-
31 December 2006
Sun, 31 Dec 2006 15:49:49 GMTThe Clock of the Long Now
Stewart Brand
Stewart Brand (one cool guy) on the idea of the Big Here and Long Now. How we need to look at things with a 10,000 year perspective as opposed to the me, me, me; now, now, now that we’ve gotten used to. Thinking about the world not just as we’ll leave it to our children or their children, but 100 generations from now might just make us think twice about burning up a beautiful woodland for suburban tract housing, etc. The Long Now Foundation.
The rates, scales, kinds, and combinations of changes occurring now are fundamentally different from those at any other time in history; we are changing the Earth more rapidly than we are understanding it. 9, Human Domination of Earth’s Ecosystems
So who burned the Library of Alexandria? War did three times, inadvertently. Religious bigotry did twice, on purpose. We are right to grieve. Only one in ten of the major Greek classics survived. Nothing like Alexandria’s library was seen again for a thousand years. 73
The accumulated past is life’s best resource for innovation. 75
Bill Cosby says that in college he ran into the question, “Is the glass half empty, or half full?” He took the question home, and his father told him, “It depends if you’re pouring or if you’re drinking.” 109
Governance itself is being rethought. “The proper role of government in capitalistic societies in an era of man-made brain power industries,” writes the economist Lester Thurow, “is to represent the interest of the future to the present.” Commerce has too short a time horizon to take the larger future seriously, therefore governance must do it. 122
-
25 November 2005
Fri, 25 Nov 2005 12:26:08 GMT IT Conversations: Brewster Kahle - Universal Access to All KnowledgeKjell Olsen2266 days agoExcellent talk about how the new Library of Alexandria is coming to be through the Internet Archive.
-
15 September 2005
Thu, 15 Sep 2005 11:36:00 GMT Making Visible the Invisiblevia Kjell Olsen2337 days agoFascinating visualization of circulation at the Seattle public library.
-
07 January 2005
Fri, 07 Jan 2005 19:57:00 GMTFinally!
After waiting about three months for my library to order and process Programming Ruby, saving me 40 bucks that I ought save for a new computer.
-
Also somewhat recently
