Long Now

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Orville Schell: China Thinks Long-term, But Can It Relearn to Act Long-term? Sep 22, 2006

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### Giant contradictions “China is the most unresolved nation of consequence in the world,” Orville Schell began. It is defined by its massive contradictions. And by its massiveness— China’s population is estimated to be 1.25 to 1.3 billion; the margin of error in the estimate is greater than the population of France. It has 160 cities with a population over one million (the US has 49). It has the world’s largest standing army. No society in the world has more millennia in its history, and for most of that history China looked back. Then in the 20th century the old dynastic cycles were replaced by one social cancellation after another until 1949, when Mao set the country toward the vast futuristic vision of Communism. That “mad experiment” ended with Deng Xiaoping’s effective counter-revolution in the 1980s, which unleashed a new totalistic belief, this time in the market. So what you have now is a society sick of grand visions, in search of another way to be, focussed on the very near term. These days you cannot think usefully about China and its potential futures without holding in your mind two utterly contradictory views of what is happening there. On the one hand, a robust and awesomely growing China; on the other hand a brittle China, parts of it truly hellish. **ROBUST CHINA** * Peaceful borders in all directions * Economic, non-threatening engagement with the entire world, including with societies the US refuses to deal with * 200 million Chinese raised out of poverty * Private savings rate of 40 percent (it’s 1 percent in the US) * 300 million people with cell phones, and the best cell phone service in the world * A superb freeway system built almost overnight * New building construction everywhere, and some of it is brilliant * 150 million people online * 350,000 engineering graduates a year * One-third of the world’s direct investment * Huge trade surplus * And an economic growth rate of 9 to 12 percent a year! For decades. but also… **BRITTLE CHINA** * Not much arable land, so a growing dependence on imported food * Two-thirds of energy production is from dirty coal, by dirty methods, growing at the rate of 1-2 new coal-fired plants per week * 30 percent of China has acid rain; 75 percent of lakes are polluted and rivers are polluted or pumped dry * Of the 20 most polluted cities in the world, 16 are in China; you don’t see the sun any more * Some industrial parts of China are barren, hellish wastes * Driven by environmental horrors and by widespread corruption, there were 87,000 instances of social unrest last year, going up every year * The population is aging rapidly, with no pension or welfare, and a broken healthcare system * The stock markets are grossly manipulated * Public and official amnesia about historical legacies such as Tiananmen Square in 1989 How can such contradictions be reconciled? The best everyone can hope for is steady piecemeal change. For the Chinese the contradictions don’t really bite so long as they have continued economic growth to focus on and to absorb some of the problems. But what happens when there’s a break in that growth? It could come from inside China or from outside (such as a disruption in the US economy). It’s hard to look at the China boom now without thinking about the Japan boom in the 1970s and ’80s, remembering how everyone knew the Japanese were going dominate the US and world economy, and we all had to study Japanese methods to learn how to compete. Then that went away, and it hasn’t come back. The leadership of China is highly aware of the environmental problems and is enlightened and ambitious about green solutions, but that attitude does not yet extend beyond the leadership, and until it does, not much can happen. That’s China: huge, consequential for everybody, and profoundly unresolved.

