Two language families' trees from Dr. Dunn's paper, with two word-order traits.

How does human language work? What are its possibilities and limitations? Where did it come from? Many linguists have asked these questions and made contributions to our understanding of language, but how do they get their answers?

One approach is to go out and document a language, which can then be compared to other languages, writings from the past, etc. Through various methods, linguists have succeeded in discovering patterns within and between languages that allow us to define some of their parameters and to organize them into families.   But, as two recent publications demonstrate, our ability to recognize patterns—and their underlying causes—may be dramatically increasing with the development of technology that can centralize, organize and manipulate enormous amounts of information.

The two studies were highlighted in The Economist, and both of them offer conclusions that are likely to spark lively debate. Dr. Michael Dunn, from the Netherlands’ Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, published a paper in Nature magazine addressing word-order dependencies—the idea that, for example, if a given language places verbs before objects (eat lunch) it will also place prepositions before nouns (at home). By comparing different languages, linguists have found that there are some strong consistencies in these dependencies, indicating that they are the result of “underlying cognitive or systems biases.” Dr. Dunn, however, has used large databases of basic vocabularies and statistical methods borrowed from evolutionary biology to approach the problem of dependencies in a different way:

To substitute for fossils, and thus reconstruct the ancient branches of the tree as well as the modern-day leaves, Dr Dunn used mathematically informed guesswork. The maths in question is called the Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method. As its name suggests, this spins the software equivalent of a roulette wheel to generate a random tree, then examines how snugly the branches of that tree fit the modern foliage. It then spins the wheel again, to tweak the first tree ever so slightly, at random. If the new tree is a better fit for the leaves, it is taken as the starting point for the next spin. If not, the process takes a step back to the previous best fit. The wheel whirrs millions of times until such random tweaking has no discernible effect on the outcome.

When Dr Dunn fed the languages he had chosen into the MCMC casino, the result was several hundred equally probable family trees. Next, he threw eight grammatical features, all related to word order, into the mix, and ran the game again.

He found that particular word-order traits were not necessarily linked to others in the way that current theories propose. Rather, such dependencies seemed to be ‘lineage-specific,’ suggesting that they have been passed down through language families. “Nurture, in other words, rather than nature,” as The Economist put it.

The other article, published in Science by Dr. Quentin Atkinson of the University of Auckland, also uses statistics and databases in an innovative way. He looked at information from the World Atlas of Language Structures on sounds in different languages and found that phonemic diversity (the number of sounds used in a language) decreases as you follow the pathways of human migration outwards from central/southern Africa. The Science article argues that modern language originated in that part of Africa and that phonemic diversity decreased with every stage of human expansion as small groups of people set off in search of new territory.

Both of these studies utilize phylogenetic language groupings, based on evolutionary theory, and they run statistical analyses with large amounts of data made available by central repositories of linguistic information, such as the World Atlas of Language Structures. The Long Now Foundation’s Rosetta Project is an effort to improve and facilitate that very sort of creative methodology—to organize and make available large amounts of data so that researchers can develop fundamentally new methods of inquiry.

Gravity Probe B is a satellite that, since 02004, has been conducting an experiment first conceived half a century ago with the goal of testing a theory developed another half-century before that.

Indeed, some of the predictions to come out of Albert Einstein’s Theory of Relativity have taken until now – a century later – to test. Nonetheless, frame dragging has been observed and confirmed.

Wondering what took so long? The New York Times explains that the theory had largely been supported by observations of the planets, the Moon and other satellites, but that direct observation of such a subtle effect required some of the most sensitive instruments and precisely machines objects in history.

To measure these minuscule warps in the very fabric of spacetime, Gravity Probe B used the world’s most perfect gyroscopes, monitored by the most precise gyro-monitors, kept directly oriented to a ‘guide-star’ using a telescope and an Attitude and Translation Control system, all maintained at exactly -455.5 degrees F for 16 months while it orbited the earth in a 400-mile high polar orbit.

