Benjamin Barber Seminar Tickets
The Long Now Foundation 10/05/2012 19:11
The Long Now Foundations monthly
Seminars About Long-term Thinking
Benjamin Barber on “If Mayors Ruled the World”
TICKETS
Tuesday June 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:
Democracy began in cities and works best in cities. Mayors are the most pragmatic and effective of all political leaders because they have to get things done. The paramount aims of city-dwellers, says Barber, concern collecting garbage and collecting art rather than collecting votes or collecting foreign allies, the supply of water rather than the supply of arms, promoting cooperation rather than promoting exceptionalism, fostering education and culture rather than fostering national defense and patriotism.
Most of humanity now lives in cities, and cities worldwide connect with each other more readily than any other political entity. By expanding on that capability, Barber suggests, Cities can make themselves global guarantors of social justice and equality against the depredations of fractious states. And they can become, as the polis once was, new incubators of democracy, this time in a global form.
A much-honored political theorist, Barber is author of Strong Democracy: Participatory Politics for a New Age and of Jihad vs. McWorld: How Globalism and Tribalism Are Reshaping the World.
VVORK
VVORK 10/05/2012 00:30
»el jardinero«, 2011 by Jesus Bubu Negron.
VVORK
VVORK 10/05/2012 00:22
»Besuche«, 2005,
»Besuche«, 2005,
»Besuche«, 2005 by Lisa Holzer.
Freinkel Seminar Primer
The Long Now Foundation 09/05/2012 22:31
“Eternal Plastic: A Toxic Love Story”
Tuesday May 22, 02012 at the Cowell Theater, San Francisco
Susan Freinkel has used both chestnuts and toothbrushes as stand-ins for American cultures relationship with the environment and technology. Her two well-received books of science journalism serve, in some ways, as foils to one another. The first, American Chestnut: The Life, Death and Rebirth of a Perfect Tree, is a study of how we lost something great, while the more recent Plastic: A Toxic Love Story explores how weve found ourselves overly-dependent on something that isnt the cure-all wed hoped. Fortunately, both books also delve into whats next: how we may get the American Chestnut back and how we can mitigate some of the more damaging effects of plastic.
The American Chestnut was all but lost early last century to a blight that nearly cleared the eastern part of the United States of the species. As it was an important source of timber and nuts, the loss of the Chestnut was a significant blow to the American economy. Freinkels book on the subject explores these effects as well as the recent proliferation of efforts to revive the species through a range of techniques, both high- and low-tech.
In exploring our relationship with plastic, Freinkel is careful to point out that it has many legitimate benefits to offer us as a material; problems arise however, when we treat it primarily as disposable. In a New York Times Op-Ed published last year, she explains that around half the plastic produced each year goes into single-use products, which not only significantly undervalues the time and energy that are required to produce those hydrocarbon molecules, but ignores how long theyll last as well.
In an interview on NPRs Fresh Air, she discusses the health concerns around the many different types of plastic, the sometimes-murky science supporting and refuting those concerns, and the complicated regulatory environment governing those debates. Shes also written a couple of articles for Fast Company, one recently exploring the costs and benefits of burning used plastic for energy.
Susan Freinkel will weave these many threads together on Tuesday, May 22nd 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.
Charles C. Mann Seminar Media
The Long Now Foundation 09/05/2012 00:49
This lecture was presented as part of The Long Now Foundation’s monthly Seminars About Long-term Thinking.
Living in the Homogenocene: The First 500 Years
Monday April 23, 02012 – San Francisco
Video is up on the Mann Seminar page for Members.
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Audio is up on the Mann Seminar page, or you can subscribe to our podcast.
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Bio-blender Earth - a summary by Stewart Brand
Tumultuous effects resulted and continue to result from the massive mixing of the worlds biota when European ships reconnected the American continent to the rest of the world. Mann traced several of the cascading consequences of “the biggest ecological convulsion since the death of the dinosaurs.”
The first momentous change came from microbial exchange—20 lethal diseases came from Europe to the Americas while only one (syphilis) went the other way. North America, which had been largely cleared by natives with fire and agriculture, reforested when two-thirds to 95% of the native inhabitants died from European diseases—”the greatest demographic catastrophe in human history.” That huge reforesting drew down atmospheric carbon dioxide and Europes “Little Ice Age” (1550-1800) apparently resulted.
Meanwhile the mountain of silver at Potosí, Bolivia, vastly enriched Europe, which “went shopping” worldwide. Trading ships coursed the worlds oceans. One artifact picked up from Peru was the potato—a single variety of the 6,000 available. When potatoes in Europe turned out to provide four times the amount of food per acre as wheat, the previously routine famines came to an end, population soared, governments became more stable, and they began building global empires. After 1843 guano shipped by the ton from coastal Peru for fertilizer introduced high-input agriculture. In Ireland 40% of the exploding population ate only potatoes. Around 1844 a potato blight arrived from Mexico, and a million Irish died in the Great Famine and a million more emigrated.
In China, which has no large lakes and only two major rivers, agriculture had been limited to two wet regions where rice could be grown. Two imports from America—maize and sweet potato—could be farmed in dry lands. As in Europe, population went up. Vast areas were terraced as Han farmers pushed westward as far as the Mongolian desert. In heavy rains the terraces melted into the streams, and silt built up in the lowlands, elevating the rivers as much as 40 feet above the surrounding terrain, so when they flooded, millions died. “A Katrina per month for 100 years,” as one Chinese meteorologist described it. The constant calamities weakened the government, and China became ripe for foreign colonial takeover.
