Life, the Multiverse and Everything...
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has a knack for making statements that are at once sweeping and stupid, but he outdoes himself with this one:
“You have one identity … Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity.”
This is, at the obvious level, a clever and cynical ploy to recast the debate about Facebook’s ongoing efforts to chip away at its members’ privacy safeguards. The frontier of invisibility is replaced by a cage of transparency.
When it comes to the digital networks that now surround us, the fact is that most us can’t just GTFO, even if we wanted to. The sooner we move beyond the addiction metaphor, the sooner we’ll be able to see, with some clarity and honesty, the extent and implications of our dependency on our networked computing and media devices.
What happens to the human self as it comes to experience more and more of the world, and of life, through the mediation of the screen?
There is a new study published in the Journal of Archaeological Science that Tim O’Reilly pointed out in his Twitter stream. It points to resource over-use by the Maya over the course of a few centuries. This would seem to lend credence to former Seminar speaker Jared Diamond’s collapse theories. Abstract Tikal, a major lowland [...]
New Cities with New Rules This talk was the first in a series of public discussions of an idea that Romer has been working on for two years. His economic theory of history explains phenomena such as the constant improvement of the human standard of living by looking primarily at just two forms of innovative [...]
The Long News: stories that might still matter fifty, or a hundred, or ten thousand years from now. There have been a flurry of reports in the last few weeks which try to anticipate how climate change may impact human populations. 1. Two trends (urbanization and global warming) seem to be on a collision course: [...]
Follow @longnowlive on Twitter for live updates from Long Now events, including tonight’s Paul Romer Seminar which starts at 7:30 PST. Our special guest live Twitterer today is @mikl_em. We encourage anyone else who would like to live twitter about the event to use the #longnow tag on their posts so that anyone can track [...]
A shift in time can shift our perspective, which is why time lapse photography can be so powerful. Here is a simple time lapse of the night sky, using a wide-angle lens. You get a Big Here/Long Now experience. But the Canon 5D used to capture this was modified by replacing the standard infrared filter [...]
Since Tim Geithner did not predict the economic crisis, Nassim Taleb has no interest in listening to him talk about it now. The author of The Black Swan, a book about risk and … [Read More...]
A leaked internal memo from physicists working at the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva reports a … [Read More...]
The more one probes the universe at smaller and smaller scales, the weirder matter and energy seem … [Read More...]
Can you recall a moment when you could honestly say 'I told you so', but when no one listens? Well … [Read More...]
