Shared posts
03 Sep 22:58
#963; In which Flowers are given
by David Malki !
Emily.f.hamilton, Scott Akerman and one other like this
03 Sep 17:18
How Soot Killed the Little Ice Age
Rising air pollution in the wake of the Industrial Revolution seems to be the explanation for a long-standing enigma in glaciology. The emission of soot from Europe’s proliferating factory smokestacks and steam locomotives explains why glaciers in the Alps began their retreat long before the climate warming caused by human activities kicked in, a study suggests.
[More]
29 Aug 18:19
Is America Addicted to War?
by S. Abbas Raza
Stephen M. Walt in Foreign Policy:
It remains to be seen whether this latest lurch into war will pay off or not, and whether the United States and its allies will have saved lives or squandered them. But the real question we should be asking is: Why does this keep happening? Why do such different presidents keep doing such similar things? How can an electorate that seemed sick of war in 2008 watch passively while one war escalates in 2009 and another one gets launched in 2011? How can two political parties that are locked in a nasty partisan fight over every nickel in the government budget sit blithely by and watch a president start running up a $100 million per day tab in this latest adventure? What is going on here?
Here are my Top 5 Reasons Why America Keeps Fighting Foolish Wars:
1. Because We Can.
The most obvious reason that the United States keeps doing these things is the fact that it has a remarkably powerful military, especially when facing a minor power like Libya. As I wrote a couple of weeks ago, when you've got hundreds of planes, smart bombs, and cruise missiles, the whole world looks like a target set. So when some thorny problem arises somewhere in the world, it's hard to resist the temptation to "do something!"
More here.
28 Aug 17:49
Sorria que eu estou te filmando.
by lucasmansoldo
Sorria, o coração tá gravando o seu nome aqui dentro de mim. 
Oh! Oh! Oh!
Já sabem do CapinaGrupo, o grupo mais GARBOSO da internet? NÃO!? Então cliquem aqui e venham, pois eu sei que amar a pé, amor, é lenha.
27 Aug 09:36
Thomas Pynchon
by egoldstein
There are committed recluses, and then there’s Thomas Pynchon, who hides in plain sight on Manhattan’s Upper West Side… more»
27 Aug 09:36
Ask an Algorithm
by egoldstein
What books belong in the canon? Ask a human; you get staid views and bias. Ask an algorithm; you get something else entirely… more»
21 Aug 15:15
Borges, Politics, and the Postcolonial
by Robin Varghese
Gina Apostol responds to Mark O'Connell's New Yorker review of two new books about Borges, in the LA Review of Books:
Certainly, Borges’s statements about his indifference to politics are alarming:
I am not politically minded. I am aesthetically minded, philosophically perhaps. I don’t belong to any party. In fact, I disbelieve in politics and in nations. I disbelieve also in richness, in poverty. Those things are illusions. But I believe in my own destiny as a good or bad or indifferent writer.
To be honest, as I read this, I start laughing. You can, of course, believe Borges — why not, if he says so? But you can also see him performing his double act, enacting the writer Borges, the provocative, public intellectual that the I abhors in that terse masterpiece, “Borges and I.” Interestingly, O’Connell begins his review with a quote from that instructive story:
“I like hourglasses,” [the I narrator] writes, “maps, eighteenth-century typography, the taste of coffee, and the prose of Stevenson; [Borges] shares these preferences, but in a vain way that turns them into the attributes of an actor.”
And yet when it comes to Borges’s actorly statements about politics, O’Connell fails to give the writer the benefit of Borges’s own skepticism of his public self.
What is it about the writer in the First World that wants the Third World writer to be nakedly political, a blunt instrument bludgeoning his world’s ills? What is it about the critic that seems to wish upon the Third World the martyred activist who dies for a cause (O’Connell: “In his own country, six coups d’etat and three dictatorships” — one hears exclamation points of disappointment)? Where does this goddamned fantasy come from — that fantasy of the oppressed Third World artist who must risk his life to speak out, who’s not allowed to stay in bed and just read Kidnapped? I have to say, look at it this way: It only benefits dictatorships when all the Ken Saro-Wiwas die — and the loss of all the Ken Saro-Wiwas diminishes us all. Why is it not okay that an old man in Argentina lives for his art — and yet it is okay for a writer in The New Yorker whose country is targeting civilians abroad in precision assassinations to merely sit and write reviews about dead Argentines whose political feelings are insufficiently pronounced? Where is the great American artist leading his fellow citizens in barricades against the NSA? And why are these New Yorker critics not calling them out for their “refusal to engage with politics”?