More on the gyroscopes:

To measure the minuscule angles predicted by Einstein’s theory, the GP-B team needed to build a near-perfect gyroscope—one whose spin axis would not drift away from its starting point by more than one hundred-billionth of a degree each hour that it was spinning. By comparison, the spin-axis drift in the most sophisticated Earth-based gyroscopes, found in high-tech aircraft and nuclear submarines, is seven orders of magnitude (more than ten million times) greater than GP-B could allow.

The rest of the satellite and it’s mission are documented in luxurious detail on the project’s website.

Being in the presence of a really old tree–think 1,000 years or more–inspires awe and, hopefully, an elongating of temporal perspective. Your thoughts are led away from the familiar concerns of yesterday, today and tomorrow, and the lifespan of the tree gradually comes into focus. The rise and fall of cities and scientific paradigms become more relevant than the rise and fall of hairstyles and political buzzwords. And perhaps the younger trees nearby grew from seeds produced by that aged individual. Or, with the help of the Archangel Ancient Tree Archive, perhaps the seedling in your backyard is that aged individual.

The Archangel Ancient Tree Archive, highlighted recently in the New York Times, seeks out the very oldest and largest living individuals of several different tree species–including coastal redwoods and giant sequoias–and clones them. The purpose? Reforestation and genetic archiving. Co-founder David Milarch sees trees as key to the health of water and soil systems. As the New York Times article put it, he “preaches his love for all things arboreal with an evangelical zeal.” Fair enough. Trees play an important role in their ecosystems, just like all parts of any ecosystem do. So why collect the oldest trees? Archangel’s website provides two distinct reasons for this, which seem to stem from the two goals of reforestation and archiving. On the one hand, reforestation efforts benefit from old trees’ “demonstrated longevity.”

The trees that we collect from have coped with the margins of life in their long life span, and in that they will have the greatest health and ability to survive. As they are introduced back into the environment, the seedlings from these trees will have the greatest survivability when planted.

It should be noted, however, that genetics are not the only reason that some trees live longer than others. A tree’s supply of water or sunshine can shepherd it to longevity, and the assertion that seedlings from ancient trees will exhibit superior performance  because their DNA “is essentially a memory for surviving calamity” borders on the Lamarckian. Archangel’s idea for a genetic archive renders a much more interesting perspective, and an interesting format as well: the archive’s ‘data’ (plant DNA) will be stored by clones of the original specimens in groves of living trees, with multiple clones of the same tree growing in various locations so as to avert losing data to a single natural disaster.

We are preserving the best known genetics to give ourselves a chance at something that could be great and something we will learn about for generations to come.

…If we allow these very old trees to tip over and die, we will never have the opportunity to study those genetics in the future to understand why they were able to make it so long and get so big.

…What Archangel is doing is difficult, but we believe in the long run this work will be very valuable.

Regardless of whether or not the genes from these “very old trees” turn out to be any different from the average member of the species, the forward-thinking what-ifs here are laudable. Archangel is taking something awesome and making it available to future generations, recognizing that their knowledge and research methods will most likely be more capable than ours in unexpected ways. It’s not just about preserving trees, it’s about preserving options. And besides…what better thing to copy than a forty-story tall redwood?

I imagine a library atop a remote mountain that collects the essential information needed to re-learn practical knowledge essential to civilization. This depot, open to anyone who journeys there, is the cultural equivalent of the Svalbard seed bank, a vault on the Arctic Circle that holds frozen seeds of crop plants from around the world. The utilitarian documents in this vault would be the seeds of culture, able to sprout again if needed. It would be the Library of Utility, and it would serve as civilization’s backup.