John Rendon: Long-term Policy to Make the War on Terror Short Jul 14, 2006

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### Only connect John Rendon, head of The Rendon Group, is a senior communications consultant to the White Houses and Departments of Defense. His subject in this talk is how to replace tactical, reactive response to terror with long-term strategic initative. I think that people were expecting a silver-tongued devil, an accomplished spin-meister, arrogant but charming, who would dance them into some new nuanced state of understanding. What they got instead from John Rendon was an earnest, soft-spoken message of such directness and scope that it apparently came across to some in the audience as dissembling. Polarization rules in Washington these days, Rendon said, and in the country. Moderates are made voiceless. Civilized discourse is nearly impossible. And everyone is consumed with the pace of the news cycle, displacing any sense of the long view. Meanwhile in the world the US has a severe “credibility deficit,” especially with the people in other nations. He said that his organization, The Rendon Group, has done detailed research on how the United States is perceived in Islamic countries. The universal message from Muslims was, “You look at us but you do not see us.” As for whether they felt positive or negative about the US, three groups emerged. Those who had some direct or even indirect contact with American people felt largely positive about the US. Those with more distant contact thought of the US only in terms of its corporations, such as McDonald’s, and had a more negative view. Those with no contact at all thought of the US strictly in terms of its government, and had the most negative view of all. “This is the key,” Rendon said. “The strength and credibility of the American people must be reflected in our government.” “There are really two campaigns against terror,” Rendon said (he doesn’t like the term “war on terror”). The one being conducted against existing terrorists by the military and intelligence people, and by 76 countries, is going pretty well. But a second campaign, against potential terrorists, terrorists that we are creating, is barely understood. “When we say that our war is with ‘Islamic fundamentalists,’ 1.2 billion people think we mean them.” “We need to turn Islamic street into an active ally, not a passive observer.” He gave an example of the kind of advice he gives US policy makers. When we focussed all our public attention on terrorist individuals, such as Bin Laden and Mullah Omar, we made just heroes of them. Focussing on the various named groups of terrorists has the same effect. But focus on specific terrorist tactics— such stopping a bus and then shooting everyone with a certain kind of name (as happened in Iraq)— puts world attention on something that might lead to changes of mind. Rendon’s greatest fear is that the US could go isolationist at the very time we need most to engage the rest of the world, when we need for people everywhere “to feel that we care more about them than their own governments do.” For that strategic-level approach to policy he had a number of specific proposals: * Let the third year of high school be mandatory overseas. * US newspapers should partner out to the world, swapping journalists. * College alumni programs should emphasize international students. * Humanitarian assistance needs to be more enduring, as with Peace Corps programs. * There should be a global endowment for education, and a global endowment for health care. * Getting a visa to visit the US should be made welcoming instead of humiliating, as it is now. * The US government needs to engage overseas “more as an enabler than as an actor.” * We need to be a better example of democracy by encouraging a convergent rather than divisive public discourse here at home. It comes down to “networks and narratives,” Rendon concluded. Five years from now what will be the narrative about the current five years taught in schools throughout the Islamic world and elsewhere? “The nature of that narrative will determine whether the conflict winds down in seven years or so, or it goes on for a hundred years.” I’ll add one thing that emerged from the long and sometimes contentious questioning from the audience (download the audio this week for the full exercise). One question was, “Since weapons of mass destruction turned out to be nonexistent in Iraq, what is America’s REAL agenda there and in the so-called war on terror? Is it oil, wealth, power, or what?” Rendon had nothing very satisfactory to offer in reply. At dinner after the talk, Danny Hillis suggested to Rendon what might be the root cause of the mutual bafflement. “People see a lot of seemingly irrational behavior and they assume there must be some hidden agenda driving it. What they don’t realize is that having an agenda requires long-term thinking, and there isn’t any going on.” That is pretty much John Rendon’s point. When US policy consists mainly of a sequence of short-term reactions, the aggregate result is massive frustration.

