The cover story from the of the New York Times Magazine this past weekend is entitled “The Future is Drying Up,” an excellent look at the work being done in the near term to cover the population explosion in the American West, as water resources become harder to allocate. It’s definitely worth a read, even if you don’t live in this region which is so dependent on water from so few sources.

One of the hardest jobs these days must be a Water Manager in the West, trying to make workable the disappearing edge between sustainable resource management and the current- and near-term needs (and unsustainable lifestyle) of the growing population:

“I asked if limiting the growth of the Las Vegas metro area wouldn’t help. [The head of the Southern Nevada Water Authority, Pat] Mulroy bristled. This country is going to have 100 million additional people in it in the next 25 to 30 years, she replied. Tell me where they’re supposed to go. Seriously. Every community says, Not here, No growth here, Theres too many people here already. For a large urban area that is the core economic hub of any particular area, to even attempt to throw up walls? I’m not sure it can be done. Besides, she added, the problem isn’t growth alone: We have an exploding human population, and we have a shrinking clean-water supply. Those are on colliding paths. This is not just a Las Vegas issue. This is a microcosm of a much larger issue. Americans, she went on to say, are the most voracious users of natural resources in the world. Maybe we need to talk about that as well. The people who move to the West today need to realize they’re moving into a desert, Mulroy said. If they want to live in a desert, they have to adapt to a desert lifestyle. That means a shift from the mindset of the 1930s, when the federal government encouraged people to settle in the West, plant water-intensive crops and make it look like the East Coast. It means landscapes of parched dirt. It means mesquite bushes and palo verde trees for vegetation. It means recycled water. It means gravel lawns. It is the Wests new deal, she seemed to be saying, and I got the feeling that for Mulroy it means that every blade of grass in her state would soon be gone.”

It’s also uncanny that this article came out just as the devastating wildfires in Southern California were growing out of control. With houses being built at a rapid pace in arid desert land areas, coupled with the drought scenarios described in the article - fire may shape the future of the region as much as water.

This also reminded me of the excellent Long Now Seminar by Brian Fagan - “Catastrophic Drought is Coming Back”. His talk discusses how we’re not the first to experience these conditions (and far worse - such as 100 years of drought), and puts all of this in to a Long Now context.

Of course there is a more immediate Long Now impact - the issues that Pat Mulroy deals with for Las Vegas water have reached all the way up to 250 miles north to Spring Valley where the Long Now property is.

No blog post about water in the region would be complete without a mention of the great book by Marc Reisner, Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water. It’s a must-read for anyone interested in the recent history and uncertain future of water resources in the Western United States.

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The latest Seminars About Long-term Thinking are now available as audio downloads or podcasts and hi-res video for Long Now members.

* Juan Enriquez on “Mapping Life”
* Gwyneth Cravens and Rip Anderson on “Power to Save the World”

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Language evolves, The English we might speak in the future will be different. One long term trend in English moves towards uniform ways of making verbs past tense. Ordinarily we do it by adding “ed” to the end.

To get an idea of where English might evolve to in the coming centuries, several linguists published a paper in Nature which tracked the shift in the regularization of irregular verbs.  Those are verbs like sink, sting, swim, wring and spring, which unlike most English verbs are made past tense by changing the “i” to “u” instead of adding the usual “ed” at the end. So we should properly say that yesterday we sunk, stung, swum, wrung or sprung, instead of sinked, stinged, swimmed, wringed, or springed.

If we trace the course of other irregular verbs from hundreds of years ago that have already be regularized, we can begin to estimate how long it will be before these remaining irregular verbs like sinked, springed and the rest become (becamed?) the accepted way to speak. At past rates it will take another 300-2,000 years.

I would bet that it takes nowhere near that time.  I already use sinked in conversation. Everyone knows what it means with zero uncertainty. It is less confusing and more precise than other venecular usages like “they” for “he/she” (a usage I also embrace).

Some of these predicted half-lifes for future word spellings are almost worth betting on at Long Bets. I’d be willing to bet on selected words being accepted faster than they project.

