Futurismic

History may only just be beginning, but we already have a lot of data stashed away as a species, and as we know, it’s always good practice to back it up.

But if you’re thinking in terms of centuries or millennia, it might also be a good idea to record information about our languages so that future historians won’t have to contend with undecipherable writings, like Rongorongo, due to linguistic drift.

The Long Now Foundation has created a modern day Rosetta Stone to help solve this problem, here is a description from Kevin Kelly’s website:

One side of the disk contains a graphic teaser. The design shows headlines in the eight major languages of the world today spiraling inward in ever-decreasing size till it becomes so small you have trouble reading it, yet the text goes on getting smaller. The sentences announce: “Languages of the World: This is an archive of over 1,500 human languages assembled in the year 02008 C.E. Magnify 1,000 times to find over 13,000 pages of language documentation.”

This graphic side of the disk is pure titanium. A black oxide coating has been added to the surface. The text is etched into that, revealing the whiter titanium. This bold sign board is needed because the pages of genesis which are etched on the mirror-like opposite side of the disk are nearly invisible.

This business side of the disk is pure nickel. Picking it up you would not be aware there were 13,500 pages of linguistic gold hiding on it. The nickel is deposited on an etched silicon disk. In effect the Rosetta disk is a nickel cast of a micro-etch silicon mold. When the disk is held at the right angle the grid array of the pages form a slight diffraction rainbow. You need a 750-power optical microscope to read the pages.

Kelly’s description of the project is fascinating, and it seems like a wonderful project, both in practical terms and in artistic terms.

[story via Slashdot]

Related posts

• WWII code-breaking computer goes head to head with modern pc (2)
• Why Nancy Kress has gone to the Dogs (0)
• Universal translator a possibility? (6)
• Unboxing Babbage (0)
• Top 87 Bad Predictions About the Future (5)

It’s long been assumed that the complex and mysterious Antikythera mechanism was some sort of device for modelling astronomical movements. [image from Wikimedia Commons]

However, it was always thought to be a tool for the astronomers themselves. Now, new translations of the inscriptions on the device show localised names for months that may well locate the device’s origins in the Sicily region, suggesting that the Antikythera machine was used to demonstrate the ’science’ of astronomy to people unfamiliar with its language.

Given the prevalence of computers in the classrooms of our own time, it’s a piquant thought to imagine the earliest computer yet known being used for educational purposes as well.

Related posts

• WWII code-breaking computer goes head to head with modern pc (2)
• Words for Worlds: What We’re Calling Pluto Now (0)
• Wikipedia Colored By Editor’s Reputation (1)
• Web wars - white hats versus black in botnet battles (4)
• Wand For Scraping Audio Samples (1)

In Spring 2006, I spent a week in Berlin with some friends from university. As part of a city tour highlighting the Berlin’s Cold War heritage, the guide made a passing reference to plans for the digital reconstruction of files shredded by East German secret police.

As this project entered its pilot stage in May 2007, Germany’s Spiegel Online reported on the finer details;

[W]ith the looming collapse of the Communist regime becoming increasingly evident [in 1989], agents of the East German Staatssicherheitsdienst … feverishly plowed millions of active files through paper shredders, or just tore them up by hand.

Rights activists interrupted the project and rescued a total of 16,250 garbage bags full of scraps. But rescuing the history on those sheets of paper amounted to an absurdly difficult jigsaw puzzle. By 2000, no more than 323 sacks were legible again — reconstructed by a team of 15 people working in Nuremburg — leaving 15,927 to go. So the German government promised money to any group that could plausibly deal with the remaining tons of paper.

The Fraunhofer Institute won the contract in 2003 … Four hundred sacks of scraps will be scanned, front and back, and newly-refined software will try to arrange the digitized fragments according to shape, texture, ink color, handwriting style and recognizable official stamps.

This week, as the pilot phase of the project reached completion, the BBC’s radio programme Digital Planet picked up on the story;

“It will be a long job - but that’s the interesting part,” said the Fraunhofer’s Jan Schneider.

“First we have to digitise all the pieces from the bags. This is done by a special high-speed scanning device.

“The next step is to segment the image itself from the raw scan - we need the outline of the pieces, pixel-wise, to perform the reconstruction process after that.

“Then all digitised pieces of paper are stored in the database. After that we reconstruct a lot of the descriptive features of the pieces.”

However, at the former Stasi prison Hohenschonhausen, the main place political prisoners were held and subjected to torture, there are criticisms that the process has already taken too long.

“I think it comes a little bit late,” said Hubertus Knabe, director of the memorial at the site, which is also a museum.

“Nearly 20 years after the fall of the Wall we start to reconstruct these Stasi files, which are really important: the most important files were the ones they destroyed.

