An exhibit currently on display at Stanford University’s Cantor Arts Center resurrects a liveliness rarely associated with Ancient Greco-Roman sculpture. When asked to conjure an image of Roman décor circa the year zero, sparkling white marble generally abounds. It turns out that a closer look at these millennia-old figures reveals that they were once covered in vibrantly-colored paints. In an article about the exhibit, Stanford News describes how undergraduate student Ivy Nguyen used ultra-violet light to find trace amounts of pigment on the surface of ancient sculptures, still present after over two thousand years:

While the technique is not new, Nguyen went beyond that with the use of x-ray fluorescence (XRF), commonly used in conservation sciences. XRF can find traces of pigment that are invisible to the unaided eye.

Nguyen’s ultraviolet imaging with the black light reveals “ghost images,” showing the areas that might be promising to test. The XRF reveals what’s in those ghost images.

Although other exhibitions have focused on painted Greek and Roman statues, this exhibition focuses on the science as well as the art, taking the visitor through the laboratory process with cases displaying pigments used in ancient times, wall-mounted images of the analysis and small, painted terra cotta works from Cantor’s ancient collection that were used as controls in the study.

Two versions of a restored sculpture are on display at the exhibit. One version includes colors that were found through testing while the other, taking into consideration that only base layers of paint have survived, includes additional layers of painted decorations that may more closely resemble the originals.

Through some combination of the quality of ancient pigment and the creative application of modern scientific technology we find ourselves able to catch a more accurate glimpse of a civilization long fallen. To see the painted replicas of Stanford’s Maenad sculpture (and to get some ideas about what materials to use for your next paint job), visit the Cantor Arts Center, which is free to the public. The exhibit ends on August 7th.

When it comes to Danish meta-mockumentaries about virtual worlds and mysterious clocks, My Avatar and Me is the one to see. Starring and co-directed by Mikkel Stolt, the film features cameos by Long Now co-founder Danny Hillis and the Foundation’s Nevada site.

My Avatar and Me can be viewed on Constellation.com, a global digital movie theater:

“My Avatar and Me is a creative documentary-fiction film about a man who enters the virtual world of Second Life to pursue his personal dreams and ambitions. His journey into cyberspace becomes a magic learning experience, which gradually opens the gates to a much larger reality.”

The next showtime is Sunday July 10th and writer/co-director Bente Milton will be virtually present to answer questions and to discuss the film.

Historic photographs can show us what people used to wear, what tools they utilized, what their cities, countryside and wilderness looked like. But the details are often difficult to discern, simply because the resolution of the images is so limited. Imagine a digital photograph of Thomas Edison’s workshop with such high resolution that you could zoom in, and zoom in, and zoom in, until you could read the notes scrawled on the papers on his desk, name the books on his shelves, and identify what brand of tea he had been drinking.

Gigapixel technology, originally developed for exploring the surface of Mars, uses a swiveling robotic camera mount to take a large number of pictures in multiple directions which are then stitched together with software, resulting in a single, wonderfully high-resolution panorama. Illah Nourbakhsh of Carnegie Mellon University led the robotics team at NASA that designed the technology. He and his team, along with other individuals and organizations, have thought of all sorts of applications for the gigapan.

Conservation Magazine recently reprinted part of an article from Science that described how the collaborative team responsible for the invention worked to make it more widely accessible, and how it is being used in the service of environmental conservation.

That experience led directly to a technology that has become a powerful tool for teaching and public engagement with science and the natural world. Scientists are also using it for projects as diverse as analyzing Middle Eastern petroglyphs, monitoring an urban forest, archiving a museum insect collection, studying a collapsed honeybee colony, keeping tabs on glaciers, examining erosion in a jaguar reserve, and viewing Galápagos fish clustered into a bait ball.

…The final image contains more data than most personal computers can handle, so Nourbakhsh and his team developed a massive server system and website, www.gigapan.org, for storing and accessing GigaPans. When viewers zoom in on an area of an image, they seem to fly into the image itself. The result is an immersive, interactive experience that can reveal surprising details—an ant on a leaf in a forest, or a hummingbird sipping nectar from a flower in a backyard. It’s like viewing nature through a huge magnifying glass.

GigaPan was initially developed by computer scientist Randy Sargent, a member of Nourbakhsh’s NASA team, who was inspired by the experience of investigating the landscape of Mars through gigapixel imagery. The online platform represents an exciting opportunity for users (of what will likely become an increasingly affordable and efficient technology) to create and store images that could prove immensely useful in the future for archiving, documenting, scientific surveying, and even art and education. The organization’s website describes its goals and purpose:

GigaPan is the newest development of the Global Connection Project, which aims to help us meet our neighbors across the globe, and learn about our planet itself. GigaPan will help bring distant communities and peoples together through images that have so much detail that they are, themselves, the objects of exploration, discovery and wonder. We believe that enabling people to explore, experience, and share each other’s worlds can be a transforming experience.

This technology and service are a step towards deep-sightedness, an opportunity to capture the Big Here photographically, and examine it closely and carefully. You can dive into some gigapixel images, like this picture of downtown Beirut, at the Gigapan site.

Here’s a beautiful time-lapse of a pulsing, breathing, flowing superorganism:

Mindrelic – Manhattan in motion from Mindrelic on Vimeo.