Although it is amusing to imagine a blind librarian in Buenos Aires brandishing his weapons of Kipling tomes against the old junta, it is less possible to imagine Jonathan Franzen or Jeffrey Eugenides risking jail at all for any reason. Why are Americans allowed to be more cowardly than others?
LCC and -1 others like this
20 Aug 21:35
Andrew Sullivan: Cameron Proves Greenwald Right
by S. Abbas Raza
Andrew Sullivan in The Daily Dish:
Readers know I have been grappling for a while with the vexing question of the balance between the surveillance state and the threat of Jihadist terrorism. When the NSA leaks burst onto the scene, I was skeptical of many of the large claims made by civil libertarians and queasily sympathetic to a program that relied on meta-data alone, as long as it was transparent, had Congressional buy-in, did not accidentally expose innocent civilians to grotesque privacy loss, and was watched by a strong FISA court.
Since then, I’ve watched the debate closely and almost all the checks I supported have been proven illusory. The spying is vastly more extensive than anyone fully comprehended before; the FISA court has been revealed as toothless and crippled; and many civilians have had their privacy accidentally violated over 3000 times. The president, in defending the indefensible, has damaged himself and his core reputation for honesty and candor. These cumulative revelations have exposed this program as, at a minimum, dangerous to core liberties and vulnerable to rank abuse. I’ve found myself moving further and further to Glenn’s position.
What has kept me from embracing it entirely has been the absence of any real proof than any deliberate abuse has taken place and arguments that it has helped prevent terror attacks. This may be too forgiving a standard. If a system is ripe for abuse, history tells us the only question is not if such abuse will occur, but when. So it is a strange and awful irony that the Coalition government in Britain has today clinched the case for Glenn.
More here.
19 Aug 19:27
O que fazer quando seu celular cair na piscina
by Supermantoani
Se não der certo, não liga cara
Zehortigoza and -1 others like this
16 Aug 20:01
Snowden leaks: the real take-home
(Before I begin: there are participants in the discourse who would say that we're supposed to natter on about Edward Snowden, and not the contents of his disclosures, because turning it into a personal issue rather than a political one is useful to the machineries of state. But the point I'm about to make here is different ...)
(UPDATE: An extended, reworked, more detailed essay along these lines can be found in Foreign Policy.)
In the 21st century, the NSA (and other espionage agencies) face a big system-wide problem that I haven't seen anybody talking about.
The problem is sociological, and it's going to get worse.
First, a brief re-cap. Here's the BBC's Adam Curtis on why the HUMINT establishment is incompetent by design (hint: we can blame a late 19th century author of technothrillers and the Daily Mail). Here's John le Carre on the relationship between spy fic and fact and, more worryingly, an anecdote from personal experience about an intel officer who made stuff up out of sheer boredom. Now, you might think that ELINT is better; computers don't lie, do they? But as Bruce Sterling has been pointing out snarkily from the sidelines for about 25 years now, the emperor is stark bollock naked. (Note: read that last essay as a sarcastic, irony-dripping rant by a prophet who burned out and gave up all hope years ago and is now luxuriating in a bath of pure schadenfreude.)
Are we ready? All together, now:
The big government/civil service agencies are old. They're products of the 20th century, and they are used to running their human resources and internal security processes as if they're still living in the days of the "job for life" culture; potential spooks-to-be were tapped early (often while at school or university), vetted, then given a safe sinecure along with regular monitoring to ensure they stayed on the straight-and-narrow all the way to the gold watch and pension. Because that's how we all used to work, at least if we were civil servants or white collar paper pushers back in the 1950s.
But things don't work that way any more. A huge and unmentionable side-effect of the neoliberal backlash of the 1970s was the deregulation of labour markets and the deliberate destruction of the job for life culture, partly as a lever for dislodging unionism and the taproots of left-wing power in the west (yes, it was explicit class war by the rich against the workers), and partly because a liquid labour market made entrepreneurial innovation and corporate restructuring easier (I love these capitalist euphemisms: I swear they'd find a use for "final solution" as well, if only some naughty, bad people hadn't rendered that clause taboo two-thirds of a century ago).
