About Mesofacts
When people think of knowledge, they generally think of two sorts of facts: facts that don't change, like the height of Mount Everest or the capital of the United States, or facts that change a lot, like the weather or the stock market close. But in between there is a third timescale, with its separate category of facts: facts that change slowly, or mesofacts. This middle, or meso-, scale, of facts are the most interesting and yet the most slippery with which to be acquainted. These change over the course of a single lifetime but we tend to nonetheless view them as constant.
There are already institutions that deal with the far reaches of the fact timescale. On the fast end, there is a company started a few years ago called Ambient Devices. A spin-off from the MIT Media Lab, Ambient Devices creates a number of informational appliances for fast-changing information, including the market and weather data mentioned above. On the other end of the spectrum, there is The Long Now Foundation. The Long Now Foundation is geared towards fostering long-term thinking and awareness.
Mesofacts.org is devoted to raising awareness of the middle category of facts. By continuing to educate ourselves and others about the many mesofacts around us, we put things into a new light and perspective. Simply being aware of how much we know about our place in the universe gets us to think a bit differently, in addition to the possibility of how it can help us to synthesize knowledge differently. For more information, please read an introductory essay about Mesofacts, by our founder Samuel Arbesman.
There are already institutions that deal with the far reaches of the fact timescale. On the fast end, there is a company started a few years ago called Ambient Devices. A spin-off from the MIT Media Lab, Ambient Devices creates a number of informational appliances for fast-changing information, including the market and weather data mentioned above. On the other end of the spectrum, there is The Long Now Foundation. The Long Now Foundation is geared towards fostering long-term thinking and awareness.
Mesofacts.org is devoted to raising awareness of the middle category of facts. By continuing to educate ourselves and others about the many mesofacts around us, we put things into a new light and perspective. Simply being aware of how much we know about our place in the universe gets us to think a bit differently, in addition to the possibility of how it can help us to synthesize knowledge differently. For more information, please read an introductory essay about Mesofacts, by our founder Samuel Arbesman.