In America two imported diseases—malaria and yellow fever—were selective in who they killed. Europeans died in huge numbers, but Africans were one-tenth as susceptible, and so slavery replaced traditional indentured servitude in all the warm regions that favored mosquito-borne diseases. As one result, four times as many Africans as Europeans crossed the Atlantic and began mixing with the remaining native Americans, giving rise to an endless variety of racial blends and accompanying vitality throughout the Americas.
During the Q & A, Mann described a potential fresh eco-convulsion-in-waiting. “There is an area in southeast Asia roughly the size of Great Britain that is a single giant rubber plantation.” Where rubber trees originally came from in the Amazon there is now a rubber tree leaf-blight that is starting to spread in Asia. “You could lose all the rubber trees in three to six months. It would be the biggest deforestation in a long time.” The entire auto industry, he added, depends on just-in-time delivery of rubber.
Subscribe to our Seminar email list for updates and summaries.
Brian Eno to Help Judge Data Visualization Awards
The Long Now Foundation 08/05/2012 23:17
Hungry for information, but bored by graphs and pie charts? Then pay a visit to Information is Beautiful, a site dedicated to all things informational and all things pretty. Its pages showcase models and graphics that reveal what can happen when data presentation is combined with an eye for design and aesthetics.
The site is now hosting the first global award competition for data visualization, and recently announced that Long Now Board member Brian Eno has joined its panel of judges.
Along with his fellow evaluators, Eno will be reviewing submissions for awards in a variety of categories, ranging from Interactive Visualisations to Data Journalism and Information Art. The most prestigious award, however, is reserved quite simply for the Most Beautiful design.
Submissions are due by May 31st and they’ll announce winners at the end of July.
Check out the website for more (artfully rendered) information about the competition, and a look at the submissions; the general public gets to vote, too!
Mega City Soundtrack
BLDGBLOG 08/05/2012 15:54
[Image: A map of fictional mega cities, via 2000AD].A short review in the most recent Wire discusses a new album by Geoff Barrow and Ben Salisbury: a speculative urban soundtrack to Mega City One, a "post-apocalyptic sprawl covering the eastern seaboard of the United States" from Judge Dredd. "Portishead's Geoff Barrow and BBC soundtrack composer Ben Salisbury's instrumental interpretation" of the city, The Wire writes, "evoke[s] the gunmetal grey of life in Mega City One, its multilevel labyrinth of self-contained blocks, zipstrips and boomways reflecting darkly in the album's tarnished metallic textures and gridlike structures."
The retro-Alan Howarthian synthesizers, a "rigorously imagined sound map" of the city, can be streamed in full via Bandcamp.
For those of you in London, meanwhile, Barrow and Salisbury will perform excerpts from the "weirdly addictive"or is it "hackneyed"?album at Orbital Comics on 16 May.
VVORK
VVORK 08/05/2012 00:47
“Derelict”, 2012 by Stéphanie Cherpin. Wood, cardboard, metal, plaster, ceramic, painting, coating.
Water vs. World
BLDGBLOG 07/05/2012 20:31
[Image: Illustration by Jack Cook, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution; courtesy of the USGS].In Charles Fishman's compelling exploration of water on Earth, The Big Thirst, there is a shocking statement that, despite the apparent inexhaustibility of the oceans, "the total water on the surface of Earth (the oceans, the ice caps, the atmospheric water) makes up 0.025 percent of the mass of the planet25/10,000ths of the stuff of Earth. If the Earth were the size of a Honda Odyssey minivan," he clarifies, "the amount of water on the planet would be in a single, half-liter bottle of Poland Spring in one of the van's thirteen cup holders."
This is rather remarkably communicated by an illustration from the USGS, reproduced above, showing "the size of a sphere that would contain all of Earth's water in comparison to the size of the Earth." That's not a lot of water.
Only vaguely related, meanwhile, there is an additional description in Fishman's book worth repeating here.
[Image: The Orion nebula, photographed by Hubble].In something called the Orion Molecular Cloud, truly vast amounts of water are being produced. How much? Incredibly, Fishman explains, "the cloud is making sixty Earth waters every twenty-four hours"or, in simpler terms, "there is enough water being formed sufficient to fill all of Earth's oceans every twenty-four minutes." This is occurring, however, in an area "420 times the size of our solar system."
Anyway, Fishman's book is pretty fascinating, in particular his chapter, called "Dolphins in the Desert," on the water reuse and filtration infrastructure installed over the past 10-15 years in Las Vegas.
(Via @USGS).
Lost Lakes of the Empire State Building
BLDGBLOG 07/05/2012 19:10
[Image: Sunfish Pond].Something I've long meant to post aboutand isn't news at allis the fact that there is a lost lake in the basement of the Empire State Building. Or a pond, more accurately speaking.
After following a series of links leading off from Steve Duncan's ongoing exploration of New York's "lost streams, kills, rivers, brooks, ponds, lakes, burns, brakes, and springs," I found the fascinating story of Sunfish Pond, a "lovely little body of water" at the corner of what is now 31st Street and Fourth Avenue. "The pond was fed both by springs and by a brook which also carried its overflow down to the East River at Kip's Bay." Interestingly, although the pond proper would apparently just miss the foundations of the Empire State Building, its feeder streams still pose a flood risk to the building, rising up through the concrete during heavy storms. To a certain extent, this reminds me of a line from the recent book Alphaville: "Heat lightning cackles above the Brooklyn skyline and her message is clear: 'You may have it paved over, but it's still a swamp.'" That is, the city can't escape its hydrology.
But perhaps this makes the Empire State Building as good a place as any for us to test out the possibility of fishing in the basements of Manhattan: break in, air-hammer some holes through the concrete, bust out fishing rods, and spend the night hauling inexplicable marine life out of the deep and gurgling darkness below.
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