I’ve written a few posts recently (1, 2) related to the Longplayer 1000-year-long piece of music, and here’s one more, including a request for your credit card contribution. On 21 June, Ohad Fishof will be doing a fundraising slow walk across London Bridge and back, a total distance of 563.8m. For a contribution of £5 […]
Long Now
Doris Lessing and Laurie Anderson: rough notes
Here are my notes of last week’s Artangel Longplayer Conversation 2005, which I previewed a few weeks ago. Michael Morris of Artangel introduced the event by saying that, after five years of Longplayer — just 995 to go — they’re instituting conversations like this as an annual event. Doris Lessing and Laurie Anderson hadn’t met […]
Time and Timelessness: Laurie Anderson, Doris Lessing, Jem Finer
Alongside her performances at the Barbican next month, Laurie Anderson is participating in a public conversation with Doris Lessing on the theme of Time and Timelessness (26 May, at the Royal Institution). The blurb for the event proffers: Since the year 2000, the lighthouse on Trinity Buoy Wharf in London’s Docklands has been home to […]
How many CDs are there in the world? Gracenote and metadata
At the end of last year, I tentatively made the prediction that “the catalogue of music recordings readily available in the northern hemisphere will continue to increase by 50% every five years until 02025 when it may start to plateau or saturate”. But I can’t test this prediction until I have some reliable measure of […]
Long bets
Reading Martin Rees’s book Our Final Century — an analysis of a range of natural and man-made risks that may threaten our existence in the next hundred years — led me to discover the Long Bets web site. The foundation that runs this site aims to use long bets to encourage long-term thinking (see this […]
Brains, culture, then what?
I’m interested in long-term thinking, seriously long term (see this posting and this one). So one passage in Stephen Oppenheimer’s October 2003 article in Prospect captured my attention and triggered a further question. Oppenheimer suggests that cultural evolution has outstripped genetic evolution for last 300,000 years. Our species develops by accumulating and transmitting knowledge down […]
Eno on the Long Now
For one week from the time of this posting you can hear an interview with Brian Eno in which he discusses the Long Now Foundation (as discussed here a few days ago), and his exploration of bell sounds as ‘demonstrations’ for the 10,000 year clock project. (Don’t be put off if the radio stream starts […]
Longplayer: 1,000 Year Composition
This picture was taken last Saturday, when I visited the Trinity Buoy Wharf lighthouse to see Jem Finer’s Longplayer. Since then, the Longplayer web site has been overhauled, and the message about the funding of the project prompts me to explain why I think you should visit and/or donate funds, as I have done. I […]