(via stellar)

Maarten Lens-FitzGerald got in touch recently to let us know that someone had created a layer within the Layar augmented reality platform that geo-tags a film shown by Rick Prelinger at his annual Lost Landscapes of San Francisco event.

The film was created shortly before San Francisco’s devastating earthquake by placing an early video camera on the front of a streetcar as it rolled along Market Street toward the city’s Ferry Terminal.

If you open the Layar browser on a smartphone while standing along the route that camera took over a century ago, you’ll see what it’s operator saw – dirt & dust, horses & buggies, people on bikes and even a few early automobiles.

It’s kind of like a real-life Wayback Machine!

While many Japanese towns were completely destroyed by the tsunami in March, several escaped potentially dire fates. Some villages were warned of the dangers of building too close to water by tablets and monoliths erected in the wakes of previous disasters.

According to this AP story, the village of Fudai took a technological brute-force approach, spearheaded by a previous mayor. Kotaku Wamura was mayor of Fudai for 10 terms and, during the 70s, fought city council resistance to augment a 51-foot tall seawall with flood gates of the same height. Wamura had witnessed the 1933 tsunami and was deeply affected by the devastation.

Fudai is fortunate to be located in a valley just narrow enough to be fortified against rising waters. The size and the expense of doing so put many off his plan, but in the end, Wamura won and the floodgates were finished in 1984.

The result last March was minimal damage, isolated mostly to the city’s port, only one missing resident who insisted on checking his boat after the quake, and many new visitors paying respect and expressing gratitude at the grave of Mr. Wamura, who passed away in 1997.

Gawker blog Kotaku did a little digging of their own into Wamura and found a photograph of him, mention that his name means “good luck advantage” and point out some transliteration problems in the AP story.

Living in modern civilization, it can be easy to sometimes forget just how much *stuff* we rely on to meet our basic needs and just how much scientific sweat and blood it’s all taken to create. Bruce Mau illustrates this in the beginning of his book Massive Change by using the metaphor of modern air travel:

“Every plane crash is a rupture, a shock to the system, precisely because our experience of flight is so carefully designed away from the reality of the event. As we sip champagne, read the morning paper, and settle in before takeoff, we choose not to experience the torque, the thrust, the speed, the altitude, the temperature, the thousands of pounds of explosive jet fuels cradled beneath us, the infinite complexity of the onboard systems, and the very real risks and dangers of takeoff and landing.”

The technological apparatus that is modern civilization, or The Technium as Kevin Kelly calls it, allows us to fly high in style. But, it’s a complicated and often fragile mess designed to channel very powerful forces – and it can fail catastrophically if we aren’t careful. Additionally, it’s taken many generations of accumulated knowledge and expertise to craft and enable such soaring capability.

Referencing that hard-won store of knowledge, Richard Feynman once asked,

“If, in some cataclysm, all of scientific knowledge were to be destroyed, and only one sentence passed on to the next generations of creatures, what statement would contain the most information in the fewest words?”

Inspired by Feynman’s question, Seed Magazine asked eleven scientists,

“Imagine—much as Feynman asked his audience—that in a mission to change everyone’s thinking about the world, you can take only one lesson from your field as a guide. In a single statement, what would it be?”

Some interesting themes fall out, as well as some contradicting ideas:

• Paul Ehrlich, Carl Folke and Enric Sala all point out the reciprocity between the human economy and the biosphere, in the seeming hope of illustrating our need to conceptualize the limits in which we as a species operate.
• A psuedo-debate pops up between proponents and critics of reductionism. Robet Sapolsky, Steven Strogatz and George Sugihara weigh in.
• Marc Hauser and Dominic Johnson assert the importance of understanding evolution’s influence on our world and our selves.

It’s an interesting challenge, to distill everything we’ve learned over the last few millennia into a useful sentence. Which theories have been most important? What details would we be most hard-pressed to re-discover? Perhaps the most all-encompassing answer comes from John Wilbanks, vice president of science at Creative Commons:

“Knowledge is a public good and increases in value as the number of people possessing it increases.”

If pondering the essence of modern civilization and technology gets your gears going, don’t miss the Manual for Civilization, a list of projects focused on preserving the technical knowledge it takes to build and maintain the infrastructure on which we depend collected by Long Now’s Alexander Rose or Long Now Board Member Kevin Kelly’s Library of Utility, a proposal to collect such knowledge, and to store it in a place that might have a reasonable chance of surviving the kind of catastrophe that would make its contents necessary. Also: this.

Long Now Executive Director and 10,000 Year Clock Project Manager Alexander Rose will be speaking on the Maker Faire Center Stage at 12:30 on Sunday the 22nd.

Maker Faire is one of the Bay Area’s biggest celebrations of geek culture and it’s back for a 6th installment at the San Mateo Fairgrounds this May 21st & 22nd. Organized by O’Reilly Media, Maker Faire features hundreds of artists, engineers, designers and hackers sharing the things they make.

Alexander is also speaking at the SETI Institute at noon on Wednesday May 18th.

In this talk, titled Construction on the 10,000 Year Clock Begins, he will discuss the process, principles and methods underlying the Clock of the Long Now. The SETI Institute Colloquium Series is held in Mountain View, and is free to the public.

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.