds 2 follows the initial report. PVW2 will focus on providing a set of best practices for preserving educational games and game franchises, such as Oregon Trail, Carmen Sandiego and the Super Mario Brothers series.

Echoes of Leningrad in St. Petersburg

The Long Now Foundation 30/10/2012 18:23

Sixty-eight years ago, St. Petersburg was known as Leningrad, and counted as one of the Soviet Unions largest cities. These days, those two names conjure up images of a distant past; an anachronistic, shady corner of European politics and culture.

Yet this series of images, posted a while back on Englishrussia, suggest that todays St. Petersburg still strongly echoes its Leningrad past. Old has been transposed onto new: photographs taken during the 3-year Nazi siege of the city have been stitched into contemporary pictures of the same sites. The results bring this harrowing time in the citys history back to life, situating the tragedy of World War II amidst contemporary landmarks.

The world has changed in the nearly seven decades since the end of WWII, and these images certainly visualize this transformation. But they also highlight an undercurrent of continuity. The seamless overlay of one era onto another suggests a kind of urban endurance and resilience, in spite of the traumatic events that history may throw its way.

Peter Warshall Seminar Tickets

The Long Now Foundation 24/10/2012 19:30

The Long Now Foundations monthly

Seminars About Long-term Thinking

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

Peter Warshall on “Enchanted by the Sun: The CoEvolution of Light, Life, and Color on Earth”

TICKETS

Wednesday November 28, 02012 at 7:30pm Cowell Theater at Fort Mason

Long Now Members can reserve 2 seats, join today! • General Tickets $10

About this Seminar:

For 3.8 billion years, life has lived in a bath of solar radiance. The Suns illumination outlines which objects are appealing, bland, or repellant. Its powers of desiccation, blistering, bleaching, and revelation govern a balance between beauty and danger. Its flood of photons shapes light-harvesters (eyes), pigments, and surfaces—stretching planetary aesthetics to include “invisible light” (ultraviolet, infrared, and polarized).

From euglena to Matisse, all creatures dwell in a variety of luminance locales—dramas of biospheric brightness, color mixes, and rebellions against darkness (such as fireflies and luminescent fish). The most recent rebellion has been human-devised lamps that impact everything from the artistic-military complex (camouflage and mimicry) to the materials, techniques, and display of paintings, electronic imaging, and growing plants.

This 55-minute journey travels from unicells to octopi to op-art, with a dose of PR for planetary color webs and their influence on awareness, desire, self-direction, memory, contemplation, and curiosity.

Armed with a PhD in Biological Anthropology from Harvard, Peter Warshall has shaped watershed theory and practices, conservation biology, relations with Indian tribes in the Southwest, and refugee activities in Africa. For a decade he was the editor of the Whole Earth Review.

Lazar Kunstmann and Jon Lackman Seminar Primer

The Long Now Foundation 23/10/2012 19:07

“Preservation Without Permission: the Paris Urban eXperiment”

Tuesday November 13, 02012 at the Cowell Theater, San Francisco

The Paris Urban eXperiment (known for short as UX) began in 1981 as a boast by a middle schooler and has since grown into a large secretive network of artists, craftspeople, and urban explorers. With over two millennia of streets, sewers, catacombs, and basements, their home city is an infrastructural palimpsest riddled with historical artifacts too numerous to be effectively preserved by its government. For those with the know-how, though, not preserving this heritage would be a tragedy worth skirting the law to avert. Jon Lackman writes for Wired:

Through meticulous infiltration, UX members have carried out shocking acts of cultural preservation and repair, with an ethos of restoring those invisible parts of our patrimony that the government has abandoned or doesnt have the means to maintain.

Lackmans story focuses on one particular preservation project undertaken by a subgroup of the UX, the Untergunther. They took it upon themselves to sneak into one of Pariss iconic churches, the Pantheon, and to restore the centuries-old clock that hadnt worked in many years. The Pantheons reaction to this work wasnt as grateful as expected, but their mission wasnt to delight the buildings current administration:

Paris, as they saw it, was the center of France and was once the center of Western civilization; the Latin Quarter was Paris historic intellectual center; the Pantheon stands in the Latin Quarter and is dedicated to the great men of French history, many of whose remains are housed within; and in its interior lay a clock, beating like a heart, until it suddenly was silenced. Untergunther wanted to restart the heart of the world.

