My Avatar and Me
The Long Now Foundation 08/07/2011 01:07
When it comes to Danish meta-mockumentaries about virtual worlds and mysterious clocks, My Avatar and Me is the one to see. Starring and co-directed by Mikkel Stolt, the film features cameos by Long Now co-founder Danny Hillis and the Foundations Nevada site.
My Avatar and Me can be viewed on Constellation.com, a global digital movie theater:
My Avatar and Me is a creative documentary-fiction film about a man who enters the virtual world of Second Life to pursue his personal dreams and ambitions. His journey into cyberspace becomes a magic learning experience, which gradually opens the gates to a much larger reality.”
The next showtime is Sunday July 10th and writer/co-director Bente Milton will be virtually present to answer questions and to discuss the film.
A different kind of clock
The Long Now Foundation 06/07/2011 00:54
The Clock of the Long Now measures time in 10,000-year increments. The Clock, a wondrous piece of video art by Christian Marclay, measures every single moment in 24 hours.
Composed of film clips drawn from the entire history of cinema, the piece literally tells the time, through images of clocks and watches as well as scenes of people looking at, talking about, or noticing the time. If you see The Clock at 9:18 in the morning, every film clip shows 9:18.
While it may sound dull — who would want to spend an hour, or twenty-four, staring at a clock? — the piece, in the watching, becomes a moving meditation on the history of cinema, and of our relationship with time itself.
The artwork has been presented in London, New York, and Los Angeles, and just won the best of show Gold Lion at the Venice Biennale 02011. The Guardian called it a masterpiece for our times. If youre in Los Angeles this July, or Venice between now and November, dont miss it.
For more, here’s a clip from BBC News.
Long Now Media Update
The Long Now Foundation 02/07/2011 00:56
LISTEN
(downloads tab)
Peter Kareiva’s “Conservation in the Real World”
There is new media available from our monthly series, the Seminars About Long-term Thinking. Stewart Brand’s summaries and audio downloads or podcasts of the talks are free to the public; Long Now members can view HD video of the Seminars and comment on them.
La Chaussettologie
The Long Now Foundation 01/07/2011 19:36
La Chaussettologie is a short film created by Yann Benedi & Celine Desrumaux for an event called Challenge Your World. La Chaussettologie translates roughly, I’m told, to Sock-ology.
It was the Long Short for Peter Kareiva’s SALT called Conservation in the Real World.
Peter Kareiva, Conservation in the Real World
The Long Now Foundation 28/06/2011 21:03
Environmentalism for THIS Century
A Summary by Stewart Brand
Kareiva began by recalling the environmental “golden decade” of 1965-75, set in motion by the scientist Rachel Carson. In quick succession Congress created the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Endangered Species Act—which passed the Senate unanimously.
Green influence has been dwindling ever since. A series of polls in the US asked how many agreed with the statement, “Most environmentalists are extremists, not reasonable people.” In 1996, 32% agreed. In 2004, 43% agreed. Now
Read the rest of Stewart Brands Summary here.
Chinas Unthinkable Population Problem
The Long Now Foundation 22/06/2011 22:33
In his post earlier today, Bryan Campen mentioned Kevin Kelly’s 02019 Unthinkables – a set of predictions he made in 1999 that were specifically meant to be outlandish or – eponymously – unthinkable.
With 12 years of perspective on the predictions, Kelly concludes his post by saying that he doesn’t think any of them will come true.
As it turns out, however, one of them isn’t too far off the mark:
The fertility rate in China drops below the replacement level, and nothing the government can do can get Chinese couples to have more than 1.5 kids each. For the first time China encourages immigration to keep its huge economy going.
The first part of this prediction has happened. On China’s latest census, The Economist reports:
The data imply that the total fertility rate, which is the number of children a woman of child-bearing age can expect to have, on average, during her lifetime, may now be just 1.4, far below the replacement rate of 2.1, which eventually leads to the population stabilising.
The Chinese government, despite calls by many academic demographers, continues to stand firm on the one-child policy enacted in 1980.
Impact Lab points out that this demographic trend will lead to China’s workforce – the country’s primary economic advantage – beginning to shrink within 5 years. In order to mitigate potential economic problems from this change, the government is trying, “to develop technology- and innovation-driven industries that need fewer workers.”
If those industries don’t develop quickly enough, the government may have to look to immigration to supply the labor China’s economy needs and the second part of Kelly’s prediction won’t seem so unthinkable, either.
Jesse Schell Launches The Crystal Ball Society
The Long Now Foundation 22/06/2011 18:30
Jesse Schell interviews gaming legend Bob Bates, who predicts that we will be having emotional vocal conversations with game characters by 2021.
There’s really no one more fun to watch predict the future than Jesse Schell, so it’s our good fortune that he just launched The Crystal Ball Society as a space to place predictions on the future.
(From his SALT talk): “…The prediction threshold is creeping in, it’s made a lot of people give up on prediction. They’ve become future blind. That’s ridiculous because if you put some energy into it you can make some predictions about the future. *You can look into your crystal ball and you can figure it out.* But it takes practice… If you practice predicting you will get better and you’re going to get feedback fast. But if you’re future blind and you don’t bother, you’re going to continue to suck at predicting the future.”
Practice sucking less by sending predictions here: crystalballsociety[at]gmail{dot}com
Also of note, an exceptionally relevant post on 2019 Unthinkables by board member Kevin Kelly, that made me daydream this afternoon about an Amazon Bookstore by 2015.
Check out lots more debatably-thinkables at Long Bets.
Record-a-thon!
The Long Now Foundation 21/06/2011 19:17
RECORD-A-THON
Help us record 50 languages in a single day!
Did you know…
- UNESCO considers the use of ones native language to be a basic human right?
- Half of the worlds 7,000 languages are endangered and may become extinct this century?
- Over 100 languages are spoken right here in the San Francisco Bay area?
There is something you can do to help document and promote the languages used in your own community! We need your help to meet our goal of recording 50 languages in a single day! How many languages can you help us document? Bring yourself and your multilingual friends and be the stars of your own grassroots language documentation project!
Professional linguists and videographers will be on site to document you and your friends speaking word lists, reading texts, and telling stories. You can also document your language using tools you probably have in your purse or back pocket a mobile phone, digital camera, or laptop just bring your device and our team will guide you through the documentation process.
How do your words and stories make a difference? An important part of language documentation is building a corpus creating collections of vocabulary words, as well as conversations and stories that demonstrate language in use. From a corpus, linguists and speech technologists can build grammars, dictionaries, and tools that enable a language to be used online. The bigger the corpus, the better the tools!
The recordings you make during the event will be added to The Rosetta Project’s open collection of all human language in The Internet Archive. And, you can compete for cool prizes, including an iPad 2 for the participant who records and uploads the most languages during the event!
Please RSVP below and let us know if you plan to attend, and what language or languages you are thinking of recording. Can’t make it to the Record-a-thon? Join us online the day of the event for the virtual Record-a-thon, where you’ll be able to interact with event staff, monitor event progress, listen live to lectures and talks, and submit your own recordings remotely.
