Memorial to the ephemeral
The Long Now Foundation 19/09/2008 06:40
In a post entitled “Temporary Becomes Permanent“, Kevin Kelly recently shared his thoughts at this blog on how fragments of culture that start out with a limited life expectancy can survive to become embedded much more deeply. The example he had in mind was the wartime graffito “Kilroy Was Here” which has now unobtrusively, yet unmistakeably, been etched in stone at the World War II Memorial on the National Mall in Washington, D.C.
A somewhat different instance of this temporary-to-permanent transition is found in the installation “Grand Gestures” by the Toronto-based 640 480 Video Collective.
Grand Gestures (02007) installation by 640 480
Images via Torontoist
The artists’ website explains this part of the Grand Gestures project:
The public component consists of ten ‘memorial’ style plaques interspersed along Queen West… Each bronze plaque will contain a partial transcription of a personal video that has been created on Queen St., which 640 480 sourced from youtube.com. By memorializing these banal and inconsequential videos with such markers of public remembrance, 640 480 draws our attention to the fleeting nature of video.
Torontoist adds:
640 480 takes its name from the original 4:3 aspect ratio of video screens, and the group has an obvious affinity for the rapidly disappearing magnetic tape format. Memorial lapel ribbons made from videotape were also part of the grand Gestures installation, and taped copies of the videos are to be converted into an artificial diamond, signifying the preservation of memories from an increasingly obsolete format into an everlasting state.
So the intention seems to have been to pay tribute to a disappearing medium, magnetic videotape; a sentiment which resonates with the Long Now’s concern for the preservation of languages as well as the cultural record generally. However, the plaque installation also stands, more robustly I think, as a broader comment on the selectiveness of historical memory. By sitting in marked contrast to the parade of history’s conventional notables usually given the bronze-plaque treatment (to wit: stateman X spent an evening in this building; general so-and-so took a meal here; a certain poet was inspired to write about this view; etc), otherwise trivial and unremarked moments of everyday life are anointed as worthy of remembrance. Certain slices of the “temporary” are suddenly, and quite arbitrarily, rendered “permanent”. All of which refocuses the attention in a curious way, as the hierarchy of significance in human affairs is briefly turned upside down.
Of course, nothing lasts forever. Even with elements of lives memorialised in so (relatively) permanent a medium as bronze, things can happen to drop them right back into obscurity.
Where one of the 640 480 plaques used to be
Image from alexanderthematt’s Flickr photostream, via Torontoist
(Thanks Jake!)
Peter Diamandis, Long-term X Prizes
The Long Now Foundation 16/09/2008 01:23
Beyond Audacious
Pursuing the idea of “revolution through competition” via huge-purse prizes was inspired for Peter Diamandis by reading about the Orteig Prize. In 1927 $25,000 was offered to the first person to fly non-stop from New York to Paris. Nine teams spent $400,000 in the competition. A 25-year-old named Lindbergh won the prize. Within 18 months air passengers had multiplied 30-fold from 6,000 to 180,000, the number of aircraft increased four-fold, and aviation stocks soared.
A lifelong space nut, Diamandis created out of thin air the Ansari X Prize. $10 million would go to the first team to make a 3-person reusable space vehicle that could reach 100 kilometers in altitude twice in two weeks. From 7 countries 26 teams competed, spending $100 million on the project. The success in 2004 of SpaceShipOne (now in the Smithsonian) launched a space tourism industry.
With the help of Google, the X Prize became a foundation to generate a series of competitions for “audacious and achievable goals.” The attributes for a good Prize competition are: very large cash prize; clear objective and simple rules; a defined problem rather than defined solution; a target that had become stuck; something that attracts maverick thinkers; something whose success will change people’s sense of what is possible.
Currently operative X Prizes include one for extremely cheap genome sequencing and one for a race of 100-mile-per-gallon cars. An example of how the prize process is learning is the Google Lunar X Prize to launch, land, and operate a rover on the Moon’s surface. Diamandis wants the event to have time duration, not just be a flash in the pan, because duration is what persuades people that something new is real. And he wants more mechanisms that help create an industry in the wake of the event. Thus the $30 million purse for this prize will be divided—$20 million to the first-place winner, $5 million to second place, and $5 million each for bonus goals such as photographing man-made objects on the Moon, surviving a lunar night, and detecting ice in a crater. So far the race has 15 registered teams competing.
