Duelity
The Long Now Foundation 22/08/2012 23:27
Duelity from Ryan Uhrich on Vimeo.
Duelity is a split-screen animation that tells both sides of the story of Earth s origins in a dizzying and provocative journey through the history and language that marks human thought.
Marcos Ceravolo and Ryan Uhrich designed and directed the short animation Duelity with the Vancouver Film School. We featured it as a Long Short – our series of short films that convey long-term thinking - at the August 02012 SALT talk with Elaine Pagels. Duelity visualizes two versions of the earth’s creation, and Pagels’ presentation delves into the Book of Revelation’s apocalyptic foretelling of its end.
Storing Digital Data in DNA
The Long Now Foundation 16/08/2012 20:15
Reported in Science today, scientists George Church, Yuan Gao and Sriram Kosuri report that they have written a 5.27-megabit book in DNA – encoding far more digital data in DNA than has ever been achieved.
Writing messages in DNA was first demonstrated in 1988, and the largest amount of data written in DNA previously was 7,920 bits. The challenge in writing more information than this has been creating long perfect sequences. The current project uses shorter sequences, each encoding 96-bit data block, along with a 19-bit address that specifies the location of the data block within the larger data set. Then redundancy reduces errors: each base only encodes a single bit (A and C are both 0, G and T are both one), and each data block has several molecular copies.
DNA has several advantages for archival data storage – information density, energy efficiency, and stability. With regard to stability DNA offers readability despite degradation in non-ideal conditions over millennia – by which they mean 400,000 years! (See Church and Regis, in their forthcoming book on the subject.)
If we wish to intentionally use this technology for active long-term information storage (imagine some crucial message we need to convey to the future), we should probably anticipate the possibility of a discontinuity in technological knowledge and access to tools that could read the information. This raises questions of discoverability, decodability, and readability.
Ubiquity aids discoverability – if the information is everywhere it is easier to find, even stumble upon, by accident. Still, clear signals / signposts could aid discovery (neon green cockroaches anyone?). With regard to decodability, Ill simply mention there several layers of encoding to be unraveled here: spoken human language > written language in text form > digital / binary > DNA. And presumably readability requires tools on the order of at least what we have available today, unless you can make the expression of the information obvious in some biological way.
Wonderfully exciting new stuff to conjure with from the perspective of technologies for the Long Now Library. We are also delighted to be working with Dr. George Church to provide Rosetta / PanLex data that may be written in a new edition of the DNA book, so check back for updates!
Cory Doctorow Seminar Media
The Long Now Foundation 16/08/2012 00:56
This lecture was presented as part of The Long Now Foundation’s monthly Seminars About Long-term Thinking.
The Coming Century of War Against Your Computer
Tuesday July 31, 02012 – San Francisco
Video is up on the Doctorow Seminar page for Members.
*********************
Audio is up on the Doctorow Seminar page, or you can subscribe to our podcast.
*********************
Who governs digital trust?- a summary by Stewart Brand
Doctorow framed the question this way: “Computers are everywhere. They are now something we put our whole bodies into—airplanes, cars—and something we put into our bodies—pacemakers, cochlear implants. They HAVE to be trustworthy.”
Sometimes humans are not so trustworthy, and programs may override you: “I cant let you do that, Dave.” (Reference to the self-protective insane computer Hal in Kubricks film “2001.” That time the human was more trustworthy than the computer.) Who decides who can override whom?
The core issues for Doctorow come down to Human Rights versus Property Rights, Lockdown versus Certainty, and Owners versus mere Users.
Apple computers such as the iPhone are locked down—it lets you run only what Apple trusts. Android phones let you run only what you trust. Doctorow has changed his mind in favor of a foundational computer device called the “Trusted Platform Module” (TPM) which provides secure crypto, remote attestation, and sealed storage. He sees it as a crucial “nub of secure certainty” in your machine—but only to the extent that it is implemented to allow owners to choose what they trust—not vendors or governments.
If its your machine, you rule it. Its a Human Right: your computer should not be overridable. And a Property Right: “you own what you buy, even if it what you do with it pisses off the vendor.” Thats clear when the Owner and the User are the same person. What about when theyre not?