“I am happy that now it is going forward, but it is late.”

[2nd story via the BBC]

Related posts

• WWII code-breaking computer goes head to head with modern pc (2)
• Verizon to carry Linux-powered phones (0)
• Vaccine worms to spread virus patches? (1)
• Unboxing Babbage (0)
• Toys of the Trade (0)

It seems to be the custom for new Futurismic posters to introduce themselves. I don’t see race, sex, age, residence, politics, or preferences. But people tell me I’m a 53-year-old white guy who lives in Arizona, leans to the left, and likes fiction, history, journalism, science, The Loud Family and The New Pornographers, and I believe them.

The birth of yet another niece puts me in mind of Samantha Powers’ recent commencement advice: “Be a good ancestor.” One way to do that might be to start treating the environment as part of the economy, by putting a dollar value on it. A report to the U.N. Commission on Biodiversity estimates that humans do at least $78 billion worth of damage each year, “eating away at our nature capital” through deforestation and pollution. Sobering to consider that about 40% of the world economy is still based on biological products and processes.

In light of the likely first contact with an uncontacted seminomadic Amazon tribe on the borderlands of Brazil and Peru, we probably need to factor cultural diversity into the equation, too. There’s something poignant and human about that AP photo of tribespeople firing arrows at an aircraft.

Think about all our ancestors have done for us. The origin and purpose of Stonehenge is no longer a total mystery, according to recent investigations: it served as a cemetary for at least 500 years beginning 5,000 years ago. It may have functioned for 20 or 30 generations as the resting place of a ruling dynasty. At least 300 surrounding homes made it one of the largest villages in northwestern Europe.

Ancestor-worship as big business? If that’s not old enough for you, consider a 375-million-year-old ancestor called the placoderm fish, with a fossil embryo attached with an umbilical cord. It’s the oldest known instance of live birth. Now think what our moms put up with, bringing us into the world. [Image by Danny Sullivan]

Related posts

• The Wire (0)
• WWII code-breaking computer goes head to head with modern pc (2)
• Will cleaner fuels raise the cost of food? (1)
• Watering Southern Australia (With Ziploc Bags) (0)
• Using salmonella to administer vaccines (0)

To coincide with the mechanical rumblings of the Bank of England a couple of weeks back, the Guardian published a piece about the Phillips machine - an early hydraulic computer;

A sensation when it was unveiled at the London School of Economics in 1949, the Phillips machine used hydraulics to model the workings of the British economy but now looks, at first glance, like the brainchild of a nutty professor. Where the Bank’s team of in-house economists are equipped with state-of-the-art digital computers, the profession’s first stab at modelling was very much a do-it-yourself affair with a whiff of the Heath Robinson about it.

When combined with a nifty visualization of American consumer spending from the New York Times, the whole idea of data visualization kicked my cranial cogs into action. This interactive graphic provides a visual breakdown of spending, highlighting price changes over the previous 12 months. This enables us to see that eggs are almost 30% more expensive than in March 2007, while the average American spends more on chicken than computers.

While nifty, this visualization could easily be the tip of a great big iceberg of usefulness. If our day-to-day spending was logged and recorded (be it through anal retention or RFID), we’d be able to visualize and interact with our domestic spending through a similar framework as that used by the New York Times. Essentially, we’d be looking at some kind of virtual, personalised Phillips machine.

Want to compare the breakdown of your expenses for February with that of the average urban-dwelling male in the 26-30 age bracket? Want to add a dynamic element, and watch your financial fortunes ebb and flow over the past ten years? Perhaps isolating the precise moment at which things started to go wrong?

The potential utility of this kind of service could be vast, allowing the cash-blind and mathematically challenged to grok the intricacies of home economics.

Something to include in the next office software bundle, perhaps?

[image from the Science Museum]

Related posts

• You Are Officially Mentally Disturbed (3)
• WWII code-breaking computer goes head to head with modern pc (2)
• Will cleaner fuels raise the cost of food? (1)
• Virus on space station searched for video game logins (0)
• Vaccine worms to spread virus patches? (1)

OK, this isn’t exactly “on-brand” for Futurismic, but I figure there’ll be enough of you who’ll react in the same way as me - by having some sort of geek-out seizure of awesomeness, in other words.

So … Wired has pictures of the unboxing of a Babbage Engine at Silicon Valley’s Computer History Museum. Be sure to wipe the drool off your monitor before continuing to surf!

