This week, the New York Times ran an article about a recent scientific discovery in the predator alert calls of Campbell’s monkeys.   Strikingly, they seem to have the ability to create complex calls out of multiple elements – a “morphological” (word building) process previously thought to only take place in human language.

Human languages do this all the time – for example the word ‘walked’ is built of two morphemes, one carrying the main verbal action ‘walk’ and the other marking past tense ‘-ed’.  In the case of the Campbell’s monkey, morphemes are often combined to indicate different types of threats.  Previous observations of monkeys have shown that they sometimes use different types of calls for different types of predators, but what’s unique about these calls is that some of them can be combined with other calls to change their meaning.  So, instead of just having a “jaguar!” call and an “eagle!” call as has been observed in Vervet monkeys, Campbell’s monkeys have a “leopard!” call that can be combined with a suffix that changes its meaning to indicate a less specific threat:

Crucially, “krak” calls were exclusively given after detecting a leopard, suggesting that it functioned as a leopard alarm call, whereas the “krak-oo” was given to almost any disturbance, suggesting it functioned as a general alert call. Similarly, “hok” calls were almost exclusively associated with the presence of a crowned eagle (either a real eagle attack or in response to another monkey’s eagle alarm calls), while “hok-oo” calls were given to a range of disturbances within the canopy, including the presence of an eagle or a neighbouring group (whose presence could sometimes be inferred by the vocal behaviour of the females).

- Ouattara, Lemasson & Zuberbühler

Just as artificial intelligence researchers have been busy over the last several decades celebrating each previously-unique human capacity achieved by computers, biologists have been finding behaviors once thought to mark the uniqueness of humans in other animals.  Neurobiologist and primatologist Robert Sapolski recently gave a lecture at Stanford about the uniqueness of humans, which provides a great overview of what we share and don’t share with other animals (as is currently understood).

Similarly, primatologist Frans de Waal has made a career of describing the political, cultural, emotional and moral lives of primates.  His work has illustrated the evolutionary breadth and depth of many human characteristics previously thought to be recent behavioral innovations without precedent and unique to our species.

As artificial intelligence research looks forward to recreating human capabilities it focuses our efforts to understand those capabilities.  Similarly, in identifying in other animals capacities like syntax once thought to be unique to humans, we are afforded a clearer look back on the deep history and development of those capacities.  Looked at this way, it actually did take millions of years to produce the works of Shakespeare.

Tunnel Boring Machine daylights at Yucca Mountain

Back 02002 Peter Schwartz wrote a great piece about our visit to the Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste site.  We often refer to it as “the other 10,000 year project”.  However 10,000 years is just the legally binding time congress set forth.  They actually have a design problem that spans millions of years.  This week several people have sent me this excellent write up in BLDG BLOG that features a Q&A with one of the technical architects of the project.  Most interesting to me were all the geeky technical details about material choices, climate, and engineering… an excerpt:

At Yucca Mountain we took the attitude that, since we basically have a dry mountain in a dry area with very little rainfall, we would use a material that can stand up to oxygen being present. The material we selected was a metal alloy called Alloy 22. Our design involves basically wrapping the stainless steel packages, in which we would receive the spent fuel, in Alloy 22 and sticking them inside this mountain with a layer of air over the top. What we know is that when water moves through rock or fractured materials, it tends to stay in the rock rather than fall—unless that rock is saturated. Yucca Mountain is unsaturated, so water ought not be a major issue for us at Yucca Mountain—yet it is.

We have to worry about future climates, because, right now in Nevada, we are in a nine year drought—and, basically since the last Ice Age, we have been in a 10,000-year drought. 80% of the time, if we look a million years into the past, we have, on average, twice the precipitation we have now. Most of the past is—and the future will be—wetter and cooler. Which is nice for Nevada! [laughs]

Upcoming seminar speaker and neuroscientist David Eagleman published an excellent piece that appeared in the New York Times yesterday.  While the piece keys on the events of this week, the broader point of the piece touches on an important element of human nature and long-term thinking.  Excerpt:

Some years ago, psychologists posed a deceptively simple question: if I were to offer you $100 right now, or $110 a week from now, which would you choose? Most subjects chose to take $100 right then. It didn’t seem worthwhile to wait an entire week for only $10 more.

And the further an event lies in the future, the less people care about it. So if offered $100 now or $500 18 months from now, many people still take the $100. The consequence is that there’s little difference between President Obama promising 18 months from now versus 18 years from now. In the human ken, both are obscured in the mists of the distant future.

Eagleman is also the author of Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives for which Brian Eno composed a special music concert along side a reading in Sydney earlier this year.

It took a while to get all the numbers crunched, but the first year’s results from the Long Bet with the highest prize are in.  Over a year ago Warren Buffet challenged the managers of several funds-of-funds to outperform the S&P 500 over a 10 year period.  A one million dollar charitable donation is on the line and so far Buffet’s opponents, Protege Partners, are doing less bad.  Carol Loomis, author of the original story on the contest, gives us the details:

Remember “Buffett’s Big Bet” (see fortune.com), in which the noted
investor and Ceo of Berkshire Hathaway maintained that an S&P 500 index
fund would outperform five funds-of-hedge-funds over 10 years? Well, the
results for the first lap, the ago-nizing year of 2008, are finally in,
and the funds-of-funds soundly whipped the index. Vanguard’s S&P 500
Admiral shares, the index fund “bought” by Buffett, were down 37.02%. on
the average, and net of all fees, costs, and expenses, the five
funds-of-funds backed by Buffett’s opponent, Protégé Partners llC, a new
York money-management firm, delivered –23.9%.