Today, around 70% of the US intelligence budget is spent on outside contractors. And it's a big budget — well over $50Bn a year. Some chunks go on heavy metal (the National Reconnaissance Office is probably the biggest high-spending agency you've never heard of: they build spy satellites the size of double-decker buses and have so many Hubble-class space telescopes cluttering up their attic that they donated a couple to NASA in 2012), but a lot goes on people. People to oil the machines. People who work for large contracting organizations. Organizations who increasingly rely on contractors rather than permanent labour, because of buzz-words like "flexibility" and "labour market liquidity".
Here's the problem: they're now running into outside contractors who grew up in Generation X or Generation Y.
Let's leave aside the prognostications of sociologists about over-broad cultural traits of an entire generation. The key facts are: Generation X's parents expected a job for life, but with few exceptions Gen Xers never had that — they're used to nomadic employment, hire-and-fire, right-to-work laws, the whole nine yards of organized-labour deracination. Gen Y's parents are Gen X. Gen Y has never thought of jobs as permanent things. Gen Y will stare at you blankly if you talk about loyalty to their employer; the old feudal arrangement ("we'll give you a job for life and look after you as long as you look out for the Organization") is something their grandparents maybe ranted about, but it's about as real as the divine right of kings. Employers are alien hive-mind colony intelligences who will fuck you over for the bottom line on the quarterly balance sheet. They'll give you a laptop and tell you to hot-desk or work at home so that they can save money on office floorspace and furniture. They'll dangle the offer of a permanent job over your head but keep you on a zero-hours contract for as long as is convenient. This is the world they grew up in: this is the world that defines their expectations.
To Gen X, a job for life with the NSA was a probably-impossible dream — it's what their parents told them to expect, but few of their number achieved. To Gen Y the idea of a job for life is ludicrous and/or impossible.
This means the NSA and their fellow swimmers in the acronym soup of the intelligence-industrial complex are increasingly reliant on nomadic contractor employees, and increasingly subject to staff churn. There is an emerging need to security-clear vast numbers of temporary/transient workers ... and workers with no intrinsic sense of loyalty to the organization. For the time being, security clearance is carried out by other contractor organizations that specialize in human resource management, but even they are subject to the same problem: Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
We human beings are primates. We have a deeply ingrained set of cultural and interpersonal behavioural rules which we violate only at social cost. One of these rules, essential for a tribal organism, is bilaterality: loyalty is a two-way street. (Another is hierarchicality: yield to the boss.) Such rules are not iron-bound or immutable — we're not robots — but our new hive superorganism employers don't obey them instinctively, and apes and monkeys and hominids tend to revert to tit for tat quite easily when unsure of their relative status. Perceived slights result in retaliation, and blundering, human-blind organizations can slight or bruise an employee's ego without even noticing. And slighted or bruised employees who lack instinctive loyalty because the culture they come from has spent generations systematically destroying social hierarchies and undermining their sense of belonging are much more likely to start thinking the unthinkable.
Edward Snowden is 30: he was born in 1983. Generation Y started in 1980-82. I think he's a sign of things to come.
PS: Bradley Chelsea Manning is 25.
15 Aug 20:31
New Carnivore Discovered, Rare With Teddy Bear Looks
by Christine Dell'Amore
A fuzzy, fog-dwelling mammal is the first carnivore found in the Western Hemisphere in three decades, a new study says.
14 Aug 20:52
Genome of largest viruses yet discovered hints at 'fourth domain' of life
by Azra Raza
From Nature:
The organism was initially called NLF, for “new life form”. Jean-Michel Claverie and Chantal Abergel, evolutionary biologists at Aix-Marseille University in France, found it in a water sample collected off the coast of Chile, where it seemed to be infecting and killing amoebae. Under a microscope, it appeared as a large, dark spot, about the size of a small bacterial cell. Later, after the researchers discovered a similar organism in a pond in Australia, they realized that both are viruses — the largest yet found. Each is around 1 micrometre long and 0.5 micrometres across, and their respective genomes top out at 1.9 million and 2.5 million bases — making the viruses larger than many bacteria and even some eukaryotic cells. But these viruses, described today in Science1, are more than mere record-breakers — they also hint at unknown parts of the tree of life. Just 7% of their genes match those in existing databases.
“What the hell is going on with the other genes?” asks Claverie. “This opens a Pandora’s box. What kinds of discoveries are going to come from studying the contents?” The researchers call these giants Pandoraviruses. “This is a major discovery that substantially expands the complexity of the giant viruses and confirms that viral diversity is still largely underexplored,” says Christelle Desnues, a virologist at the French National Centre for Scientific Research in Marseilles, who was not involved in the study.
