Complicated

Awesome. Listen here.

The Long Then

When it started, I was initially fascinated by the Long Now foundation and its works, and attended some of its seminars. I found it generally hopeful and futuristic, and I was glad at least someone was looking at civilization as a long-term project. Then I lost interest in it due to a pervasive Objectivist/Libertarian bent that eventually became annoying (Stewart Brand, its founder, is an avid Ayn Rand fan).

But now I’m seeing it less as a bold or refreshing initiative or as irritating ideological propaganda, but as a sad postscript on a dying civilization. Many of its projects– the Rosetta Project to make permanent records of the world’s vanishing languages, the Long Now Clock project to create a human artifact to last 10,000 years– strike me now as attempted time capsules from a doomed civilization.

Much of the work in these projects is designed to survive a world without technology or civilization. The artifacts are explicitly designed to survive post-apocalpytic looting! That’s wise, for sure, but it doesn’t sound like a bold attempt to orient people’s thinking towards creating a long-term civilization, but rather as an attempt to leave at least some last record of one that once existed: the Long Then.

Thing of beauty

My grandfather had a donkey while he was living in Tashkent in Central Asia during World War II. There was nothing much for the donkey to eat, but, as a member of the Communist Party, my grandfather had a subscription to Pravda, the Communist Party newspaper, and so that’s what the donkey ate. Apparently, donkeys can digest any kind of cellulose, even when it’s loaded with communist propaganda. If I had a donkey, I would feed it the Wall Street Journal.

Awesome on so many levels.

Google code browser? Awesome.

Too cool

Just came across this by accident. Google is now a huge source repository and IDE.

Amazing. Source highting and directory browsing for any code found on the internets.

A knowledge of Italian

A knowledge of Italian is as useful to a musician– and was once as critical– as knowlege of English is to a software engineer.