Most great libraries of today have a broad mandate to be very inclusive. They contain “everything.” This everything is being duplicated in digital form by Google and others as the long-desired Universal Library. But the library at the top of the mountain would be different. It would be a very selective library. It would not contain the world’s great literature, or varied accounts of history, or deep knowledge of ethnic wonders, or speculations about the future. It has no records of past news, no children’s books, no tomes on philosophy. It contains only seeds. Seeds of utilitarian know-how. How to recreate the infrastructure and technology of civilization so far. The library would gather the knowledge needed to recreate itself — all the mechanical structures of brick, mortar, glass — the library itself. One could think of it as a manual for making a physical library with books and paper. Or a manual for reconstruction the infrastructure of civilization. A civilization reboot manual, which has also been discussed at the Long Now Foundation and in various science fiction stories. From the seeds of know-how archived here you could regrow the arts of printing, or metalworking, or plastics, or plywood, or laser discs.

This information is not usually found in libraries, or in books, or even on the web in text. These days much instructional and utilitarian information is conveyed in YouTube clips. Partly because video is a good way to show how something is done, but also because it is much easier to record a video that put things into words and diagrams. But often that ease lowers the quality of instruction. If you had to rely on a university library to find instructions on how to make sheet metal from ore, or even to find and extract the ore, or to make plastic from oil, or to grow silicon to make make a chip, it would be very difficult. Usually such utilitarian knowledge is missing from books, but even when it is present in the library, it is dilute and spread throughout many books or journals. A lot of this utilitarian knowledge is implicit knowledge and passed along outside of written documentation. And when written down, these documents are often not the type to find their way into libraries.

It need not be a giant library. It may be possible to fit all the essential information needed to bootstrap the infrastructure of civilization into 10,000 books or so. And unlike the Universal Library of Google, it would be on paper. In a century or so, paper-based books will be rare. But paper books will outlast any digital platform and paper requires the least amount of technology to access. Paper will be universally readable at any period. You can’t say that about floppy disks, CD-Roms, and PDFs.

But rather than containing merely shelves of books, this Library of Utility would contain sequences of books. Depending on where you wanted to start, you would visit different documents. If you already knew how to make glue, you could immediately start the instructions on making plywood. But if you did not know how to make water-proof glue, you would begin at a different point. Or if you knew glue and wood spinning, but did not know about hydraulic presses, you’d get a different set of instructions. That multi-forking seems pretty hypertext; would not digital be better for this? Yes, it would be better, but would be done in paper as a back up.

Perhaps the Library of Utility is usually sealed airtight, say through the winter, and it is opened a few times, or a few months, a year for adding books and research. This is a 10,000-year Library, encased in an impermeable shell that could last for hundreds of years without human attention if it came to that. So the Library of Utility would be built to house the most essential 10,000 books for 10,000 years, a library of practical knowledge that could be bootstrapped to restart civilization at any point it might be needed.

There is no need to wait for the Library to be built at the top of the mountain. It could be started now, in any garage. What books would you bring to it if you could?

(The image on top is of small monastery in the Himalayas, near Paro, Bhutan. There were only a few books in it. The second image is of the Svalbard seed bank. No books, only seeds.)

This article was cross posted from The Technium.

Ecologist Tim Flannery is on tour in the US to support his recently released Here on Earth: A Natural History of the Planet, a book that explores the intertwined histories of humanity and planet Earth.

On May 3rd, he’ll discuss Here on Earth at one of Long Now’s Seminars About Long-term Thinking in San Francisco. Long Now Members who can’t make it in person can listen to a live audio stream of the event as it happens.

In addition to the print version of Here on Earth, Flannery and his publishing team created an iPad app that comes with the full text of the book, 60 minutes of original film and animated content, interactive maps and infographics and an integrated Twitter-based reading group that allows readers to see what others are saying about the book in real-time.

Tim Flannery is a best-selling and prolific author of natural histories; a professor of paleontology, paleoclimatology & mammology; and the Chairman of the Copenhagen Climate Council. Some of his previous works include The Weather Makers and The Eternal Frontier.