Lazar Kunstmann, of the UX, and Jon Lackman discuss this and other acts of rogue preservation on November 13th at the Cowell Theater. You can reserve tickets, get directions and sign up for the podcast on the Seminar page.

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

Steven Pinker Seminar Media

The Long Now Foundation 19/10/2012 21:19

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

The Decline of Violence

Monday October 8, 02012 – San Francisco

Video is up on the Pinker Seminar page for Members.

*********************

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

*********************

The Long Peace – a summary by Stewart Brand

Nothing can be more gentle than man in his primitive state, declared Rousseau in the 18th century. A century earlier, Thomas Hobbes wrote, In the state of nature the life of man is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. The evidence shows that Rousseau was wrong and Hobbes was right, said Pinker. Forensic archaeology (CSI Paleolithic) reveals that 15 percent of prehistoric skeletons show signs of violent trauma. Ethnographic vital statistics of surviving non-state societies and pockets of anarchy show, on average, 524 war deaths per 100,000 people per year.

Germany in the 20th century, wracked by two world wars, had 144 war deaths per 100,000 per year. Russia had 135. Japan had 27. The US in the 20th century had 5.7. In this 21st century the whole world has a war death rate of 0.3 per 100,000 people per year. In primitive societies 15 percent of people died violently; now 0.03 percent do. Violence is 1/500th of what it used to be.

The change came by stages, each with a different dynamic. Pinker identified: 1) The Pacification Process brought about by the rise and expansion of states, which monopolized violence to keep their citizens from killing each other. 2) The Humanizing Process. States consolidated, enforcing the kings justice. With improving infrastructure, commerce grew, and the zero-sum game of plunder was replaced by the positive-sum game of trade. 3) The Humanitarian Revolution. Following ideas of The Enlightenment, the expansion of literacy, and growing cosmopolitanism, reason guided people to reject slavery, reduce capital crimes toward zero, and challenge superstitious demonizing of witches, Jews, etc. Voltaire wrote: Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.

4) The Long Peace. Since 1945 there has been zero use of nuclear weapons, zero combat between the Cold War superpowers, just one war between great powers (US and China in Korea, ending 1953), zero wars in western Europe (there used to be two new wars a year there, for 600 years), and zero wars between developed countries or expansion of their borders by conquest. 5) The New Peace is the spreading of the Long Peace to the rest of the world, largely through the decline of ideology, and the spread of democracy, trade, and international organizations such as the UN. Colonial wars ended; civil wars did flare up. 6) The Rights Revolution, increasingly powerful worldwide, insists on protection from injustice for blacks, women, children, gays, and animals. Even domestic violence is down.

Such a powerful long-term trend is the result of human ingenuity bearing down on the problem of violence the same way it has on hunger and plague. Something psychologists call the circle of empathy has expanded steadily from family to village to clan to tribe to nation to other races to other species. In addition, humanitarian reforms are often preceded by new technologies for spreading ideas. It is sometimes fashionable to despise modernity. A more appropriate response is gratitude.

In the Q & A, one questioner noted that violence is clearly down, but fear of violence is still way up. Social psychologist Pinker observed that we base our fears irrationally on anecdotes instead of statistics—one terrorist attack here, one child abduction there. In a world of 7 billion what is the actual risk for any individual? It is approaching zero. That trend is so solid we can count on it and take it further still.

Subscribe to our Seminar email list for updates and summaries.

The Time Keeper

The Long Now Foundation 17/10/2012 22:52

One of the early ideas for the 10,000 Year Clock was to simply endow a family whose job it would be for 400 generations to just shout out the time every day. I had no idea there was already someone like that… RIP John Votta.

The Washington Square timekeeper was a link back to a very ancient tradition of people who both tell time and look out for the public good,

The whole story at Washington Square News

The Long View on Real Estate

The Long Now Foundation 17/10/2012 19:41

Sometimes a long view can yield a very different perspective than the short view.

Take housing prices, for example. For the past five years or so, the news media have often characterized the housing market as volatile and fragile. The statistics certainly bear this out: from 02000 to 02008, the global housing boom propelled real estate prices to unprecedented heights only to come crashing down dramatically as this latest economic bubble burst. Its enough to suggest that real estate might not be the most reliable kind of investment.