Will Wright & Brian Eno: Playing with Time Jun 26, 2006

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### Generative play In a dazzling duet Will Wright and Brian Eno gave an intense clinic on the joys and techniques of "generative" creation. Back in the 1970s both speakers got hooked by cellular automata such as Conway's "Game of Life," where just a few simple rules could unleash profoundly unpredictable and infinitely varied dynamic patterns. Cellular automata were the secret ingredient of Wright's genre-busting computer game "SimCity" in 1989. Eno was additionally inspired by Steve Reich's "It's Gonna Rain," in which two identical 1.8 second tape loops beat against each other out of phase for a riveting 20 minutes. That idea led to Eno's "Music for Airports" (1978), and the genre he named "ambient music" was born. Wright observed that science is all about compressing reality to minimal rule sets, but generative creation goes the opposite direction. You look for a combination of the fewest rules that can generate a whole complex world that will always surprise you, yet within a framework that stays recognizable. "It's not engineering and design," he said, "so much as it is gardening. You plant seeds. Richard Dawkins says that a willow seed has only about 800K of data in it." Eno noted that ambient music, unlike "narrative" music with a beginning, middle, and end, presents a steady state. "It's more like watching a river." Wright said he often uses Eno's music to work to because it gets him in a productive trancelike state. Eno remarked that it's important to keep reducing what the music attempts, and one way he does that is compose everything at double the speed it will be released. Slowing it down reduces its busyness. Wright: "How about an album of the fast versions?" Eno: "'Amphetamine Ambient.'" "These generative forms depend very much on the user actively making connections," Eno said. "In my art installations I always have sound and light elements that are completely unsynchronized, and people always assume that they are tightly synchronized. The synchronization occurs in them. " With Eno noodling some live background music, Will Wright gave a demo of his game-in-progress, "Spore." It compresses 3.5 billion years of evolution into a few hours or days of game play, where the levels are Cell, Creature, Tribe, City, Civilization, Space." The game has potent editing tools, so that 30 mouse clicks can build a unique beautiful creature that would take weeks of normal computer generation, complete with breathing, eye blinks, and shrieks. The computer generates a related set of other creatures to meet-- some to eat, some to avoid. Socialization begins, mating, then babies (using a "neonatal algorithm"), and on to tribes and cities with amazing buildings and vehicles the user designs. "You encounter civilizations built by other players, but the players don't have to be there for the civilizations to be alive and responsive." Wright launched his civilization into space, having first abducted some creatures to plant on other planets for terraforming projects. The computer presented him an infinite variety of planets, some already occupied. Wright: "Oops. I seem to have inadvertently started an interplanetary war here." Eno: "Like America." Building models, said Wright, is what we do in computer games, and it's what we do in life. First it's models of how the world works, then it's models of how other humans work. A significant new element in computer games is the profound command, "Restart." You get to explore other paths to take in the same situation. Eno: "That's what we do with everything I call culture, everything not really necessary, from how we wear our hair to how we decorate a cupcake. We try something, surrender to it, and are encouraged to imagine what else might be tried." It's interesting that just one verb is used both for music and for games: "play." PS. For Eno's website for making your own version of his album with David Byrne, "My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, " go to: . For a glimpse of his new show, "77 Million Paintings by Brian Eno," soon to be fully online, see: . For a full Wikipedia article on Wright's "Spore," with lively links, check out:

Will Hearst & Chris Anderson: The Long Time Tail May 30, 2006

Show notes

### The power law is the shape of our age You know something is up when an audience member is taking cell phone photos of the presenter's slides for instant transmittal to a business partner. Chris Anderson does have killer slides, full of exuberant detail, defining the exact shape of the still emerging opportunity space for finding and selling formerly infindable and unsellable items of every imaginable description. The 25 million music tracks in the world. All the TV ever broadcast. Every single amateur video. All that is old, arcane, micro-niche, against-the-grain, undefinable, or remote is suddenly as accessible as the top of the pops. "The power law is the shape of our age," Anderson asserted, showing the classic ski-jump curve of popularity-- a few things sell in vast quantity, while a great many things sell in small quantity. It's the natural product of variety, inequality, and network effect sifting, which amplifies the inequality. "Everything is measurable now," said Anderson, comparing charts of sales over time of a hit music album with a niche album. The hit declined steeply, the niche album kept its legs. The "long tail" of innumerable tiny-sellers is populated by old hits as well as new and old niche items. That's the time dimension. For the first time in history, archives have a business model. Old stuff is more profitable because the acquisition cost is lower and customer satisfaction is higher. Infinite-inventory Netflix occupies the sweet spot for movie distribution, while Blockbuster is saddled with the tyranny of the new. Anderson explained that we are leaving an age where distribution was ruled by channel scarcity-- 3 TV networks, only so many movie theater screens, limited shelf space for books. "Those scarcity effects make a bottleneck that distorts the market and distorts our culture. Infinite shelf space changes everything." Books are freed up by print-on-demand (already a large and profitable service at Amazon), movies freed by cheap DVDs, old broadcast TV by classics collections, new videos by Google Videos and You Tube online. Even the newest game machines are now designed to be able to emulate their earlier incarnations, so you can play the original "Super Mario Bros." if so inclined-- and many are. "I'm an editor of a Conde-Nast magazine [Wired] AND I'm a blogger," said Anderson. In other words, he works both in the fading world of "pre-filters" and the emerging world of "post-filters." Pre-filtering is ruled by editors, A&R guys ("artist and repertoire," the talent-finders in the music biz), studio execs, and capital-B Buyers. Post-filtering is driven by readers, recommenders, word of mouth, and buyers. Will Hearst joined Anderson on the stage and noted that social networking software has automated word of mouth, and that's what has "unchoked the long tail of sheer obscure quantity in the vast backlog of old movies, for example." Anderson agreed, "The marketing power of customer recommendations is the main driver for Netflix, and it is zero-cost marketing." "By democratizing the tools of distribution, we're seeing a Renaissance in culture. We're starting to find out just how rich our society is in terms of creativity," Anderson said. But isn't there a danger, he was asked from the audience, of our culture falling apart with all this super-empowered diversity? Anderson agreed that we collect strongly and narrowly around our passions now, rather than just weakly and widely around broadcast hits, but the net gain of overall creativity is the main effect, and a positive one. Questions remain, though. "Digital rights is the elephant in the room of freeing the long tail." Clearing copyright on old material is a profoundly wedged process at present, with no solution in sight. Will Hearst fretted that we may be becoming an "opinionocracy," swayed by TV bloviators and online bloggers, losing the grounding of objective reporting. Anderson observed that maybe the two-party system is a pre-long-tail scarcity effect that suppresses the diversity we're now embracing. Much of how we run our culture has yet to catch up with the long tail.