More here.
LCC and -1 others like this
11 Aug 03:33
Why All Humans Deserve to Be Eaten By Sharks
Why All Humans Deserve to Be Eaten By Sharks
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*Edited at 6:45pm to correct a few miscalculations.
I'm not volunteering to be eaten or anything (and sharks aren't really all that into eating people anyway), but I am being volunteering to be EATEN BY GUILT FOR WHAT MY SPECIES IS DOING.
Woah, maybe guilt is made of tiny sharks and they are getting their revenge.
Lucas B, Shawn.odoherty and one other like this
06 Aug 09:51
The End of (xkcd’s) Time
by Austin Brown
The stories told in comics can range from decades-long epics to a single wordless image. Though Randall Munroe’s web comic xkcd has tended toward the shorter end of this vast spectrum, he recently concluded a narrative arc that unfolded over several months in the form of Time.
Starting off as a couple stick figures sitting on the beach and the instruction to “Wait for it…”, the image automatically updated in a kind of super-slow animation that followed the characters on a journey of discovery. Readers (viewers?) had little explanation to go on and began looking for clues and forming theories about the story’s setting and direction. A frame showing the night’s sky allowed astronomy buffs a chance to show that the story seemed to be taking place thousands of years into the future (just as we hope the 10,000-Year Clock’s face will prove useful). Munroe confirmed exactly that in a post on his blog once the story had concluded:
And as Time unfolded, readers gradually figured out that it was a story, set far in the future, about one of the strangest phenomena in our world: The Mediterranean Sea sometimes evaporates, leaving dry land miles below the old sea level … and then fills back up in a single massive flood.
Wired explores even further the research Munroe put into his story, including geographically appropriate flora and fauna, as well as creating a constructed language:
With the help of a linguist, Munroe invented a language and orthography (dubbed “Beanish” by readers) for one of the foreign cultures his characters encounter, which he wanted to be “as different from [English] as our language is from Linear A or Linear B,” the still-undeciphered writing systems of ancient Crete. His abstruse approach worked; despite the efforts of “Time” superfans, no one has been able to decode the language, which Munroe finds fitting since “we haven’t cracked Linear A, either!”
Time chronicles a cataclysmically accelerated event in an uncharacteristically patient, ponderous style. Here’s the whole thing, turned into a video:
04 Aug 07:00
Bozophobia
by evanier
Do you find clowns scary? I used to, a little. I was actually scared of anyone in real life who was hiding behind any sort of mask. Anyway, here’s an article about fear of clowns. Thanks to Scott Marinoff for suggesting I link to it.
02 Aug 11:12
Surprising brain scan of individual “living” with Walking Corpse Syndrome
by Caitlin Kirkwood, The Synaptic Scoop
Graham spent his time at the graveyard. His visits would last so long that the local police would find him there, among the gravestones, and bring him back home. He had been suffering from severe depression and several months prior attempted suicide by bringing an electrical appliance into the bath. Graham believed that his brain was dead. He felt he had fried it in the bath. Now living a sort of half-life, stuck between being alive but having a dead brain, Graham’s trips to the cemetery served as the closest connection he could make with death....
Charland-Verville V, Bruno MA, Bahri MA, Demertzi A, Desseilles M, Chatelle C, Vanhaudenhuyse A, Hustinx R, Bernard C, Tshibanda L.... (2013) Brain dead yet mind alive: A positron emission tomography case study of brain metabolism in Cotard's syndrome. Cortex; a journal devoted to the study of the nervous system and behavior, 49(7), 1997-9. PMID: 23664000
Brain dead yet mind alive: A positron emission tomography case study of brain metabolism in Cotard's syndrome.
19 Jul 14:55
SDCC GEEKS! I'll be at booth 2300!
July 19, 2013
SDCC GEEKS! I'll be at booth 2300!
Jarrod Keone Montoya, Vincent and -1 others like this
17 Jul 21:44
Brian Eno Designing Sound and Light Installations for the Long Now Salon
by Mikl Em
Photo by Alexander Rose in July of 02013
Brian Eno recently visited the Bay Area and saw the latest progress on the 10,000 Year Clock project. Clock designer Danny Hillis gave Brian a tour of the progress at the Long Now Clock assembly space (where these photos were taken.)
