During his presentation at Pop!Tech 2008: Scarcity and Abundance, Dr. K. David Harrison discussed how language death leads to intellectual impoverishment in all fields of science and culture. He also detailed efforts to sustain, value and revitalize linguistic diversity worldwide. His talk was presented in collaboration with the multilingual video captioning site DotSub, where. . .   Read More

 
Last week the Rosetta craft (carrying our prototype Rosetta Disk) successfully recorded its flyby of Steins Asteroid with these — the first images from its OSIRIS imaging system (also check out this cool animation). During the flyby, the craft was out of communication for approximately 90 minutes – what must have been a nerve-wracking, although. . .   Read More

Yesterday at the Long Now Museum, board members, staff and guests raised a glass to celebrate the completion of the first version of the complete Rosetta Disk. Over eight years in development, the Disk is a physical, microscopic library of information on over 1,500 human languages. 14,000 text and image pages are etched into the […]

During its recent gravity assist flyby, the Rosetta craft was mistaken for an Earth-threatening asteroid! From Sky and Telescope:

“The spacecraft was unknowingly ‘discovered’ on November 7th by astronomers in Arizona scanning the skies for Earth-threatening asteroids. They dutifully reported the 20th-magnitude blip in their images to the Minor Planet Center here. . .   Read More

Get out your telescopes!

From www.spaceweather.com:

“Europe’s Rosetta spacecraft is rapidly approaching Earth for a close flyby on Nov. 13th. The gravity assist maneuver, bringing the probe only 5301 km above the Pacific Ocean, will fling Rosetta toward its 10-year destination: Comet 67/P Churyumov-Gerasimenko. Amateur astronomers with mid-sized. . .   Read More

This week, tech sites like DomainInformer reported that ICANN (the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) was unveiling the internationalization of top-level domain names in “11 test languages — Arabic, Persian, Chinese (simplified and traditional), Russian, Hindi, Greek, Korean, Yiddish, Japanese, and Tamil.” Uh…wait a second…did they say Yiddish?!! A language with. . .   Read More

The New York Times reported yesterday on the crisis of language loss, and the work of linguists to document languages that are on the brink of vanishing without a trace. This picture of linguists David Harrison and Greg Anderson, and Charlie Muldunga, the only known speaker of Amurdag (a language of the Northern Territory previously. . .   Read More