Jimmy Wales: Vision: Wikipedia and the Future of Free Culture Apr 14, 2006

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### Community-built content rules Vision is one of the most powerful forms of long-term thinking. Jimmy Wales, founder and president of the all-embracing online encyclopedia Wikipedia, examines how vision drives and defines that project and its strategy-- and how it fits into the even larger world and prospects of "free culture." "The design of Wikipedia," said its founder and president Jimmy Wales, "is the design of community." When Wikipedia was started in 2001, all of its technology and software elements had been around since 1995. Its innovation was entirely social-- free licensing of content, neutral point of view, and total openness to participants, especially new ones. The core engine of Wikipedia, as a result, is "a community of thoughtful users, a few hundred volunteers who know each other and work to guarantee the quality and integrity of the work." Wikipedia, already enormous, continues to accelerate its growth. It is one of the top 20 websites, with 5 billion page views monthly. As an encyclopedia, it is larger than Britannica and Encarta combined and is now in so many languages, only 1/3 of the total Wikipedia is in English. When Wales went to Taiwan last week, strangers recognized him on the train, and 1,200 came to his talk. (One attraction to a Chinese audience is that Wikipedia takes the position of "no compromise with censors, ever.") The free licensing of Wikipedia content means that it is free to copy, free to modify, free to redistribute, and free to redistribute in modified forms, with attribution links. This is in service to the Wikipedia vision "to create and distribute a free encyclopedia of the highest possible quality to every single person on the planet in their own language." One byproduct is that Wikipedia's success is helping shift the terms of the copyright debate, in a public-good direction. The secret of Wikipedia's content-generating process, Wales explained, is the nurturing and shaping of trust, instead building everything around distrust. He said that most social software systems are designed around expected problems. "Suppose you ran a restaurant that way. If you serve steak, that means steak knives, which are really dangerous in the wrong hands, so you need to put barriers between the tables." "If you prevent people from doing bad things, you prevent them from doing good things, and it eliminates opportunities for trust." Thus every page of Wikipedia has an open invitation to edit it, and the operational motto is "Be bold." The expectation is that most edits will be improvements, and they are. Problems are dealt with completely post facto. There is an all-recent-changes page watched by hundreds of people, and another page proposing "Articles for Deletion." Regular users set up watch lists for Wikipedia articles they care about, so they are notified immediately of new edits. Besides the edit history and text comparison features of the wiki itself, many users employ IRC (Internet Relay Chat) to discuss ongoing issues, from article details to general policy. The court of last resort to resolve fraught issues is a benign emperor, Jimbo Wales. Wales continually fights the programmers to keep them from automating matters he thinks must remain social. Issues are decided not by voting but by dialogue, in which some voices have more weight because they are recognized to have earned it. Yet users do not get formal ratings. "Suppose you had to go around wearing a badge that says how many people like you." In support of the Wikipedia rule to welcome new contributors, programmers would like to install the ability to automatically send a welcome note to anyone who has made eight contributions. Wales insists that only people can welcome people. The best way to keep Wikipedia deeply radical, Wales feels, is to keep its process deeply conservative. Wikipedia is a window into further realms of free culture. What else can be done with wiki-enhanced communities? "A library is bigger than an encyclopedia." So alongside the nonprofit Wikipedia Wales has set up the for-profit Wikia-- a general purpose wiki community enabler, drawing its income from Google ads. Most leaders, in my experience, focus on their organization's product. Jimmy Wales focuses with exceptional clarity and insight on Wikipedia's process, and therein lies its magic.

