"Then they take a nap."

Roger Ebert's essay, Why the meaningless of the Universe consoles me

There is more than one way to see. A leaf turns to the light. A chimpanzee selects a piece of fruit. A fish sees a smaller fish. An eagle sees a rabbit. A dolphin rescues a sailor. A dog welcomes us home. While all of these actions are guided by a process falling under the general heading of Intelligence, humans seem to be fairly unique in our ability for conscious thought. We see, we know, and we know we know.
This is a blessing and it carries a price. To know you live is to know you die. Having studied several cats at close range over a period of years, I've concluded they don't give it a moment's notice. They know they want to live, which is why they get out of trouble as fast as they can. Then they take a nap.

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"We are going to rescue your shit"

This is the credo of the Archive Team, whose existence was brought to my attention by a post in The Long Now Blog, Where does the data go when the host dies?

In the wake of the crumbling Yahoo! behemoth and the clamor of mass Delicious data dumps, it’s worthwhile to stop and ask ourselves just how “archived” is the data that we create and share in these free hosting sites? What kind of promises do these sites make to preserve our information and to care about the hundreds of hours we spend uploading, tagging, and arranging it? In the case of Yahoo! and all of its affiliate sites, none whatsoever.

The funny thing is, we were warned about this over two years ago. In January 2009, the Archive Team said in no uncertain terms, “Please do not use Yahoo or Yahoo-owned sites for any non-retrievable personal data.”

 From the Archive Team page, Why Back Up?

• Because they don't care about you
• Disaster will strike
• But there is still hope

Luckily, a few basic (and cheap) precautions can bring the long-term care of your data into your own hands, away from the short-term world of the Internet.

More "Ideas about Long-term Thinking" related to digital technology may be found at The Long Now Blog category Digital Dark Age.

"An Apology For Roger Ebert"

The title of a talk (transcript here) by Brian Moriarty, delivered 4 March 2011 at the 25th Game Developer's Conference in San Francisco, an intelligent defense of Ebert's remark that "video games can never be art."
Among other things, I found this interesting:

Back in 1900, the trustees of the Boston Symphony Orchestra commissioned a beautiful new auditorium.

Around the edge of the gold proscenium they mounted a series of nine flat plaques, three on the left, three on the right and three overhead.

The plan was to inscribe these plaques with the names of the world's nine greatest composers.

We can imagine the names that were being thrown around. Bach, Handel and Haydn, Mozart, Brahms.

But when it came time to actually sit down and determine which composers would be honored, the trustees couldn't make up their minds.

And so, for the past 111 years, visitors to Boston Symphony Hall sit before a gold proscenium with eight empty plaques. Only one, at the very top, contains a name, the only one the trustees could all agree on: Beethoven.

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Discovery's last mission

The space shuttle Discovery lands for the last time. From the AP article:

Perhaps more than any other shuttle, Discovery consistently delivered.

It made its debut in 1984 following shuttles Columbia and Challenger, dispatched the Hubble Space Telescope in 1990, flew the first shuttle rendezvous to Russia's Mir space station and carried the first female shuttle pilot in 1995, and gave another ride into space to John Glenn, the first American to orbit the Earth, in 1998.

It got NASA flying again, in 1988 and 2005, following the Challenger and Columbia disasters. And it flew 13 times to the space station, more than any other craft. On its last trip, it delivered a new storage compartment packed with supplies and a humanoid robot.

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Read Ken Kremer's blog post for the Planetary Society.

Altogether, Discovery spent a full year (365 days) in space during the 39 missions, orbited Earth 5,830 times, and traveled 148,221,675 miles during a career spanning 27 years.