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Peter Paul Rubens’s copy of a copy of Da Vinci’s The Battle of Anghiari

I just received this update on the lost Davinci painting The Battle of Anghiari from Davide Bocelli, a Long Now member and long time friend of the Foundation in Italy… This is a good reminder how difficult it can be to preserve one of the great masterpieces in the world (done in a very permanent media). Imagine if the Da Vinci of our time is working in electronic media…

I just found the news that in Florence some researchers from the San Diego University will work next year to discover a secret fresco by Leonardo da Vinci. The masterpiece was covered by the Medici that hated the subject, but Vasari - ordered to cover the painting - decided to protect and not to delete Leonardo’s work. He left also a suggestion for the future researchers “Cerca Trova” (Search and Find - kind of time googling?? :) ) written on a flag inside the new covering fresco.

After 32 years of researche and thanks to new technologies, we could be the first generation after centuries to see one of the most impressive, copied and forgotten pieces by Leonardo.

Links
[IT] La Repubblica Article in Italian
[EN] Wikipedia entry in English
Just one year to wait.

Best,
Davide

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Genes of micro-organisms are being modified to create something new

The BBC reports on our upcoming seminar speaker Craig Venter’s recent advances in creating life. Attendees of Juan Enriquez’ illuminating talk “Mapping Life” also heard about this research and Venter’s success in “jump starting” life by injecting DNA from one cell to another.

The plan is to re-synthesise these DNA sequences from simple chemicals, stitch them together and create an artificial organism. Some believe the team may be on the cusp of doing just that. Dr Venter’s work on synthetic life is described by some as “top-down”, meaning that he is taking an existing organism and changing it to create something new.

“We have abandoned so much of what traditional biology is doing, many biologists view us as heretics” -Steen Rasmussen

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This week, tech sites like DomainInformer reported that ICANN (the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) was unveiling the internationalization of top-level domain names in “11 test languages — Arabic, Persian, Chinese (simplified and traditional), Russian, Hindi, Greek, Korean, Yiddish, Japanese, and Tamil.” Uh…wait a second…did they say Yiddish?!! A language with around 3 million speakers in the company of languages like Hindi, which has an estimated 500 million speakers, and Mandarin, with about 1 billion? Well, all we can say here at Rosetta is…how cool! It’s not every day that a minority language gets as much attention as the big shots.

Before getting too excited though, we should probably note that what’s actually being counting here is scripts…writing systems…rather than languages per se. This is why Chinese makes the list twice: for the simplified as well as traditional writing system. If we were counting languages, “Chinese” would include a lot more – since linguistically speaking, Mandarin is one of many Chinese languages.

The reason for listing Yiddish, a language closely related to German, rather than the more obvious Hebrew, a Semitic language and national language of the State of Israel, is that although both use roughly the same script, Yiddish requires the use of few additional diacritics. What works for Yiddish, should therefore work for Hebrew as well, although ICANN is certainly open to discussion of this topic on the IDNwiki.

This internationalization effort is certainly good news for speakers and typers of Yiddish worldwide, as well as the hundreds of millions of people who regularly use non-Roman scripts online, and who will now be able to have top-level domain names (.com, .gov, etc.) written in the same script as the rest of the domain.

Now about that http…

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“All life is imperfectly transmitted code,” Enriquez began, “and it
is promiscuous.” Thus discoveries like the one last month of an
entire bacterial genome inside the DNA of a fruitfly is exploding the
old tree-of-life models of evolution. The emerging map replaces gene
lineages with gene webs.

“There is a whole genomic continent to discover, and we’ve just
mapped part of the coastline so far.” Noting that his friend Craig
Venter has just transplanted the DNA from one microbe into a
different one, and booted it up there, Enriquez said that humans are
going to be increasingly designing and controlling the code of life.
“We’ll do with bacteria what we do with our pets.”

Likewise new maps of brain function are raising questions such as,
“Can we model the brain, can we download it, can we transplant it,
can we reboot it?” Prostheses such as robotic arms used to be driven
by muscle signals, but now they are being controlled directly from
the brain.

Enriquez noted that some nations are charging ahead with such
technology and the education that drives it while others cripple
themselves by holding back. Portugal had colonies throughout the
world, he said, but they never respected the natives enough to help
educate them, and so left intellectual blight behind them and at
home. London and Paris are full of Indian and Chinese restaurants,
but there are none in Portugal. He showed a photo of a billboard
that read: “Portugal— We were a world power for about 15 minutes.”

The new maps of life, he said, will profoundly affect countries,
business, religion and ethics. Being alive in the midst a scientific
renaissance like this is Christmas every day.