Kevin Kelly: The Next 100 Years of Science: Long-term Trends in the Scientific Method. Mar 10, 2006

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### Recursion drives science The co-founding editor of “Wired” magazine and author of _Out of Control_ is working on a new book on “what technology wants.” His research led to the first-ever history of scientific methodology. Starting from this long-term view of science’s past transformation, he speculates on how the practice of science will change in the future. Science, says Kevin Kelly, is the process of changing how we know things. It is the foundation our culture and society. While civilizations come and go, science grows steadily onward. It does this by watching itself. Recursion is the essence of science. For example, science papers cite other science papers, and that process of research pointing at itself invokes a whole higher level, the emergent shape of citation space. Recursion always does that. It is the engine of scientific progress and thus of the progress of society. A particularly fruitful way to look at the history of science is to study how science itself has changed over time, with an eye to what that trajectory might suggest about the future. Kelly chronicled a sequence of new recursive devices in science… * 2000 BC - First text indexes * 200 BC - Cataloged library (at Alexandria) * 1000 AD - Collaborative encyclopedia * 1590 - Controlled experiment (Roger Bacon) * 1600 - Laboratory * 1609 - Telescopes and microscopes * 1650 - Society of experts * 1665 - Repeatability (Robert Boyle) * 1665 - Scholarly journals * 1675 - Peer review * 1687 - Hypothesis/prediction (Isaac Newton) * 1920 - Falsifiability (Karl Popper) * 1926 - Randomized design (Ronald Fisher) * 1937 - Controlled placebo * 1946 - Computer simulation * 1950 - Double blind experiment * 1962 - Study of scientific method (Thomas Kuhn) Projecting forward, Kelly had five things to say about the next 100 years in science… **1)** There will be more change in the next 50 years of science than in the last 400 years. **2)** This will be a century of biology. It is the domain with the most scientists, the most new results, the most economic value, the most ethical importance, and the most to learn. **3)** Computers will keep leading to new ways of science. Information is growing by 66% per year while physical production grows by only 7% per year. The data volume is growing to such levels of “zillionics” that we can expect science to compile vast combinatorial libraries, to run combinatorial sweeps through possibility space (as Stephen Wolfram has done with cellular automata), and to run multiple competing hypotheses in a matrix. Deep realtime simulations and hypothesis search will drive data collection in the real world. **4)** New ways of knowing will emerge. “Wikiscience” is leading to perpetually refined papers with a thousand authors. Distributed instrumentation and experiment, thanks to miniscule transaction cost, will yield smart-mob, hive-mind science operating “fast, cheap, & out of control.” Negative results will have positive value (there is already a “Journal of Negative Results in Biomedicine”). Triple-blind experiments will emerge through massive non-invasive statistical data collection— no one, not the subjects or the experimenters, will realize an experiment was going on until later. (In the Q&A, one questioner predicted the coming of the zero-author paper, generated wholly by computers.) **5)** Science will create new levels of meaning. The Internet already is made of one quintillion transistors, a trillion links, a million emails per second, 20 exabytes of memory. It is approaching the level of the human brain and is doubling every year, while the brain is not. It is all becoming effectively one machine. And we are the machine. “Science is the way we surprise God,” said Kelly. “That’s what we’re here for.” Our moral obligation is to generate possibilities, to discover the infinite ways, however complex and high-dimension, to play the infinite game. It will take all possible species of intelligence in order for the universe to understand itself. Science, in this way, is holy. It is a divine trip. PS… Kevin Kelly’s book in progress on all this, and much more, is being written online and is visitable and discussable at .