Photo by Alexander Rose in July of 02013
Brian Eno confirmed on this visit that he is designing the ambient sound for the Long Now Salon as well as a dedicated light-painting installation for the space. We are thrilled that Brian will be creating these one-of-a-kind works for our new venue. The Salon is intended to be a comfortable place that inspires conversations, and Brian’s sound and lightscape designs will be a key element to creating that atmosphere.
After rising to fame in the British pop music scene of the early 1970′s with Roxy Music and a series of acclaimed solo albums, Brian Eno made his mark as a producer working with such artists as David Bowie, the Talking Heads, U2, Coldplay and many more. Along the way he coined the term “Ambient Music” and made the recordings that eventually defined the genre.
In recent years he has increasingly focused on generative sound and visual art. His 77 Million Paintings software creates a slow, constantly evolving series of light-paintings with an ever-changing ambient sound and lightscape. Brian has released this type of algorithmically-driven digital work both as mobile apps and projected to monumental scale on the sails of the Sydney Opera House (below).
“Luminous/Lighting the Sails” photo by Paul Benjamin
Brian was amongst the first people with whom Danny Hillis discussed his idea to design a clock that would run for 10,000 years. The Clock and the process of building it are intended as an inspiring example of long-term thinking. From Danny’s 01995 article in Wired, announcing “The Millennium Clock”:
When I tell my friends about the millennium clock, either they get it or they don’t. Most of them assume I’m not serious, or if I am, I must be having a midlife crisis. (That’s nice, Danny, but why can’t you just write a computer program to do the same thing? Or, Maybe you should start another company instead.) My friends who get it all have ideas that focus on a particular aspect of the clock. My engineering friends worry about the power source: solar, water, nuclear, geothermal, diffusion, or tidal? My entrepreneurial friends muse about how to make it financially self-sustaining. My writer friend, Stewart Brand, starts thinking about the organization that will take care of the clock. It’s a Rorschach test – of time. Peter Gabriel, the musician, thinks the clock should be alive, like a garden, counting the seasons with short-lived flowers, counting the years with sequoias and bristlecone pines. Artist Brian Eno felt it should have a name, so he gave it one: The Clock of the Long Now.
After giving the Clock its name, Brian joined the Board of Directors of Long Now when it was founded as a non-profit in 01996. He continues to serve on our board, and we thank him for his generosity in also creating art specifically for this new project.
Photo by Alexander Rose
This will be the first sound and light installation of its kind that Brian has created in America. The sooner we finish this project the sooner we can all enjoy Brian’s art in its new Bay Area home. We can’t wait, and we’d love for you to help us build it.
16 Jul 18:54
The Zimmerman Verdict
by Robin Varghese
Justin Smith over at his website:
To the extent that I, as a matter of principle, do not believe in incarceration, I am never sad when someone else is not sent to prison. I would have liked to see Zimmerman found guilty, and I would have liked for him to be compelled to spend his life doing things that would have made him a better person, as a starter things that would not involve guns. I would not like to have seen him sent to a place where the travesty of racial essentialism and inequality in America is concentrated and heightened to an absurd degree, and where people are forced to identify with racial clans in order to stay alive. In prison he would not have learned to regret shooting Trayvon Martin; he would have been deposited into a world that can only make sense by appeal to the same false virtues --self-defense, looking after one's own-- that caused him to commit the murder in the first place.
When I taught in a maximum security prison in Ohio, the guards had to check every day to make sure the class was perfectly balanced between 'races', so that no one group of racially affiliated inmates would feel emboldened enough to gang up on the others and stab them with their pencils (a potential weapon issued cautiously in reward of good conduct) right before my eyes. I've seen enough of prisons to know that no good can come of them. None at all.
If the punishment were to sit in a confined space for years and years in atonement for one's crime, that would be one thing. But that's not what the punishment of imprisonment is. Imprisonment involves living in constant fear of being raped and beaten, and it involves submitting to the very grossest rules of a Hobbesian nightmare world in order to avoid these outcomes. But this is not fitting punishment for any crime.
12 Jul 15:19
Decapitated worms regenerate head with old memories
by Shelly Fan, Neurorexia
Yup, you read that right. The worm in question is the Planarian flatworm. Compared to C. elegans, the flatworm doesn’t get as much love in neuroscience. But to regenerative medicine, it is a truly incredible gem. You see, planaria harbors adult stem cells that imbue them with astonishing regenerative abilities. If you decapitate a worm, […]...