X Prizes in the past have been for goals that could be achieved in a 3 to 8 year time frame. Now Diamandis wants to reach further in time and further into the realm of the seemingly impossible. He noted that only a short while ago a number of things were understood by everybody to be impossible: heavier-than-air flight; instant communications at a distance; transplanting a heart; space travel; cloning of a mammal; eradicating smallpox. What things are in that category now? And what would it take to get things moving in their direction?
Diamandis calls them Mega-X Prizes. They would have a purse of $100 million to $1 billion. (Not implausible; there are 1,200 billionaires in the world now.) As an example of how the economics could make sense, Diamandis points out that the current cost of AIDS is $80 billion a year, $800 billion a decade. A successful $1 billion X Prize for a cure for AIDS would be a hugely efficient economic event as well as a massive humanitarian breakthrough.
To conclude the evening, Diamandis offered the audience a list of 35 potential Mega-X Prize goals. Circle your top three choices, he said, and we’ll tally the results. Rather than tell you what that particular audience chose, I’ll pass on the list to you. What are your top three choices? What would you add to the list?…
* First (private) Human on Mars
* Faster-than-light Communications
* Organ Replacement
* First Baby Born off Earth
* Babelfish - Instant universal translator
* Flying cars
* Artificial Intelligence: Build a machine that passes the Turing Test
* Self-replicating (non-biological) machines
* Longevity: Double the length of the healthy human lifespan
* Cancer: Be able to detect any cancer at the 100-cell stage and Zap-it
* Predict Earth Quakes with >1 hour / >1 day notice
* Cure for AIDS
* Identify extra-solar life-bearing planet: Any type of replicating life from, single cell or greater
* SETI - Proof of extra-terrestrial intelligence
* NY to Paris in 30 min
* Private, fully-reusable, Orbital Spaceship
* Human to orbit for <$100,000
* Apollo 8: Privately fly 1 person around the moon and safely back to Earth.
* Robot Sports: (1) beat Tiger; (2) beat a championship soccer team; (3) beat a Formula-1 team
* Humans in Deep Ocean : 3 people to ocean bottom twice in 3 days.
* Image 100% of the Ocean Floor
* Backup the Biosphere: Create a data backup of the internet and the top 10,000 species on Earth
* Replicator: create out of energy and raw materials anything.
* Energy Extraction - e.g. ZeroPoint ; Cold Fusion
* Hot Fusion -- Sustained, net-energy positive
* Vision Restoration: Wire up a false eye for a blind person to gain 20:20 vision
* First brain transplant: full functioning of memory and motorfunction and lives > 1 day
* Download brain to a computer with all memory intact
* Brain to brain communication that are more than 10x the speed of audio conversations
* Develop real-time collective consciousness for a group of over 100 people
* Eradicate Hunger for > 90% of the human population
* Eradicate poverty for > 90% of the human population
* Carbon Sequestration: Create an economic device to extract/sequester carbon from the atmosphere
* Create an AI that can engage and educate children to their highest potential
* Develop a teaching system that allows an increase learning rates by an order of magnitude.
You can propose new X-Prizes here.
–Stewart Brand
Souvenirs from 60s Hawaii
The Long Now Foundation 14/09/2008 02:38
02060s, that is.
User-modified self-and solar-powered hybrid wireless telephone
Design by FoundFutures, executed by Dan Phelan
User-modified cookware (”hubcap wok”)
Design by FoundFutures, executed by Sally Szwed
Military uniform of the Army of O’ahu, Confederation of Hawaiian Republics
Design by FoundFutures, executed by Haruko Moberg
What if an energy crisis prompted Hawaii to close its doors to visitors?
That’s the premise of an unusual exhibition currently running at San Francisco’s Wattis Institute, California College of the Arts.
The objects on display are fragments of a story in which a Great Oil Collapse strikes in the 02010s, generating long-term global disruption which (among other things) culminates in the Hawaiian monarchy being reinstated some twenty years later, and Hawaii’s doors being closed to outsiders. In 02069, with the U.S. riven by Civil War, a man named Nestor von Hoepper flees by boat to escape the draft. He survives to build a new life in Hawaii, which has by now developed self-sufficiency in some intriguing ways. The exhibition is set in 02108, in the aftermath of a turbulent 21st century, as the archive of von Hoepper’s secret effects — journals, drawings, and artifacts — sheds light for the first time on the “dark islands”.