Stephen Lansing: Perfect Order: A Thousand Years in Bali Feb 13, 2006

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### Hidden order in the Balinese "religion of water" With lucid exposition and gorgeous graphics, anthropologist Stephen Lansing exposed the hidden structure and profound health of the traditional Balinese rice growing practices. The intensely productive terraced rice paddies of Bali are a thousand years old. So are the democratic subaks (irrigation cooperatives) that manage them, and so is the water temple system that links the subaks in a nested hierarchy. When the Green Revolution came to Bali in 1971, suddenly everything went wrong. Along with the higher-yield rice came "technology packets" of fertilizers and pesticides and the requirement, stated in patriotic terms, to "plant as often as possible." The result: year after year millions of tons of rice harvest were lost, mostly to voracious pests. The level of pesticide use kept being increased, to ever decreasing effect. Meanwhile Lansing and his colleagues were teasing apart what made the old water temple system work so well. The universal problem in irrigation systems is that upstream users have all the power and no incentive to be generous to downstream users. What could account for their apparent generosity in Bali? Lansing discovered that the downstream users also had power, because pests can only controlled if everybody in the whole system plants rice at the same time (which overloads the pests with opportunity in one brief season and starves them the rest of the time). If the upstreamers didn't let enough water through, the downstreamers could refuse to synchronize their planting, and the pests would devour the upstreamers' rice crops. Discussion within the subaks (which dispenses with otherwise powerful caste distinctions) and among neighboring subaks takes account of balancing the incentives, and the exquisite public rituals of the water temple system keep everyone mindful of the whole system. The traditional synchronized planting is far more effective against the pests than pesticides. "Plant as often as possible" was a formula for disaster. It seems clear how such "perfect order" can maintain itself, but how did it get started? Was there some enlightened rajah who set down the rules centuries ago? Working with complexity scientists at Santa Fe Institute, Lansing built an agent-based computer model of 172 subaks planting at random times, seeking to maximize their yields and paying attention to the success of their neighbors. The system self-organized! In just ten years within the model the balanced system seen in Bali emerged on its own. No enlightened rajah was needed. (Interestingly, the very highest yields came when the model subaks paid attention not just to their immediate neighbors but to the neighbors' neighbors as well. If they paid attention primarily to distant subaks, however, the whole system went chaotic.) In Balinese language and understanding, "rice paddies" equals "jewel" equals "mind." One result of Lansing's work is that in the 1980s the Balinese government threw out the "plant often" and pesticide parts of the Green Revolution and renewed respect for the water temple system. It kept the providentially higher yield rice. Unfortunately, it also kept pouring on the fertilizer. Balinese water is so naturally nutrient-rich, the extra fertilizer just passes through the watershed out to the sea, where it is destroying the coral reefs with algal blooms. So far, the water temple system does not reach that far downstream. Lansing ended with a suggestion for Long Now about the perception and practice of time. In the standard western perspective, time is long but thin-- just past, present, future. In Bali, he said, time is dense. The Balinese have ten kinds of weeks operating concurrently-- solar, lunar, and 7-day, 6-day, on down to a one-day week ("Today is always luang.") It's like the difference between the shimmering density of polycyclic gamelan music versus western romantic narrative music-- beginning, middle, end. The Long Now Foundation should figure out how to introduce Balinese time density to the time-impoverished West, Lansing said.

Ralph Cavanagh & Peter Schwartz: Nuclear Power, Climate Change and the Next 10,000 Years Jan 13, 2006