There are systems where there is a credible argument for the authorities to rule—airplanes, nuclear reactors, probably self-driving cars (“as a species we are terrible drivers.”)—but at least in the case of cars, and possibly in the other two, it will not make us safer; it will make us less safe. The firmware in those machines should be inviolable by users and outside attackers. But the power of Owners over Users can be deeply troubling, such as in matters of surveillance. There are powers that want full data on what Users are up to—governments, companies, schools, parents. Behind your company computer is the IT department and the people they report to. They want to know all about your email and your web activities, and there is reason for that. But we need to contemplate the “total and terrifying power of Owners over Users.”
Recognizing that we are necessarily transitory Users of many systems, such as everything involving Cloud computing or storage, Doctorow favors keeping your own box with its own processors and storage. He strongly favors the democratization and wide distribution of expertise. As a Fellow of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (who co-sponsored the talk) he supports public defense of freedom in every sort of digital rights issue.
“The potential for abuse in the computer world is large,” Doctorow concluded. “It will keep getting larger.”
Subscribe to our Seminar email list for updates and summaries.
Steven Pinker Seminar Tickets
The Long Now Foundation 15/08/2012 19:38
The Long Now Foundations monthly
Seminars About Long-term Thinking
Steven Pinker on “The Decline of Violence”
TICKETS
Monday October 8, 02012 at 7:30pm Herbst Theater at Civic Center
Long Now Members can reserve 2 seats, join today! • General Tickets $10
About this Seminar:
Steven Pinker changes the world twice in his new book, THE BETTER ANGELS OF OUR NATURE: Why Violence Has Declined.
First, he presents exhaustive evidence that the tragic view of history is wrong and always has been. A close examination of the data shows that in every millennium, century, and decade, humans have been drastically reducing violence, cruelty, and injustice—right down to the present year. A trend that consistent is not luck; it has to be structural.
So, second, he boldly founds a discipline that might as well be called psychohistory. As a Harvard psychologist and public intellectual (author of The Language Instinct and The Blank Slate), he sought causes for the phenomenon hes reporting—why violence has declined. Real ethical progress, he found, came from a sequence of institutions, norms, cultural practices, and mental tricks employed by whole societies to change their collective mind and behavior in a peaceful direction.
Humanitys great project of civilizing itself is far from complete, but Pinkers survey of how far weve come builds confidence that the task will be completed, and he illuminates how to get there.
Indias Living Bridges
The Long Now Foundation 14/08/2012 20:23
In far North-Eastern India, the power of nature is not a limitation, but a resource. This video offers a glimpse at an old tradition, but one that’s very much alive in more ways than one!
A form of sustainable, living architecture that will live and grow for generations, these living bridges are a testament to long term thinking. Indeed, theyre included in the list of Long Now Locations maintained by Atlas Obscura, who write:
The root bridges, some of which are over a hundred feet long, take ten to fifteen years to become fully functional, but theyre extraordinarily strong strong enough that some of them can support the weight of fifty or more people at a time. In fact, because they are alive and still growing, the bridges actually gain strength over time and some of the ancient root bridges used daily by the people of the villages around Cherrapunji may be well over 500 years old.
For more photographs of these living bridges, check out Atlas Obscuras webpage!
Library of Water
The Long Now Foundation 10/08/2012 21:31
In the sleepy little town of Stykkishólmur, Iceland is a very interesting long-term project entitled Vatnasafn or Library of Water. The artist Roni Horn created an art installation in the old City Library in 02007. There are four parts to the exhibition, the beautiful building and view, the floor which is covered with weather terms in English and Icelandic, weather reports and finally the collection of water.
The library is a mesmerizing 24 volume collection of floor to ceiling water cylinders each containing water from one of the 24 glaciers of Iceland, including the now extinct Ok glacier).
When you enter the exhibit the towering columns of mostly clear water force you to think about these resources in a different way. We use water without even thinking, every time we wash our hands, take a shower or a bath, and cook our food. To put water on display in this way as a symbol or what we have and what we have lost makes for an interesting examination on our priorities.
Unlike a seed bank, we wont be recreating that lost glacier from the water saved in this library. This is a collection that brings together nature from all across the Icelandic country into a single place. It shows how temporal nature and the weather can really be. With the worries of retreating and disappearing glaciers, to have a collection of a small slice of hydrological history is unique.
The website for the installation has a great map and a slideshow of where all the water came from.
Thanks, Brian!