10,000 years ago what was walking on the land you are on right now?  It turns out in a recent find that a mammoth was in Monterey county on the California coastline ten millennia ago. As is frequently the case, the bones were revealed while tilling agricultural land for the planting season. Mark Hylkema, Santa Cruz District archaeologist for the state Department of Parks, spoke with Kevin Howe of the Monterey County Herald about the find, which could indicate that more fossils might be buried in the area.

Hylkema described teeth, tusks and bones as still porous and in good condition

“There were three types of bone conditions noted,” Hylkema reported. “Fragments of ivory tusk, regular looking bone fragments and some that were discolored as though charred or lithified.”

If the bones are charred, he said, it could indicate human association with the remains. Some bone fragments were taken for radiometric tests to determine how old they are.

…The soil level and composition in which they were found indicates that the mammoth died 10,000 to 25,000 years ago, Hylkema said.

Another exciting collection of Ice Age fossils was uncovered last fall at the site of a popular ski resort in the Colorado Rockies. You can see some great photographs from that discovery on the National Geographic website.

A study was published last month that made some interesting conclusions about how the human brain organizes and prioritizes memory. Psychology Today reported on the investigation, which was conducted by a team of researchers under the leadership of University of Lübeck professor Dr. Jan Born. The experiment involved volunteers conducting one of a few memory tests and then being quizzed ten hours later on the tests. Only some of the participants, however, were told that they would be quizzed, and only some of them were allowed to sleep in the meantime. As it happens, we might all be futurists while we’re asleep…

The pivotal question is, How does the brain “decide” what to keep and what to dump?… German researchers have garnered evidence that the brain sorts through memories during sleep and preferentially retains the ones that are most relevant. The study, published in the Journal of Neuroscience, concludes that the brain evaluates information based on future expectations. After a good night’s sleep, we remember information better when we know it will be useful in the future.

…The researchers also recorded electroencephalograms (EEGs) from the individuals who slept. Subjects who expected a test displayed a strong increase in slow oscillation activity during their slow-wave sleep. The more slow-wave activity the sleeping participants had, the better their memory during the test. Born and colleagues think that the process may involve at least two parts of the brain. The brain’s prefrontal cortex appears to “tag” memories deemed potentially useful for the future, while the hippocampus consolidates those memories during sleep.

“Our results show that memory consolidation during sleep indeed involves a basic selection process that determines which of the many pieces of the day’s information are sent to long-term storage,” Born says. “Our findings also indicate that information relevant for future demands is selected foremost for storage.”

Since the end of the last ice age a little over 10,000 years or so ago, human civilization has blossomed in a climatically friendly epoch known as the Holocene. The flowers are still blooming, but as climate change begins to mix things up some have been predicting that the story of recent and pending human history will prove quite dramatic…and it will be written in stone. National Geographic reports:

Stratigraphers like Zalasiewicz are, as a rule, hard to impress. Their job is to piece together Earth’s history from clues that can be coaxed out of layers of rock millions of years after the fact. They take the long view—the extremely long view—of events, only the most violent of which are likely to leave behind clear, lasting signals. It’s those events that mark the crucial episodes in the planet’s 4.5-billion-year story, the turning points that divide it into comprehensible chapters.

So it’s disconcerting to learn that many stratigraphers have come to believe that we are such an event—that human beings have so altered the planet in just the past century or two that we’ve ushered in a new epoch: the Anthropocene. Standing in the smirr, I ask Zalasiewicz what he thinks this epoch will look like to the geologists of the distant future, whoever or whatever they may be. Will the transition be a moderate one, like dozens of others that appear in the record, or will it show up as a sharp band in which very bad things happened—like the mass extinction at the end of the Ordovician?

That, Zalasiewicz says, is what we are in the process of determining.

Whether or not humans are ushering in such a singular moment in recent geologic history, there seems to be increasing support for the notion that we are leaving the Holocene behind, and that ‘we’ have enough to do with that transition to merit naming the new epoch after ourselves. The term ‘Anthropocene’ was first used by Paul Crutzen, a Dutch chemist, at a conference about ten years ago. It’s come a long way: today it is featured in the March issue of the National Geographic.