But when you zoom out across the scale of time, this ragged spike on the graph of housing prices actually softens gradually, until it fades among other similar spikes around it into the continual ebb and flow of one long, wavy line that never strays far from its average.

This conclusion emerges from a (very) longitudinal study of housing prices by Piet Eichholtz of Maastricht University in the Netherlands. Eichholtz tracked nearly four centuries of housing prices on the Herengracht, a stately canal in the historic center of Amsterdam. While housing prices certainly plummet with the devastation of wars and soar in response to economic growth, Eichholtz graph shows that over the long term, average real housing prices those adjusted for inflation actually oscillate around an average that stays more or less constant across time.

These findings suggest, perhaps, that the price of real estate ultimately reflects its nature as a basic human necessity. Housing is, and will always be, valuable because it offers us shelter not because it can make us money. In that sense, real estate prices may be better compared to the cost of produce and dairy products than to the value of the Dow Jones index.

The study has been discussed on a few blogs, and the original paper by Eichholtz can be found here.

Decoding Long-Term Data Storage

The Long Now Foundation 12/10/2012 19:47

If human societies are founded on the accumulation of knowledge through the ages, then the long-term transmission of information must be the cornerstone of a durable civilization. And as we accelerate ever more rapidly in our expansion of knowledge and technological capability, the development of durable storage methods becomes ever more important.

In the process of brainstorming such methods, two central questions emerge. The first of these concerns the type of storage media you might use: what kind of material is likely to last long enough to convey a message to generations thousands of years into the future? Throughout much of history, people carved important messages into stone, bone, or other hard materials. So far, we dont seem to have come up with anything better: most of us are familiar with the limited lifespan of CDs, vinyl, and computer hard drives. Faced with this lack of suitable options, several organizations and companies around the world have re-embraced the long-term durability of hard natural substances. The Long Nows Rosetta disk, for example, is made of nickel. Arnano, a French technology start-up, has developed a disk of sapphire on which to micro-etch information civic records, perhaps, or important messages about the storage of nuclear waste. And most recently, Japanese electronics giant Hitachi announced a new data storage technology that uses quartz glass.

The second and perhaps even more intriguing question concerns the language of your message. What kind of code will be most easily accessible to future generations, and what technologies will they have available to help them decrypt a message from the past?

The storage and transmission of data often requires multiple levels of encoding. When we think of code we often think of computers but in fact, we routinely go through two layers of encryption before we can even begin to digitize information. Spoken human language is itself a code, in which sounds are used to signify things or ideas. The use of a writing system adds a further layer of encryption: sequences of letters or pictographs signify the sounds that represent things or ideas. Yet another layer of encryption can then be applied by translating a writing system into binary numbers (and numeric systems are a kind of code, as well!) or perhaps even DNA.

These extra layers of encoding offer the advantage of information density: they can help you pack lots of information into a very small format. However, each layer also further complicates the decodability and readability of a message. Because the Rosetta Disk is itself intended to be a tool for decryption a primer of human language meant to help future archaeologists unlock entire worlds of culture, just like the Rosetta stone did in the 19th century Long Now has chosen to store its data in the analog form of human alphabets, rather than add an extra layer of encryption by a digital code of 1s and 0s.

Arnano, the makers of the sapphire disk, have made a similar choice. The added advantage is that this analog information is readable by the human eye (aided by a microscope or magnifying glass).

Its safe to assume that the languages future generations will speak and the technologies theyll have available will most likely be very different from what we use today. This brings up an important third question: how do you include instructions for decoding and reading with your message? Following the example of its namesake predecessor, the content on Long Nows Rosetta Disk is its own primer: if you know at least one of the 1,500 languages included on the disk, all other information can be decoded. Perhaps a similar kind of parallel multiplicity of codes is possible for other storage methods as well.

These questions of language and code are inevitably more difficult to answer than that of the storage medium. You can subject your chosen material to stress tests to make sure that it will stand up to acid, erosion, or any other kind of potential natural disaster. But theres no similar test for language; its impossible to predict what codes will be interpretable by the people of the future, or what technology theyll have available to decrypt a message. Nevertheless, these conundrums are no less important to grapple with, and any proposal for long-term storage worth its salt must offer some potential answers to these questions.