Considering that hedge funds can and do sell short, and that they are
not limited to investing in stocks, Protégé’s victory in a bear market
year like 2008 was not surprising to anyone involved in the bet. Ted
Seides, the Protégé partner who engineered the bet with Buffett, says
that until September of that year the five funds-of-funds were in fact
doing well enough that they still anticipated achieving the up year that
hedge fund seek to deliver, even in difficult markets. “But when markets
failed in the aftermath of the Lehman bankruptcy,” says Seides, “the
funds couldn’t avoid the storm.”

Which funds are these, you ask? The bet stipulates that their identities
would not be disclosed. Buffett, however, knows their names and has seen
their audited results. About his trailing position, he says, “I just
hope that Aesop was right when he envisioned the tortoise overtaking the
hare.”

The reader will note that we said the results of the bet are “finally”
in, and therein lies a little story. originally, the thought was that an
update on the bet would be announced each year at Berkshire’s annual
meeting, held in late spring. But the five funds-of-funds did not have
audited financial statements at that time, which made Buffett unwilling
to announce results. only in late october, when the last of the five
funds finally delivered its audited figures to Protégé, were complete
results known. They were very close to what Protégé had earlier
estimated they would be, so it is likely that next year Buffett will
indeed announce 2009 “approximate” results at Berkshire’s meeting in the
spring.

The author of this article is both a friend of Buffett’s and the editor
of his chairman’s letter in the Berkshire Hathaway annual report.

The European Space Agency’s Rosetta probe made its final flyby of the Earth on Friday in order to fling itself off towards its target: Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko.

Launched in 02004, Rosetta has made several planetary flybys in order to gain the velocity necessary to approach and eventually orbit the comet so that a small landing craft can touchdown upon and sample some of the comet’s material.  Scientists hope that a better understanding of the make-up of a comet will be like a key that will unlock many secrets about the formation of the planets and the development of our solar system.

Included on the craft is one of the early Rosetta Disks produced by Long Now.  The highly durable, format-independent linguistic archive will survive as long as the craft continues to orbit Comet 67P.  Unlike the Voyager Disks, this terrestrial artifact will remain in our solar system orbiting the comet, which is orbiting the Sun and will continue to do so until it runs into something (which could be quite a while).

You can see lots of great photos and amazing animations on the Rosetta blog, run by the ESA.  In addition, there was a lovely little piece in the Guardian highlighting the mission’s long-term nature:

The scientific pay-off from Rosetta could be huge. But contemplate the generosity of vision that made the mission possible. Some of those who lobbied for Rosetta will have died by the time the first results are delivered. Some young scientists who will build their careers on the data from Rosetta were not born when the mission was conceived. If, as Harold Wilson famously observed, a week is a long time in politics, Rosetta is a reminder that we can also think on a celestial timescale.

Officially inaugurated in 02002, the Bibliotheca Alexandrina is an attempt by Egypt and the city of Alexandria to recreate, in spirit if not content, the original Library of Alexandria.  The Ptolemaic dynasty of Egypt created what was at the time, the worlds largest library in the third century BC in the Egyptian city of Alexandria.  Though historical accounts disagree as to how, why and when, this massive repository of centuries of scholastic work was burned down and lost to the ages.

Long Now Board Member Michael Keller sent in notice of his event coming up at Stanford University on December 2nd in which Dr. Ismail Serageldin will be discussing his work as the Director of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina and his hopes for better dialogue between the West and the Muslim world:

Stanford University Libraries is pleased to present two lectures by Dr. Ismail Serageldin.

At 2:00 pm: The New Library of Alexandria: A Beacon of Knowledge

At 4:30 pm: For a Better Dialog Between the West and Muslims

Refreshments will be provided after the second lecture.

The lectures are being held in the Dinkelspiel Auditorium.  Call 650-736-9538 or email sonialee@stanford.edu for details/reservations.

Of Note: The Bibliotheca Alexandrina has a complete copy and physical backup of the Internet Archive.

The Genome 10k Project is currently just getting started, but if 65 scientists get their way, the University of California Santa Cruz could eventually house an extensive database of vertebrate genetic evolution.  The plan is to build an archive of the entire genomes of 10,000 vertebrates.  A library of this sort would assist in answering many questions within evolutionary biology and would allow for the construction of a highly detailed natural history of vertebrate evolution.  Genome sequencing is still a costly process, but is quickly becoming more affordable as computing power grows.  The project’s leaders say that once a genome can be sequenced for $3,000 dollars, they’ll be “good to go.”

