Zander Rose launched the conference with an impressive discussion and photos of the Clock of the Long Now. I've known Danny Hillis and Stewart Brand for forty years or so, and known of this great project for fifteen or more years. I've even 'fondled' the 'camshaft' designed to handle the peregrinations of the sun during its annual semi-ellipic orbit arount the earth (or maybe it is the other way around). Nonetheless, I had NO IDEA how complex and sophisticated this project really has turned out to be.
I called Jenny to say, this was one of the ten most inspiring talks I've heard in my life. Some impertinent person asked me, "What were the others?" I stammered, but did manage to say that hearing Fred Hoyle talk at Caltech about the Big Bang when I was thirteen, and John Lilly the same year about conversations with porpoises made the list. Richard Feynman's first Freshman Physics lecture comes to mind, the week after Professor Watson had a heart attack. And probably Murray Gell-Mann's closing talk at ACM '01 in the San Jose Convention Center, talking about the value of, plus the difficulty of , cross-disciplinary research for the world's most pressing problems.
How about you? Can you name the most inspiring three talks you've ever heard?
The day had plenty of highlights, which I'll tackle in another post. But I will close this one by noting that we all went to a special place east of Scottsdale, the La Cuesta del Sol (I think), where local viands and libations were followed by peering through two telescopes, one trained on the New Moon and the other on Saturn, replete with its rings. One had to reflect on Galileo's spectacular finding a half millennium ago, and the impact his discovery had on world views. Fitting to end the day this way...
No comments:
Post a Comment