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### Climate change and nuclear prospects Given the power to decide who would go first-- anti-nuke Ralph Cavanagh from Natural Resources Defense Counsel or pro-nuke Peter Schwartz from Global Business Network-- the large audience Friday night voted for Schwartz to make the opening argument. It is the threat of "abrupt climate change" that converted him to support new emphasis on nuclear power, Schwartz said. Gradual global warming is clearly now under way, and there is increasing reason to believe that human activity is driving it, mostly through the burning of coal and oil. If warming is all that happens, it will be an enormous problem, but some regions of the Earth would gain (Russia, Canada) while many others would lose. In the event of abrupt climate change, though, everyone loses. The most likely change would be a sudden (in one decade) shift to a much colder, drier, and windier world. The world's carrying capacity for humans would plummet, driving human population from the current 6.5 billion to as low as 2 billion, with most of the losses from war. It would be a civilization-threatening catastrophe. From research Schwartz has led for the Pentagon as well as from his own training in fluid dynamics, he thinks that continuation of the current warming is very likely to trigger the kind of radical climate instability that has been the norm in Earth's past, except for the last 10,000 years of uncharacteristically stable climate. Therefore everything must be done to head off the shift to climate instability. Meanwhile, Schwartz said, world demand for energy will continue to grow for decades, as two billion more people climb out of poverty and developing nations become fully developed economies. China and India alone will double or quadruple their energy use over the next 50 years. We will run out of oil in that period. That leaves coal or nuclear for electricity. Conservation is crucial, but it doesn't generate power. Renewables must grow fast, but they cannot hope to fill the whole need. Nuclear technology has improved its efficiency and safety and can improve a lot more. Reprocessing fuel will add further efficiency. The discussion format called for Cavanagh to quiz Schwartz for ten minutes, drawing out his views further. Cavanagh asked, "What about the storage of nuclear waste?" "We defined the problem wrong," Schwartz said. "Storage for thousands of years is not needed. The present storage on site in concrete casks is working, and the 'waste' is available as a further energy source with later technology." In the discussion Schwartz also pointed out that new reactor sites are not needed in the US, since all the existing sites are expandable. The format called for Cavanagh to now summarize Schwartz's argument. He did so to Schwartz's satisfaction, adding a point Schwartz missed-- recent findings indicating that the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is now the highest it has been in 25,000 to 400,000 years. It was Ralph Cavanagh's turn to present for 15 minutes, striding the front of the stage. He began by agreeing that messing with the atmosphere and thus the climate is a "suicidal" experiment for humanity to be conducting, and it has to be stopped. He agreed that nuclear should not be considered taboo and should be included as a candidate clean power source, but its history is not encouraging. No new reactors have built in the US since 1973. Nevada has stonewalled on waste storage at Yucca Mountain. The nuclear industry has all manner of government subsidies, loan guarantees, and protections from liability. It has never competed in the open market with other energy sources. California, Cavanagh said, has led the way in developing a balanced energy policy. Places like China are paying close attention. PG&E has become the world's largest investor in efficiency, led by Carl Weinberg (who was in the audience and got a round of applause). And now there are signs that California may become the leader in setting limits to carbon emissions. Within limits like that, then the private sector can compete with full entrepreneurial zest, and may the best technologies win. Nuclear would have to compete fairly with new forms of biofuels and with ever improving renewables. Schwartz asked Cavanagh about the large government subsidies for solar research while there have been none for nuclear (except fusion). Cavanagh said the subsidies were declining, and should. There should be more funding for R&D in biofuels and other alternatives, but the main role for government should be in setting emission standards and then let the private sector duke it out for the best solutions. Schwartz summarized Cavanagh's argument to his satisfaction (many later reported they liked that feature of the evening), and then a host of written questions came from the audience. Asked for a catalog of desirable new technologies, Schwartz wanted cheaper solar, effective energy storage (batteries are painfully limited), and a better electrical grid, while Cavanagh would like more R&D on vehicles and breakthroughs on coal processing. My take on the evening is that Cavanagh was particularly persuasive on the need for nuclear to compete on the open market, and Schwartz was persuasive on the direness of climate prospects and the relative readiness of nuclear power to help.

Sam Harris: The View from the End of the World Dec 09, 2005

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### On necessary heresy With gentle demeanor and tight argument, Sam Harris carried an overflow audience into the core of one of the crucial issues of our time: What makes some religions lethal? How do they employ aggressive irrationality to justify threatening and controlling non-believers as well as believers? What should be our response? Harris began with Christianity. In the US, Christians use irrational arguments about a soul in the 150 cells of a 3-day old human embryo to block stem cell research that might alleviate the suffering of millions. In Africa, Catholic doctrine uses tortured logic to actively discourage the use of condoms in countries ravaged by AIDS. "This is genocidal stupidity," Harris said. Faith trumps rational argument. Common-sense ethical intuition is blinded by religious metaphysics. In the US, 22% of the population are CERTAIN that Jesus is coming back in the next 50 years, and another 22% think that it's likely. The good news of Christ's return, though, can only occur following desperately bad news. Mushroom clouds would be welcomed. "End time thinking," Harris said, "is fundamentally hostile to creating a sustainable future." Harris was particularly critical of religious moderates who give cover to the fundamentalists by not challenging them. The moderates say that all is justified because religion gives people meaning in their life. "But what would they say to a guy who believes there's a diamond the size of a refrigerator buried in his backyard? The guy digs out there every Sunday with his family, cherishing the meaning the quest gives them." "I've read the books," Harris said. "God is not a moderate." The Bible gives strict instructions to kill various kinds of sinners, and their relatives, and on occasion their entire towns. Yet slavery is challenged nowhere in the New or Old Testaments; slave holders in the old south used the Bible to defend their practice. The religious texts have power because they are old, but they are also hopelessly out of date because they are old. It's taboo among religious moderates to compare religions, said Harris, but we must. "Where are the Tibetan Buddhist suicide bombers? For that matter, where are the Palestinian Christian suicide bombers-- they're as Arab and aggrieved as anyone." The fundamental beliefs of Islam really are a problem. "Martyrdom in jihad is not a fringe doctrine; it is believed by millions of Muslims." It's not a question of ignorance-- two-thirds of al Qaeda operatives are college educated. "We have no reason to expect to survive our religious differences indefinitely. Faith is intrinsically divisive. We have a choice between conversation and war." It was conversation that ended slavery, not faith. "Faith is a declaration of immunity to conversation. To make religious war unthinkable, we have to undermine the dogma of faith. The continuance of civilization requires not moderation, but reason." Harris ended by lauding meditation and mysticism as a form of experiential science, and observed, "The wisdom of contemplative life is not evenly distributed. The East has more than the West."