From their site:

The Genome 10K project aims to assemble a genomic zoo—a collection of DNA sequences representing the genomes of 10,000 vertebrate species, approximately one for every vertebrate genus. The trajectory of cost reduction in DNA sequencing suggests that this project will be feasible within a few years. Capturing the genetic diversity of vertebrate species would create an unprecedented resource for the life sciences and for worldwide conservation efforts.

The growing Genome 10K Community of Scientists (G10KCOS), made up of leading scientists representing major zoos, museums, research centers, and universities around the world, is dedicated to coordinating efforts in tissue specimen collection that will lay the groundwork for a large-scale sequencing and analysis project.

The plan is to add this new vast collection to UC Santa Cruz’s existing Genome Browser, a publicly accessible archive of 45 genomes and to enhance The Encyclopedia of Life, a wiki with pages for each known species.  (Long Now’s All Species Inventory was spun off and folded into the EoL.)

The Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics is holding its 10th anniversary Quantum to Cosmos Festival this month in Waterloo, Ontario.  The 10 day extravaganza has the theme this year of “Ideas for the Future” and seeks to “take a global audience from the strange world of subatomic particles to the outer frontiers of the universe.”

They’ve got lots of great lectures that are free to view online, including several by speakers in our seminar series:

• Stewart Brand will be on The Agenda with Steve Paikin Friday night to discuss science’s evolving role in society and on Saturday he’ll be giving his own lecture on his Ecopragmatist Manifesto, Whole Earth Discipline.
• Peter Diamandis spoke on Sunday about the X Prize Foundation.
• Neal Stephenson spoke with Lee Smolin and Jaron Lanier about using fiction as a window into science and he’ll be joining Tuesday night’s panel on The Agenda with Steve Paikin to discuss our increasingly wired lives.

There are many other scientists and thinkers on the schedule, and each of these lectures will become available online shortly after the live event, so keep checking back on the full list to see what’s new.  (A play button will appear on the icon for each event once the video is released.)

Long Now London Meetup member Adam Becker sent in a write-up describing Jem Finer’s Longplayer Live event in the UK:

Jem Finer’s 1000 year composition Longplayer moved from virtual instruments to real ones on Saturday, September 12th at the Roundhouse in London. He amassed a collection of musicians to perform an excerpt from the piece over the course of the day, filling the main performance space of the venue with the pulsing, metallic voices of Tibetan singing bowls for 1000 minutes.

Dressed in blue-gray army surplus style uniforms, the musicians gave the place the look of a Bond villain’s lair, some kind of mysterious, devious activity going on. Even so, the result was child-friendly, plenty of young ‘uns running around, or falling asleep in their parents’ arms, Zenned-out by the chiming bowls.

Downstairs something less abstract was happening – a series of conversations (each 36 minutes long) between a host of scientists, journalists, historians, mathematicians and more.  These had their own ebb and flow, some pairings warming up right before they were gonged out, others getting straight into it, clearly having researched their partner/opponent and wanting to have some fun.

The talks provided a great accompaniment to the music above, the participants clearly aware that this event was somewhat to do with long-term thinking, but not hammering the point.  Upstairs again, and the music played into the night, sonically and visually elegant, and one of the most unusual things to be found in London on a Saturday night.

(Some beautiful photos here: http://longplayer.posterous.com/)

In his Seminar for the Long Now Foundation in January, Saul Griffith mentioned what he called the Rolex/Montblanc Pen approach to solving climate change.  As a way of cutting down on wasteful consumption (and the carbon embodied in consumer goods production), he suggests making and using fewer products.  The few products we do use, he explains, should be of the highest quality so that they’ll last and be worth using for our entire lives.  He exemplifies the idea by suggesting that everyone should be issued one Rolex watch and one Montblanc pen at birth:

I just have to own less stuff and make it last ten times as long.  Sometimes I call this the Rolex and Montblanc pen approach to life. So that just made me sound like a pretentious wanker. I am really not.  I am a deep green environmentalist and so what you want is when your child is born or when you are born to be issued a Rolex and a Montblanc pen and that’s the only writing implement, the only time piece you get for your whole life.

All right, so we solved just now writing and time reading but how about cell phones? So I think this is actually kind of great challenge.  The first company that makes the cell phone that will last a lifetime totally wins. That will be the most amazing thing.  For everyone in the audience who just got laid off please go and start a company to make a cell phone that lasts 100 years.  That would be the best thing you can do.

Anil Dash tells us that we’re already using plenty of very high-quality products.  Since there is no reason to throw out something that still works, he has started Last Year’s Model:

It’s totally normal to lust after the hottest new geeky gadgets. It’s also cool to put some thought into what we buy, and what we throw away. So this is a place to show the world that a lot of us are choosing to use Last Year’s Model.

In a way, it’s a prescriptive take on Kevin Kelly’s idea that species of technology never go extinct.  We may consider them ‘obsolete’ because we use a different tool for the job now, but somewhere someone is doing it the old fashioned way.  It can be a pretty fun challenge to find uses for the old tech you’ve got laying around and Dash’s site encourages people to submit the ways they’re still using iPods with (*gasp*) moving parts, or other less-than-shiny products from back in the day.

Also, I hope we can all agree that un-boxing videos have always been a little weird.