Stewart forwards this beautifully detailed rendering of the Rosetta Mission by artist Erik Viktor, showing the landing craft on the icy surface of Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasiamenko and the sun beyond.  The main spacecraft above is the orbiter, with 14 meter solar panels on each side.  The orbiter has eleven groups of scientific instruments, intended to take readings from the lander, and relay them back to earth. The prototype Rosetta Disk is also on the orbiter, located on the exterior underneath thermal blankets.  The orbiter is due to rendezvous with the comet in 02014.

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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.

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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.”

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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.

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What do Klingon, Elvish and Esperanto have in common?  They are all explicitly constructed languages — some for fictional worlds, some for the real world.  Some are created to entertain, others have such lofty goals as achieving world peace.  Some have dictionaries, grammars and language academies.  All have a fair number of real world speakers, and probably even a few native speakers.  But none, so far, have been the subject of serious linguistic inquiry…until now.

In her recently published book In the Land of Invented Languages: Esperanto Rock Stars, Klingon Poets, Loglan Lovers and the Mad Dreamers Who Tried to Build a Perfect Language, linguist Arika Okrent takes a serious look at as many of these as she could find (about 900 are well documented over the past several hundred years).  In these languages, often dismissed as whimsy, she finds a kind of ingenuity that is uniquely human, and a creative drive that can shed light on our own identification with languages and what they can and cannot achieve for us as speakers.  The NPR program “On Point” aired this hour long interview with Arika Okrent today.

We at The Rosetta Project have always thought invented languages are totally cool (after all, philologist J.R.R. Tolkien wrote in his letters that he created Middle Earth as a way to showcase his invented languages and what could be cooler than that?).  The invented languages Esperanto and Interlingua are both represented the Rosetta Disk — we have Genesis translations for both (hint: look in the European region for languages of France).

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What happens when you substitute the human FOXP2 gene for that of a mouse?  According to researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology, not much, except this interesting result — it changes their vocalizations.

While the FOXP2 gene is important in the development of many different tissues, in humans it affects the development of the basal ganglia, a region of the brain important for language.  When the human version of FOXP2 is introduced into mice, a measurable result is a change in their ultrasonic vocalizations - baby mice have deeper squeaks.  While this is interesting, and the kind of correlation one might expect, even more striking is what is going on in the brains of these mice — the mean length of dendrites in the basal ganglia region increased by 80% over mice without the human version of the gene.

This groundbreaking study, with results recently published in the journal Cell, provides a new a model for research into how speech and language evolved in humans.

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Put down your crosswords, cryptograms and sudoku.  Instead try boosting your brain power by deciphering an ancient script.  In case you have forgotten which ones are still available and want to stake your claim, here is a catalog with difficulty ranking based on two important criteria:  language (known/unknown) and script (known/unknown).  All have teased many a brain for many an age.

Other things you might want to consider when selecting your brain challenge:  is the script artifact a hoax (see Phaistos Disk)?  Does it even represent spoken language (see recent work and controversy over the Indus Valley Script)?  Also, beware of the possibility of unleashing an army of undead if you actually do figure out the script and recite it (for a vision of this scenario, see Evil Dead II).

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The good folks over at the Jet Propulsion Labs in Pasadena who organized the Data and Art show that the Rosetta Disk was in, were kind enough to get some really nice photos taken of the micro-etched data side of the disk.  What you are looking at is over 13,000 tiny pages describing over 1,500 languages.  To see each page you would need a 500x microscope.

Many thanks to Dan Goods at JPL and especially Spencer Mishlen for this gorgeous work.  I really love how the page rows start to look like the Matrix as you zoom in…

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Can a logographic script of a major world language survive its own government bureaucracy?  As reported in the NY Times:

“Seeking to modernize its vast database on China’s 1.3 billion citizens, the government’s Public Security Bureau has been replacing the handwritten identity card that every Chinese must carry with a computer-readable one, complete with color photos and embedded microchips.  The bureau’s computers, however, are programmed to read only 32,252 of the roughly 55,000 Chinese characters, according to a 2006 government report. The result is that at least some of the 60 million other Chinese with obscure characters in their names cannot get new cards — unless they change their names to something more common.”

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Wired magazine has a very good piece this month on what many are calling the American Stonehenge, (though it’s not the only site to receive this moniker). 90 miles east of Atlanta lies a mysterious and controversial monument known as the Georgia Guidestones.

photo via Flickr - Sir Mildred Pierce

In a field north of a small town called Elberton, four 16-foot tall granite slabs stand aligned to the cardinal directions.  They are centered around a central pillar with a fifth piece of granite resting on top.  The full monument is almost 20 feet tall and weighs over 100 tons.  Constructing the monument was no easy feat, even for the experienced granite workers of Elbert County, which calls itself “The Granite Capital of the World.”

In the central column, a hole is drilled that aligns with the North Star (for now, anway).  It also contains a slot that allows viewers to see the Sun’s position as it sets on the equinoxes and solstices.  An opening in the capstone create a beam of sunlight that shines onto the central pillar at noon and indicates the day of the year.

The Guidestones were erected in 1980 with the direction of a man operating (and funding the pricey project) under the pseudonym R. C. Christian.  While their purpose isn’t exactly clear, a tablet set into the ground nearby proclaims,

Let these be guidestones to an Age of Reason.

The Guidestones are covered in inscriptions written in 8 major languages that describe the tenets of their imagined Age of Reason.  They seem to be a prescription for a utopia, albeit, one with limited access - the first tenet reads,

MAINTAIN HUMANITY UNDER 500,000,000
IN PERPETUAL BALANCE WITH NATURE

These tenets (some are calling them commandments) line up pretty closely with what many conspiracy theorists, especially those with a religious bent, imagine to be the plot of either the Antichrist or the New World Order.  Searching online about the Guidestones turns up more conspiracy theory pages than fansites:

The message of the American Stonehenge also foreshadowed the current drive for Sustainable Development. Any time you hear the phrase “Sustainable Development” used, you should substitute the term “socialism” to be able to understand what is intended…Certainly the group that commissioned the Georgia Guidestones is one of many similar groups working together toward a New World Order, a new world economic system, and a new world spirituality. Behind those groups, however, are dark spiritual forces.

The Guidestones were vandalized last winter and, though nobody has yet marshaled the resources to actually do it, calls for their destruction are not uncommon.  Thus far, Elbert County appreciates the controversy’s effect as a tourist draw and probably appreciates the way it highlights their granite industry.

As for the Guidestones’ likelihood to survive, it is interesting to note that the surrounding mystery has been both a help and a hindrance.  By instilling wonder and encouraging curiosity, the secretive creators have generated a good deal of interest in the monument.  They’ve also, however, allowed some blanks to be filled by people offended by the little that is discernible about their agenda.

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