Curator Sally Szwed writes in her notes to the show:
As you look at the display, imagine you are three generations into the future and outsiders have not been able to visit the Hawaiian Islands for decades. The land of luxury resorts and tiki-torches that one might now associate with the state has disintegrated and Hawaii has become an independent nation. The objects that are on display are artifacts from this future. They tell the story of one man’s experiences and discoveries while living on the islands during this time of seclusion, drastic transition, and cultural rebirth.
The scenario and pieces on display were conceived and designed for Sally’s project by FoundFutures, an ongoing series of multimedia projects manifesting alternative future scenarios in tangible form. (FoundFutures is run by myself and Jake Dunagan, who has just moved from the Hawaii Research Center for Futures Studies to join Palo Alto’s Institute for the Future.)
The exhibition exemplifies long-term art in another way. It’s part of Americana, a multi-year presentation planned to run until 02012, co-organised by Wattis Institute director Jens Hoffmann and CCA’s Graduate Program in Curatorial Practice. Each month the display at the Wattis takes up a different American state, and is curated by a different student. Sally drew Hawaii at random, and her online research turned up HRCFS Director Jim Dator’s “Best Little Backwater” scenario (pdf, 01999), which prompted the idea of “collecting” artifacts from a low-key future Hawaii.
Americana: Hawaii is on display at the Wattis until 20 September. Hours and location can be found here.
Mandatory ration card for the ahupua’a (governing district) of Honolulu, O’ahu
Design by Yumi Vong, from an earlier piece for FoundFutures by Steve Kiyabu
(Images: the sceptical futuryst.)
Long Now Media Update
The Long Now Foundation 12/09/2008 23:29
The latest Seminars About Long-term Thinking are now available as audio downloads or podcasts and in hi-res video for Long Now members.
*Neal Stephenson’s Anathem - video excerpt of Stephenson reading from the book
*Iolet, the music of Anathem - CD available for purchase
The oak beams
The Long Now Foundation 11/09/2008 19:48
Stewart Brand telling the story of the beams at New College in Oxford England for the BBC series he did on How Buildings Learn. Most amusing about this story is that the folks at New College now deny the veracity of this story. But Stewart actually chased it all down and verified it.
Neal Stephenson reads from Anathem
The Long Now Foundation 11/09/2008 00:42
Video above (from Fora.tv) of Neal reading from Anathem at the book launch event last night, and a little of the live singing. We would like to thank the nearly 900 attendees, and those that watched the video stream. We apologize for the delays and sound troubles that plagued us at the venue.
Anathem Event details
The Long Now Foundation 09/09/2008 13:01
Tickets and pre-signed books are now sold out for the Anathem book launch event on September 9th, 02008 in San Francisco. The evening will include a reading by Neal Stephenson, a followup conversation with Danny Hillis and Stewart Brand, and a short live concert of the music inspired by the book. There will even be a martial arts demonstration of Shovel-Fu from the the book.
As time allows, Neal has agreed to do some inscriptions after the reading.
Time: Doors open at 6:30pm, program begins promptly at 7pm
There will be one line for general admission and one line for Long Now Members, I would recommend arriving as early as possible to get in line for good seats.
Venue: The Regency 1320 Van Ness @ Sutter, San Francisco, CA 94109
Not in SF or didn’t get tickets? You can watch the event live on the web at http://www.longnow.org/anathem, with streaming donated by Streamguys, and filming sponsored by Fora.tv. The video will also be available on Fora.tv starting the following day September 10th.
Rosetta craft rocks our world!
The Long Now Foundation 08/09/2008 23:23
Last week the Rosetta craft (carrying our prototype Rosetta Disk) successfully recorded its flyby of Stei
ns Asteroid with these — the first images from its OSIRIS imaging system (also check out this cool animation). During the flyby, the craft was out of communication for approximately 90 minutes - what must have been a nerve-wracking, although planned silence, as the teams engineers turned Rosetta away from the sun.
The Steins Asteroid was the first scientific target for the Rosetta craft as it makes its way to the comet 67/P Churyumov-Gerasimenko. From the collected data, the team’s scientists hope to better understand the composition and formation of the unusually bright asteroid .