During Q&A Enriquez lamented that the pharmacology industry has
retreated to doing just marketing now instead of discovery, haven
been driven into a defensive crouch by public misapplication of the
“Precautionary Principle” that all new technologies are guilty until
proven innocent, and innocence is impossible to prove. Thus the
potential death of tens is used to head off treatments that could
save tens of thousands. I asked him, “What would you call the
opposite of the Precautionary Principle?” Kevin Kelly offered from
the audience, “How about the Pro-actionary Principle?”

–Stewart Brand

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Cool Tools Reader Michael Hohl figured out this wonderful way to make your computer Y10K compliant. That is, how to set your computer so that it displays the 5-digit date it will need when we reach the years after 9999: that is 10000 and beyond. In anticipation of that time, you can set this year’s date to 02007 if you have Mac OSX Tiger. Here are step-by-step directions on his site (or click the “read the rest of this entry” link below). Be first in your neighborhood to have all your documents and files future-proofed.

Now if we could only get our WordPress blog engine to the same thing…

(more…)

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(This post was submitted by Roderick Jones, photo from Flickr user Dukal)

One of the stranger aspects of the explosion in the use of virtual worlds is when the avatar outlives the physical life of the gamer controlling it. People inhabiting virtual communities die in real life leaving their avatar and its property behind. A trend that is likely to increase given the predicted increase in use of virtual worlds. Players could leave their avatar passwords to their children or friends to carry on their virtual lives and distribute their property, but it is possible to conceptualize a scenario whereby the avatar continues to exist by replicating the digital profile of its real-life creator.

Both Myspace and Facebook are on the verge of introducing systems to monitor their users online activity in order to better direct advertising toward them. It doesn’t seem long before this kind of marketing system will also be applied to virtual worlds. The process of distilling an individual’s online behavior into a digital profile is currently driven by the commercial needs of advertising but it is possible to imagine it being used in more creative ways. The software used to track the online behavior of users, within in particular system (virtual worlds or social networks) could be modified to track the entirety of their online behavior, over a longer space of time – say thirty years. At the end of this period the data could be used to program an avatar. This avatar would inhabit a virtual world or worlds and be programmed with all the users personal data, preferences and potential responses– would this lead to an avatar afterlife?

With the increase in data storage capacity, computational power and future arrival of mainstream interconnected virtual worlds, this scenario does not seem so improbable. The idea of uploading minds into computers and robots certainly isn’t new (Moravec, Kurzweil) but is generally tripped up by ideas of consciousness and attempts to replicate the mechanics of the human brain. Creating a copy of online behavior and programming an avatar to respond to stimuli in the way the user has been during their digital life is not suggesting consciousness, merely sophisticated replication. This scenario has some intriguing consequences. Amongst them are the possibilities an individual could leave money to their avatar rather than their children in order to support their avatar afterlife, or that future generations would have access to a representation of their ancestors – but would having access to the temporal wisdom of our forebears be of any use? A digital representation of life could continue unhindered in a virtual environment, after real-life has ended.

Tech companies could offer this service; certainly there has never been a lack of human interest in life after death. Maybe Google with its seemingly endless storage capacity will one-day also host our virtual afterlife.

Roderick Jones

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(Frozen bacteria found by Richard Hoover in the ice of the Fox permafrost tunnel)

From New Scientist:

Microbes can survive trapped inside ice crystals, under 3 kilometres of snow, for more than 100,000 years, a new study suggests. The study bolsters the case that life may exist on distant, icy worlds in our own solar system. Living bacteria have been found in ice cores sampled at depths of 4 kilometres in Antarctica, though some scientists have argued that those microbes were contaminants from the drilling and testing of the samples in labs. And in 2005, researchers revived a bacterium that sat dormant in a frozen pond in Alaska for 32,000 years (see Ice age bacteria brought back to life). Now, physicist Buford Price and graduate student Robert Rohde, both at University of California in Berkeley, US, have found a mechanism to explain how microbes could survive such extreme conditions. They say a tiny film of liquid water forms spontaneously around the microbe. Oxygen, hydrogen, methane and many other gases will then diffuse to this film from air bubbles nearby, providing the microbe with sufficient food to survive. Thus, virtually any microbe can remain alive in solid ice, resisting temperatures down to -55° Celsius and pressures of 300 atmospheres. Under such harsh conditions, the microbes would not be able to grow and reproduce, but they would still be able to repair any molecular damage, keeping themselves viable for more than a thousand centuries, the team says. “It is not life as we generally think about it,” says Rohde. “[They] are just sitting there surviving, hoping that the ice will melt.”

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