The Apollo Goodwill Disc
The Long Now Foundation 09/08/2012 20:47
On July 20, 01969, humans landed on the surface of the moon for the first time. But since only two of us got to go, NASA sent a message “FROM PLANET EARTH” in the rest of humanity’s stead. The message wasn’t a letter written in ink and paper, though. It was a thin silicon disc, with messages from various world leaders etched into its surface at a microscopic scale. On the recent anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing, Steve Jurvetson posted photographs of some Apollo 11 artifacts, including the Goodwill Disc. Jurvetson writes on his Flickr page:
The story of the rushed creation of the disc is fascinating, as are the messages embedded in this interplanetary time capsule.
The concept started in June, 1969, and it was a politically charged project, in the midst of the Cold War and the Vietnam War. On June 27, NASA telephoned the state department, and got the unprecedented permission to contact the foreign chiefs of state to deposit a message on the moon. This was 19 days before launch. They were asked to compose and send typed and scribed letters to the U.S. (they came by telegram and mail).
But NASA did not know how they would store the messages so that they could last thousands of years in the harsh temperatures, solar radiation, and cosmic rays on the lunar surface. So they approached the supplier of some of the most advanced technology on Apollo the nascent semiconductor industry.
Sprague manufactured 53,000 components on the Apollo 11 spacecraft and many more for the ground support equipment. The engineers chose silicon for the storage medium because of the density of storage and the stability of silicon over temperature in a vacuum.
You can read the text of the goodwill messages on Wikipedia, as well as on the original 01969 NASA description, which also explains a bit about the fabrication method.
Forty years later, The Long Now Foundation’s Rosetta Disk uses remarkably similar technology to provide a durable record of the world’s human languages:
For the extreme longevity version of the Rosetta database, we have selected a new high density analog storage device as an alternative to the quick obsolescence and fast material decay rate of typical digital storage systems. This technology, developed by Los Alamos Laboratories and Norsam Technologies, can be thought of as a kind of next generation microfiche. However, as an analog storage system, it is far superior. A 2.8 inch diameter nickel disk can be etched at densities of 200,000 page images per disk, and the result is immune to water damage, able to withstand high temperatures, and unaffected by electromagnetic radiation. This makes it an ideal backup for a long-term text image archive. Also, since the encoding is a physical image (no 1′s or 0′s), there is no platform or format dependency, guaranteeing readability despite changes in digital operating systems, applications, and compression algorithms.
(via BoingBoing)
Tim OReilly Seminar Tickets
The Long Now Foundation 08/08/2012 22:42
The Long Now Foundations monthly
Seminars About Long-term Thinking
Tim OReilly on “Birth of the Global Mind”
TICKETS
Wednesday September 5, 02012 at 7:30pm Cowell Theater at Fort Mason
Long Now Members can reserve 2 seats, join today! • General Tickets $10
About this Seminar:
The history of civilization is a story of evolution in our ability to build complex multicellular minds,” says Tim OReilly, founder and CEO of OReilly Media (books, conferences, foo camps, Maker Faires, Make magazine.)
Speech allowed us to communicate and coordinate. Writing allowed that coordination to span time and space. Twentieth century mass communications allowed shared information and culture to blanket the world. In the 21st century, memes spread mind to mind in nearly real time.
But that’s not all. In one breakthrough computer application after another, we see a new kind of man-machine symbiosis. The Google autonomous vehicle turns out not to be just a triumph of artificial intelligence algorithms. The car is guided by the cloud memory of roads driven before by human Google Streetview drivers augmented by powerful and precise new sensors. In the same way, crowd-sourced data from sensor-enabled humans is leading to smarter cities, breakthroughs in healthcare, and new economies.
The future belongs not to artificial intelligence, but to collective intelligence.
Elaine Pagels Seminar Primer
The Long Now Foundation 07/08/2012 21:41
“The Truth About the Book of Revelations”
Monday August 20, 02012 at the Cowell Theater, San Francisco
Watch Elaine Pagels on the Book of Revelation on PBS. See more from Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly.
Throughout her career as an historian and biblical scholar, Elaine Pagels has been piecing together the process by which many different writings inspired by someone named Jesus came to be singularly known as The Bible. By proxy, that process tells the story of how the disparate devotees of Jesus came to form a singular institution we know as the Christian church. In the centuries since, the interpretations of that book by that institution (or fragments of it), have heavily influenced history. Better understanding these parallel coalescences of text and tribe, as Pagelss work has shown, can teach us about more than just some of the events of the first few centuries CE, but of balancing individual empowerment with group identity, the formation of orthodoxy, and the enduring power of a good story.