The Wisdom of Public Prediction Markets
The Long Now Foundation 04/09/2008 21:19
Prediction markets continue to proliferate. These communities use money to bet on outcomes in the future. If a prediction comes true, the winners reap the money from the losing betters. The price of a bet, or share, fluctuates over time — and thus can be used as a signal for the community’s opinion. In theory a prediction market taps into the “wisdom of crowds,” but can also be viewed as conventional wisdom. However the results of prediction markets have been proven to be reliable conventional wisdom. (See my previous post on the subject.)
There are two kinds of prediction markets: ones where you bet real money, and ones where you bet funny money. Since betting real money keeps people honest (to reduce their loses), markets with real money are considered a much better indicator of opinion than a mere poll — which has no “penalty” for being less than honest. But real money prediction markets are (stupidly) illegal in the US. So token markets like Long Bets and Bet2Give are devised to innovate around the law.
For instance, Hubdub trades token dollars. You are given $1,000 hubdubs at the start, and $20 each day you log on. You win or loose these token dollars on various predictions. There is a leaderboard which displays the highest ranked traders, showing how much they have gained in the last quarter. One fellow gained $1 million hubdubs, and now has a net worth of $3 million. Hubdub dollars are only good for bragging rights.
One clarification of how the price of a bet works (from Hubdub’s FAQ):
If a prediction has a yes value of 43%, does that mean that 43% of people have voted yes?
No, not really. The forecast is dependent on both the number of people who have selected this outcome and the amount they have risked on it. Very roughly, 43% means that 43% of the money risked by users is riding on that outcome.
I was curious how closely the two formats (real and token money) might match each other so I hunted for a bet that I thought most prediction markets might share: the outcome of the US presidential election. From my brief survey, betting real dollars and token dollars give similar results. More so, there is a pretty close convergence of price among all the prediction markets:
Roughly, the day after Republican VP candidate Sarah Palin gave her rousing nomination speech, all six different prediction markets price Obama winning at about 60%.
Betfair, based in England, trades real money to make bets. It is the biggest prediction market in the world in terms of numbers of bettors and dollars bet. It’s bread and butter are sports events, including the Olympics, and card games, but it also runs bets on almost anything else including politics.
The day after VP candidate Sarah Palin’s nomination speach, Betfair bookies put the odds for Obama winning at 1.6 and give worse odds for McCain winning at 2.72.
Intrade also bets real money, also mostly on sports, but also on many other wagers. On this same day, Intrade money is on Obama winning at 59%.
On this same day Hubdub market rates on Obama win at 63%.
On this same day the Iowa Electronic Markets, which I’ve written about previously, and is the only prediction market in the US to legally use real dollars, has Obama winning at 59%.
On this same day, Bet2Give also pegs Obama winning at 63 cents or 63%.
Bet2Give is run on Newsfuture software and is sort of a non-profit demo for Newsfutures, which sells software for customized enterprise-strength prediction markets. They promise that a company can “harness the wisdom of your crowds.” In Bet2Give you bet with real dollars but your winnings are given to charities, so technically you are not gambling.
Newsfutures itself runs a prediction market using token dollars. On this same day it shows a 60% chance of an Obama win.
PPX is another token market. Run by Popular Science magazine, it is their Prediction Exchange. It does not do political predictions, so there’s no chart or price for a new US president. Instead it focuses on tech and commercial predictions. Such as: Will Netflix top 10 million subscribers by end of 2008? (You need to register to see the wagers).
My conclusion is that token money prediction markets carry the same validity as real money prediction markets, and that they are fairly consistent across markets. In that sense they are probably reliable indicators of what people believe at this moment (not be confused with reliable predictions).
The end is nigh
The Long Now Foundation 04/09/2008 18:24
On Wednesday morning September 10th, the very excited and optimistic scientists turn on the Large Hadron Collider outside Geneva…
We have a Long Bet that states Large Hadron Collider will destroy Earth. And you can watch the video above of what that looks like.
The “First Beam” will occur at 9:30am at CERN, which I believe will be about 1:30am here in San Francisco as we clean up after the Anathem Event. We will be sure to open a bottle of champagne and have a toast. The world has been a lot of fun so far, shame it has to end :)
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