Crutzen…thinks its real value won’t lie in revisions to geology textbooks. His purpose is broader: He wants to focus our attention on the consequences of our collective action—and on how we might still avert the worst. “What I hope,” he says, “is that the term ‘Anthropocene’ will be a warning to the world.”

The photograph of the oil field above was taken by Edward Burtynsky, who spoke at our seminar series in 2008 on “The 10,000-year Gallery.”

The Maeslant Barrier built for a once in 10,000 year storm

There was a maxim that predicted the existence of the longest living trees even before they were discovered, “adversity breeds longevity.”  Using this principle conifer scientists traveled to the harshest mountain peaks and found the Brisltecone Pine alive and over 4,800 years old.

It stands to reason then that a country that had spent the whole of it’s existence defending itself from an encroaching sea, would have the longest term perspective on the subject.  In 01939 when a series of studies in Holland revealed how their country might suffer from from a large storm in the north Atlantic, the Dutch began planning and building.  Only part way through their efforts, a storm in 01953 proved them right, killing over 2,000 people and flooding hundreds of thousands of acres of farmland.  Shortly after the flood these efforts would be doubled and put into a new nationalized government “Deltawerken” (Deltaworks) program.  The Dutch have since been steadily building dams, barriers, and sacrificial flood areas.  This culminated in the final Deltawerken project completed in 01997, the Maeslant Barrier one of the largest man made moving structures in the world.  This barrier opens and closes over one of the busiest ports on the planet, and is strong enough to withstand a once in 10,000 year storm event.  Yes, once in 10,000 years.  At a cost of nearly $1 billion it seems unthinkable that a country could have this much resolve for such a rare event.  In fact the barrier has already been closed multiple times and prevented minor flooding, so it is already paying itself off.

In the wake of Hurricane Katrina (considered a 100 year event) which killed over 1,800 people and cost more than $81 billion, it seems unlikely the US will build infrastructure like this to protect the Southeastern seaboard.  I am not sure how much more adversity the residents of the gulf coast need however, they have had a tough decade.  It could be that the culture in the US looks more to dealing with problems of the future with insurance rather than prevention.  But if I lived in New Orleans, I think I would much rather have better levees and barriers, than a new insurance policy.

Devastation of Hurricane Katrina, a once in a 100 year event.

SETI Director Jill Tarter discussed in a 02005 blog post that we recently discovered the possibility of broadcasting humanity’s presence to the universe. SETI’s position for at least the next decade is that we’re not ready.

Any technology that is observable over interstellar distances cannot be more primitive than our own. After only 100 years of manipulating the electromagnetic spectrum, we find ourselves in the midst of an exponential explosion of technology. But it has taken us over 4.5 billion years of planetary and biological evolution to get to where we are today. If there is detectable technology out there, it is statistically improbable that their evolution and development will be fine-tuned to coincide precisely with our current emerging technological capabilities. They will be older, potentially billions of years older since the Milky Way Galaxy was around for at least five billion years before our solar system began to form.

In exploring some of the ways to make this decision, Tarter explains that communication across galactic distances will take protocols we can’t imagine and timescales we’re simply not seriously dealing with yet.

She searched Google and graphed the number of results she found for plans ranging between “The One Year Plan” to “The Two Hundred Thousand Year Plan.” As a point of reference, the green arrow just below 10,000 hits on Google represents the number of results she found when searching for her own name. Plans over one hundred years in scope were most often the result of science fiction and religion, though Y2K and nuclear waste had lead to some longer plans as well. (Long Now is in there right next to the 10,000-year Yucca Mountain plan.)

I did a quick Google Book N-gram viewer search on some of these terms over the last hundred years and found that during the late ’60s there was a peak in books discussing ‘x year plans’, the favorite being 10 year plans. ‘One year -’ and ‘hundred year’ plans show consistently, but few other plans registered at all.