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

*Paul Romer on “A Theory of History, with an Application” – audio and video now available

From TechOn!: “Japanese researchers prototyped a memory system that can store large volumes of data for more than a thousand years. The system, “Digital Rosetta Stone (DRS),” was announced June 16, 2009, by Keio University, Sharp Corp and Kyoto University at the 2009 Symposium on VLSI Circuits, which is taking place in Kyoto, Japan (lecture number: C3-3). They stacked wafers mounted with mask ROM and packaged it with SiO₂. Power supply and signal communication are conducted by wireless.”

Very, very cool… but there remains the issue of transparency.  If someone finds this disk 1,000 years from now, how will they know how to access the information?   We think a microetched instruction manual might do very nicely.

From Wired:

The printing process in question is a simple but, as usual with Keats, pretty clever idea. The cover is printed in a double layer of standard black ink, with an incrementally screened overlay masking the nine words. Exposed over time to ultraviolet light, the words will be appear at different rates, supposedly one per century.

“The precise quantity of ink covering each word is different, so that the words will appear one at a time,” Keats said. “Provided that your copy of Opium is kept out in the open, and regularly exposed to sunlight over 1,000 years to be read progressively by the next dozen or so generations. Or very, very slowly if you happen to be Ray Kurzweil.”

The odds are very good that Keats’ brainy game will outlive print itself, at least as far as magazines are concerned. But will the pages of Opium last long enough for his story to be told?

“The high-quality acid-free paper on which Opium is printed will certainly last that long,” Keats answered. “Whether humankind will, of course, remains an open question.”

Today a million copies of the  International Herald Tribune were distributed that were dated 6 months from now… after the Copenhagen climate talks.

In a front-page ad in today’s International Herald Tribune, the leaders of the European Union thank the European public for having engaged in months of civil disobedience leading up to the Copenhagen climate conference that will be held this December. “It was only thanks to your massive pressure over the past six months that we could so dramatically shift our climate-change policies…. To those who were arrested, we
thank you.”

There was only one catch: the paper was fake.

Looking exactly like the real thing, but dated December 19th, 2009, a million copies of the fake paper were distributed worldwide by thousands of volunteers in order to show what could be achieved at the Copenhagen climate conference that is scheduled for Dec. 7-18, 2009.

The effort was orchestrated through a joint effort bythe always amazing Yes Men and Greenpeace. While this is not the first time someone has produced an artifact from the future as a way to change the way people are acting now, this is certainly one of the most ambitious efforts.  Kudos.

One of my favorites parts of the paper are the ads like the one from BP below:

The Long News: stories that might still matter fifty, or a hundred, or ten thousand years from now.

Life can survive at the bottom of the oceans; inside volcanic vents; in radioactive wastelands. So even if humans don’t make it through the coming centuries, it’s a good bet that in some form or other, life will go on.

A few recent stories about the resilience of life:

1. Microbe Wakes Up After 120,000 Years

2. Life could have survived earth’s early bombardment

3. A counter-example to the previous story (though, obviously, sea life later recovered): Ancient eruption ‘killed off world’s sea life’

4. Trying to understand the essential elements for life: Could life be 12 billion years old?

5. Making “life” in a test-tube: Simple chemical system created that mimics DNA

6. With or without us, life can survive on this planet a while longer: Earth gets billion-year life extension

We invite you to submit Long News story suggestions here.

Whether the language you speak fundamentally shapes your thinking (sometimes referred to as “linguistic relativity”) is a question that usually comes up in Linguistics 101, along with a set of well known examples — Hopi time, Eskimo words for snow — that would seem, a priori, to indicate the answer is “yes”.  Recent research, however, conducted by Lera Boroditsky and discussed in her contribution to “What’s Next?  Dispatches on the Future of Science” go a long way towards actually proving this is the case.

In one reported study of several:

“We gave people sets of pictures that showed some kind of temporal progression (e.g., pictures of a man aging, or a crocodile growing, or a banana being eaten). Their job was to arrange the shuffled photos on the ground to show the correct temporal order. We tested each person in two separate sittings, each time facing in a different cardinal direction. If you ask English speakers to do this, they’ll arrange the cards so that time proceeds from left to right. Hebrew speakers will tend to lay out the cards from right to left, showing that writing direction in a language plays a role.  So what about folks like the Kuuk Thaayorre, who don’t use words like “left” and “right”? What will they do?

The Kuuk Thaayorre did not arrange the cards more often from left to right than from right to left, nor more toward or away from the body. But their arrangements were not random: there was a pattern, just a different one from that of English speakers. Instead of arranging time from left to right, they arranged it from east to west. That is, when they were seated facing south, the cards went left to right. When they faced north, the cards went from right to left. When they faced east, the cards came toward the body and so on. This was true even though we never told any of our subjects which direction they faced. The Kuuk Thaayorre not only knew that already (usually much better than I did), but they also spontaneously used this spatial orientation to construct their representations of time.”

 Patrick Wlaters sent in this great tidbit about the oceans “thermohaline currents” driven by salinity and temperature gradients.

The ocean conveyor gets it “start” in the Norwegian Sea, where warm water from the Gulf Stream heats the atmosphere in the cold northern latitudes. This loss of heat to the atmosphere makes the water cooler and denser, causing it to sink to the bottom of the ocean. As more warm water is transported north, the cooler water sinks and moves south to make room for the incoming warm water. This cold bottom water flows south of the equator all the way down to Antarctica. Eventually, the cold bottom waters are able to warm and rise to the surface, continuing the conveyor belt that encircles the globe.

It takes almost 1,000 years for the conveyor belt to complete one “cycle.”

This month some results were published from the now 72 year long Happiness Study at Harvard of 268 wealthy and priveleged men.  NPR also ran a story on this recently with interviews of the case researchers.  What was most striking to me is that in all cases, the money and success were not indicators of happiness.  It was having good relationships with other people that was the universal key.  Here is a synopsis from the longer Atlantic article on the study.

Is there a formula—some mix of love, work, and psychological adaptation—for a good life? For 72 years, researchers at Harvard have been examining this question, following 268 men who entered college in the late 1930s through war, career, marriage and divorce, parenthood and grandparenthood, and old age. Here, for the first time, a journalist gains access to the archive of one of the most comprehensive longitudinal studies in history. Its contents, as much literature as science, offer profound insight into the human condition—and into the brilliant, complex mind of the study’s longtime director, George Vaillant.

In a piece from February in On The Media,  Bob Garfield is interviewed about his piece on Slate.com about the National Archive ingestion policies.  He makes the assertion that they are actually not able to injest digital documents such as MS Word, and Powerpoint files.

“… the National Archives’ technology branch is so antiquated that it cannot process some of the most common software programs. Specifically, the study states, the archives “is still unable to accept Microsoft Word documents and PowerPoint slides.”

I would like to think this is because those formats are proprietary and saving them actually has all kinds of sticky legal and versioning issues… But it does beg the question, if they are not ingesting Powerpoint and Word files, what are they ingesting?

I have just stumbled across the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (CDLI), which contains images and catalog information for cuneiform tablets dating from ca. 3350 B.C., or the age when writing began. As of February 8, 2008, the collection contained 225,000 cuneiform texts and 85,000 images. The CDLI brings together the collections of sixteen digital library collections.

The collection is gorgeously photographed and allows you to zoom in to a degree on each of the tablets. Not only is it a joy to peruse, but it is exhillarating to see so many ancient texts from over 5,000 years ago.

The image shown is from The Hearst Museum of Anthropology at UC Berkeley and is from the Early Dynastic period, or ca. 2600-2350 B.C.