What the strange persistence of rockets can teach us about innovation.

By Neal Stephenson

Few architects have to design anything to last more than 100 years, so how do you build a nuclear waste facility to last for millennia? And what sign do you put on the door?

The documentary mentioned in the article, Into Eternity, is watchable online (perhaps not exactly legally): Into Eternity 1 of 6 (What Happens to Nuclear Waste?).

Via Alex Giron.

We are building a 10,000 Year Clock. It’s a special clock, designed to be a symbol, an icon for long-term thinking. It’s of monumental scale inside a mountain in West Texas. The father of the Clock is Danny Hillis. He’s been thinking about and working on the Clock since 1989. He wanted to build a Clock that ticks once a year, where the century hand advances once every 100 years, and the cuckoo comes out on the millennium.

I am infatuated with this clock. I love the idea of something that exists outside our time, like the pyramids.

I think of epic quests like in video games, when a small band of misfits and heroes need to trek across rugged terrain to an ancient place. Inside this place is a cavern of incredible machinery. That’s what this clock is.

Through the Wormhole is my new favorite show. Astro-physics, metaphysics, narrated and featuring extreme close ups of Morgan F’ing Freeman, who also produces the show. I love how nerds have eagerly put up every episode on YouTube.

I read articles about astronomy and physics. It doesn’t matter to me how much I understand. Their buried message is always the same: Somewhere out there, or somewhere deep inside, there are mysteries of which we perceive only vague shadows, and there are possibly more mysteries within those shadows, continuing indefinitely.

I’m eating these up. So far I’d go with the Extended Mind talks: The Sense of Being Stared At and Telepathy.

First off, the dogs in this video are astronomically cute. Paranormally cute.

Second, are there really old British ladies that have vast manors like that? I thought that was a trope of old mystery novels.

Morphic resonance is a faxinatin’ subject for me. I think most people would be spooked off by it. But Sheldrake’s approach here is brilliant. Instead of reinforcing his argument with laboratory results or exotic qualitative reports, he relies on mundane occurrences. (I suppose these would be ethnographic data, but now my liberal arts degree is showing). Pets know when their masters are coming back home. This concept seems so familiar, it’s no wonder it’s never been investigated before.

Faxinatin’

It’s the Balinese candle-dance trick, and if you don’t know it, go find someone who can show you how to do it. You hold the coffee cup with your right hand underneath it, straight out in front of you. Now bring it left, under your underarm, awkwardly around front with your elbow straight up in the air. That’s 360 degrees, and you’re a pretzel. Keep going around counterclockwise, this time swinging your arm around over your head. At 720 degrees the coffee cup is back where it started, unspilled, and your arm is straight once more. Keep going round and round until you believe it.

53:40:

I feel that games are important to the future of humanity. That sounds like a grand statement, but it’s obviously true for other forms of art that we are very familiar with. Film and novels have drastically shaped our very society we live in, and without them, our lives would be very different. Our conception of humanity come from fiction. The way we visualize things in our head is heavily informed by the language of film.

Now I don’t think games are there yet. But I think that if we’re good about it, we can develop games in a medium that is relevant to a wide swatch of humanity, in the same way that films and novels are.

Discovered via Jonathan Blow’s talk.

In latter times, I think that artists and writers have allowed themselves to be sold down the river. They have accepted the prevailing belief that art and writing are merely forms of entertainment. They are not seen as transformative forces that can change a human being, that can change a society. They are seen as simple entertainment. Things with which to fill 20 minutes, half an hour while we are waiting to die.

It is not the job of artists to give the audience what the audience wants. If the audience knew what they needed then they wouldn’t be audience, they would be the artists. It is the job of artists to give the audience what they need.

Recommended if you have a taste for metaphysics. Topics include morphic resonance, time singularity, and the power of art.

This quote is especially dark, but I appreciate its sentiment, that art can exists outside of time, so its much more powerful than any other force we could wield.

The bardic tradition of magic would place a bard as being much higher and more fearsome than a magician. A magician might curse you. That might make your hens lay funny or you might have a child born with a club foot. If a bard were to place, not a curse upon you, but a satire, then that could destroy you.

If it was a clever satire it might not just destroy you in the eyes of your associates, it would destroy you in the eyes of your family. It would destroy you in your own eyes. And if it was a finely worded, and clever satire, that might survive and be remembered for decades, even centuries, then years after you were dead, people might still be reading it and laughing at you and your wretchedness and your absurdity.

Writers and people who had command of words were respected and feared as people who manipulated magic.

Jonathan Blow created Braid, the wonderful time-bending game from a couple years ago. In this talk, he breaks down the elements that go into making a financially successful game, and how games stack up against the other art forms.

I’m fascinated by this as I see the medium of video games to be like an older brother to medium of the web. The game industry is rife with its own tropes, and you can find plenty of parallels for the web.

Jonathan Blow cares about the medium, and talks about the medium, and is interested in big ideas. I’d love to see this sort of discussion about the web.