Shomrat T, & Levin M. (2013) An automated training paradigm reveals long-term memory in planaria and its persistence through head regeneration. The Journal of experimental biology. PMID: 23821717
An automated training paradigm reveals long-term memory in planaria and its persistence through head regeneration.
12 Jul 10:10
Post-Scarcity Economics
by Robin Varghese
Tom Streithorst in the LA Review of Books:
WE LIVE LIKE GODS, and we don’t even know it.
We fly across oceans in airplanes, we eat tropical fruit in December, we have machines that sing us songs, clean our house, take pictures of Mars. Much the total accumulated knowledge of our species can fit on a hard drive that fits in our pocket. Even the poorest among us own electronic toys that millionaires and kings would have lusted for a decade ago. Our ancestors would be amazed. For most of our time on the planet, humans lived on the knife-edge of survival. A crop failure could mean starvation and even in good times, we worked from sun up to sundown to earn our daily bread. In 1600, a typical workman spent almost half his income on nourishment, and that food wasn’t crème brûlée with passion fruit or organically raised filet mignon, it was gruel and the occasional turnip. Send us back to ancient Greece with an AK-47, a home brewing kit, or a battery-powered vibrator, and startled peasants would worship at our feet.
And yet we are not happy, we expected more, we were promised better. Our economy is a shambles, millions are out of work, and few of us think things are going to get better soon. When I graduated high school, in 1975, I assumed that whatever I did, I would end up somewhere in the great American middle class, and that I would live better than my father, who lived better than his. Today, my son doesn’t have nearly the same confidence. Back in those days, you could go off to India for seven years, sit around in an ashram, smoke pot and seek spiritual fulfilment, and still come home and get a good job as a copywriter at Ogilvy and Mather. Today kids need a spectacular resume just to get an unpaid internship at IBM. Our children fear any moment not on a career path could ruin their prospects for a successful future. Back in the 1970s, pop stars sang songs about of the tedium and anomie of factory work. Today the sons of laid-off autoworkers would trade anything for that security and steady wage.
On the one hand, technology has made us all much more productive than we were 30 years ago. On the other, jobs have evaporated.
Igor likes this
11 Jul 09:38
Were Paleolithic Cave Painters High on Psychedelic Drugs? Scientists Propose Ingenious Theory for Why They Might Have Been
by S. Abbas Raza
Steven Rosenfeld in AlterNet:
Prehistoric cave paintings across the continents have similar geometric patterns not because early humans were learning to draw like Paleolithic pre-schoolers, but because they were high on drugs, and their brains—like ours—have a biological predisposition to "see" certain patterns, especially during consciousness altering states.
This thesis—that humanity’s earliest artists were not just reeling due to mind-altering activities, but deliberately sought those elevated states and gave greater meaning to those common visions—is the contention of a new paper by an international research team.
Their thesis intriguingly explores the “biologically embodied mind,” which they contend gave rise to similarities in Paleolithic art across the continents dating back 40,000 years, and can also be seen in the body painting patterns dating back even further, according to recent archelogical discoveries.
At its core, this theory challenges the long-held notion that the earliest art and atrists were merely trying to draw the external world. Instead, it sees cave art as a deliberate mix of rituals inducing altered states for participants, coupled with brain chemistry that elicits certain visual patterns for humanity’s early chroniclers.
More here.
10 Jul 01:25
Long Now Salon funding passes $200,000 thanks to gift from writer Neil Gaiman
by Alexander Rose - Twitter: @zander
photo by Kimberly Butler
Famed author Neil Gaiman has generously boosted The Long Now Salon “brickstarter” with a donation of $25,000. We are honored to have his support and encouragement as we near the 50% mark of our Salon fundraising which we must reach to start construction this summer.
“I really believe in Long Now’s mission, and I am excited about this project which puts such focus on knowledge and conversation and books. I can’t wait to see it open and I look forward to visiting.”
-Neil Gaiman
In recognition of his gift, Long Now will engrave the dedication of his choice on a shelf in the Manual for Civilization. The Manual is a symbol of our mission to foster long-term thinking and responsibility, a collection of thousands of books which will fill shelves from floor to ceiling in our new Salon. Curated collaboratively between Long Now and our members and evolving over time, this living archive represents the knowledge that would be most useful to help restart civilization.
Neil Gaiman is the author of Coraline, American Gods, The Sandman comic series, and the new novel The Ocean at the End of the Lane which recently hit #1 on the New York Times best seller list.