One of Pagels most popular books, Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas explores the cache of texts discovered near Nag Hammadi, Egypt in 1945. In it, she focuses on The Gospel of Thomas, which was written sometime between 40 and 140 CE. Of interest is the texts interpretation of the salvation offered by following Jesus. Referencing a light within each person, this apocryphal gospel eschewed the one true path rhetoric that would eventually be incorporated into the official church doctrine for an Eastern-sounding individually achieved enlightenment. More recently, Pagels explored writings attributed to Judas that also didnt make it into the doctrinal Bible and that similarly contradict official teaching. She discussed Reading Judas: The Gospel of Judas and the Shaping of Christianity with Stephen Colbert in 02007.
In her latest book, Revelations: Visions, Prophecy, and Politics in the Book of Revelation, Pagels turns her attention away from rejected and suppressed texts for one of the most popular and cinematic Biblical passages – The Book of Revelation. The historical record seems to indicate that it was written by John of Patmos to express the horror of the Roman armys destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE. The author couldnt openly demonize such a dominant force, so he opted to retain some plausible deniability by writing in vague, symbolic terms. Pagels also contends that though John was a follower of Jesus, he still considered himself and Jesuss teachings Jewish, and feared that the developing schism from the existing Jewish Church would lead to a violent reckoning.
Pagels explains in an interview with PBS that several centuries after its writing, in an ironic twist, Revelations powerful imagery was repurposed by a bishop named Athanasius to threaten those who would taint his vision of a pure, singular orthodox Christianity – just the thing it was originally written to discourage.
Elaine Pagels discusses the lives stories can lead beyond their writers imaginations and the particularly storied life Revelation has lived on August 20th 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.
Cory Doctorow Seminar Media
The Long Now Foundation 03/08/2012 22:39
This lecture was presented as part of The Long Now Foundation’s monthly Seminars About Long-term Thinking.
The Coming Century of War Against Your Computer
Tuesday July 31, 02012 – San Francisco
Audio is up on the Doctorow Seminar page, or you can subscribe to our podcast.
*********************
Who governs digital trust?- a summary by Stewart Brand
Doctorow framed the question this way: “Computers are everywhere. They are now something we put our whole bodies into—airplanes, cars—and something we put into our bodies—pacemakers, cochlear implants. They HAVE to be trustworthy.”
Sometimes humans are not so trustworthy, and programs may override you: “I cant let you do that, Dave.” (Reference to the self-protective insane computer Hal in Kubricks film “2001.” That time the human was more trustworthy than the computer.) Who decides who can override whom?
The core issues for Doctorow come down to Human Rights versus Property Rights, Lockdown versus Certainty, and Owners versus mere Users.
Apple computers such as the iPhone are locked down—it lets you run only what Apple trusts. Android phones let you run only what you trust. Doctorow has changed his mind in favor of a foundational computer device called the “Trusted Platform Module” (TPM) which provides secure crypto, remote attestation, and sealed storage. He sees it as a crucial “nub of secure certainty” in your machine—but only to the extent that it is implemented to allow owners to choose what they trust—not vendors or governments.
If its your machine, you rule it. Its a Human Right: your computer should not be overridable. And a Property Right: “you own what you buy, even if it what you do with it pisses off the vendor.” Thats clear when the Owner and the User are the same person. What about when theyre not?
There are systems where there is a credible argument for the authorities to rule—airplanes, nuclear reactors, probably self-driving cars (“as a species we are terrible drivers.”)—but at least in the case of cars, and possibly in the other two, it will not make us safer; it will make us less safe. The firmware in those machines should be inviolable by users and outside attackers. But the power of Owners over Users can be deeply troubling, such as in matters of surveillance. There are powers that want full data on what Users are up to—governments, companies, schools, parents. Behind your company computer is the IT department and the people they report to. They want to know all about your email and your web activities, and there is reason for that. But we need to contemplate the “total and terrifying power of Owners over Users.”
Recognizing that we are necessarily transitory Users of many systems, such as everything involving Cloud computing or storage, Doctorow favors keeping your own box with its own processors and storage. He strongly favors the democratization and wide distribution of expertise. As a Fellow of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (who co-sponsored the talk) he supports public defense of freedom in every sort of digital rights issue.
“The potential for abuse in the computer world is large,” Doctorow concluded. “It will keep getting larger.”
Subscribe to our Seminar email list for updates and summaries.
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