Clay Shirky: Making Digital Durable: What Time Does to Categories Nov 14, 2005

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### Categories go nova It is fortunate that the leading thinker in "social software" is one of the best speakers in the high-tech world, a hot ticket at any conference that can get him. Clay Shirky gave one of his dazzling presentations Monday, Nov. 14, examining a new dimension in one of the most vexed problems in the digital world-- how the hell do we keep anything digital usable beyond ten years? When a whole civilization goes digital, as we are, loss of continuity becomes a crucial issue, fit subject for a Seminar About Long-term Thinking. Thus… Clay Shirky is an adjunct professor at New York University and, among other provocations, runs a mailing list on "Networks, Economics and Culture" at . Sample Shirkyism: "The only group that can categorize everything is everybody." That defies 3,000 years of intellectual practice (Library of Congress, etc.), and it obviously can't work, but it blithely does work in a Googlized world, and over time it's the only thing that can work, but time introduces other problems. "THIS is what the Internet has been straining to become," said Clay Shirky Monday night, both joking and meaning it. He was referring to a category ("tag") that emerged from users on the photo-sharing site Flickr. The category is "cats in sinks." Growing use of the unlikely seeming tag exposed something that a lot of cats do and a lot of people feel compelled to photograph… Shirky pointed out that "cats in sinks" has none of the limitations of former category systems such as the Dewey Decimal System or the Library of Congress scheme or Yahoo's hierarchical category structure. There is no need for a category "cats" with subcategory "in sinks," nor a category "sinks" with subcategory "cats in". The specificity of the category precisely fits its content, its traffic, and its currency. (Unlike the Dewey Decimal system which has 10 categories under "Religion," 8 of them about Christianity and one for "Other Religions. And unlike the Library of Congress system, which retains outdated categories like "Former Soviet Union" and gives equal value to the categories "Asia" and "the Balkans.") "The only group that can categorize everything is everybody," said Shirky. And that's what web services like Google, Flickr, and Del.icio.us makes possible. Flickr links up users, photos, and tags. Del.icio.us links up users, websites, and tags. All you need for a comprehensive category system to emerge is links and tags! There is all manner of overlap, but that's not a problem (thanks to global search). Instead it's a virtue. A high degree of overlap (or redundancy, or "degeneracy" as Shirky called it) makes the system far more robust against disruption and against the erosion of time. An example of the virtue of overlap is the Rosetta Stone. Having the same text in three written languages was the breakthrough for decoding Egyptian Hieroglyphics, whereas the meaning of Inca knotted-string language and Easter Island's Rongorongo remain lost because there is no overlapping text. The title of Shirky's talk was "Making Digital Durable: What Time Does to Categories." While he had good news, and deep news, on the category front, he was less encouraging about digital preservation in general. "We don't know yet how bad the problem is," he said. He pointed out that there are an alarming number of levels between preserving bits (which is easy) and preserving essence (which is at best expensive and at worst impossible). To make the Bits express the Essence over time, you have to preserve (or accurately translate forward) the Medium; and the Format; and the Interpreter; and various Dependencies; and the Operating System; and the Architecture; and the Power system (is 110 A.C. power forever?) Any of that missing or corrupted or misblended, and all is lost. In 1995 Shirky published a book called _Voices From the Net_. Though written and printed with digital files, neither the author nor the publisher Ziff-Davis have a working digital version of the book's text, but Shirky's posts in sundry Usenet flame wars from that same period are preserved intact to embarrass him apparently indefinitely. Why did one form of his writing survive and the other not? The book was written and printed with an expensive, brittle system with few users, whereas Usenet is a cheap, flexible system with a vast number of users. Cheap and big always wins. But for how long? "Preservation is an outcome," said Shirky. You don't know if it is working until afterward. All you can do is reduce the risk of loss. Making digital durable, he said, is a "wicked" problem, meaning it can't actually be solved. It will be an endless process of negotiation.

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