Related posts

• WWII code-breaking computer goes head to head with modern pc (2)
• WiFi flu (6)
• supercomputers that fit in your hand (6)
• Playing games with time (1)
• Old-school bioweapons - sick sheep (0)

Time has a strange attraction for many people - it’s the one dimension that we can perceive but can’t control. But we can hack at the edges of it, like the Time Nuts: a 400-strong geek clade who collect high-precision atomic time-pieces. If you find you never have enough time to spend with your family, you may want to look into their methods - it’ll help you scrape up a few precious extra nanoseconds. [Awesome 'shopped image by fdecomite]

Other people are trying to map time, instead - MetaFilter points out Miomi, a web2.0 startup with the tagline “user generated history” that aims to round up all the information in the world and assemble it into one coherent browsable time-line. Insert your own joke about conspiracy theorists and alternate history writers here.

On the subject of writers and time, the relentlessly provocative and controversial Mundane SF blog reminds us of DeSmogBlog’s “100 Year Letter” project, and decries the fact that science fiction writers seem to have taken no interest in it at all. Of course, they may simply not have know about it - this is the first I’ve heard of it, at least - but the Mundanistas lay a much weightier charge:

“… here, in 2007, the Science Fiction community has abandoned the future; or the future has abandoned it and gone on its merry way, following the laws of physics and thermodynamics with absolutely no consideration for our fantastic dreams. What a shame.”

What do you think - is it science fiction’s duty to deal with contemporary issues, or is it just for escapist purposes?

Related posts

• Reassessing the mundane - James Patrick Kelly on Mundane SF (2)
• How the future looked in the past - gallery of old Interzone covers (0)
• Christopher East - Defining Futurismic Fiction (3)
• Yet more free fiction (0)
• WWII code-breaking computer goes head to head with modern pc (2)

Biological warfare would appear to be a much older idea than we thought. New translations of ancient Middle Eastern texts suggest the Hittites had hit upon the idea of weakening their enemies with diseases by sending them rams “cursed” with a bacterial infection called tularemia - over 3 millennia ago. Tularemia is still a potentially lethal agent today … whether or not a sheep would be a successful delivery system in our modern age is an unknown quantity, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there were parts of the world where it could still be very effective. [Image by Dave-F]

On a lighter note, I can’t help but be reminded of the Sheep Cannon from the hilarious and addictive Worms computer games.

Related posts

• WWII code-breaking computer goes head to head with modern pc (2)
• Viropiracy - because safeguarding ‘intellectual property’ is more important than saving lives (6)
• Using salmonella to administer vaccines (0)
• Unboxing Babbage (0)
• THE EXISTENTIAL CURE by Will McIntosh (2)

The ten ‘Colussus’ code-breaking machines, thought to be the first modern digital computers, broke the code of many German communications through the second world war. To commemorate the work done by the codebreakers at Bletchley Park, Tony Sale has rebuilt one of the machines, which were broken down after the war for security reasons.

Now, with the rebuilt machine functioning, a competition is being run to decipher a German transmission similar to those seen during the war. The rebuilt Colussus will compete with a virtual version of the codebreaking program on a modern computer. Due to the single-minded nature of the Colussus, it’s closer than you may think. Sometimes a multi-purpose personal computer isn’t as good as a van sized monstrosity made up of 2000 valves.

[via BBC, image via picotech]

Related posts

• Unboxing Babbage (0)
• WiFi flu (6)
• supercomputers that fit in your hand (6)
• Playing games with time (1)
• Old-school bioweapons - sick sheep (0)

A lot can happen in 160,000 years. Back then a handful of human beings scraped out a life in Africa and at various hard times during the centuries catastrophes have pushed the total world population down to barely 10,000 people. This excellent animation by the Bradshaw Foundation shows how the human race expanded and contracted as climate changed, eventually spreading to all the continents after the last ice age. Watching the ice and glaciers advance and retreat and volcanoes erupt and change and the impact this had on human lives is a stark warning to anyone denying climate change. It’s amazing how much the Earth can effect our lives.

And here’s a reminder of just how small even mankind’s efforts are amidst the vastness of the universe. This wonderfully kitsch 1977 video zooms out at a power of ten from the earth out into space. Alternatively, why not go the other way, as in this zooming in animation.

[via Dark Roasted Blend][image courtesy of gipuzkoakultura.net]

Related posts

• Your monthly serving of ‘wet Mars’ waffle (0)
• Yellowstone gives aspiring post-apocalyptic writers new hope (4)
• WWII code-breaking computer goes head to head with modern pc (2)
• Visible Magnetic Fields (1)
• Virgin Galactic unveils WhiteKnightTwo space-plane (0)

Take a trip back into the early eighties - here’s an archive of scanned covers from old editions of Interzone. As far as graphic design is concerned, we’ve come a long way, baby. [Full disclosure: I am Interzone's reviews editor.]

Related posts

• Playing games with time (1)
• Independent science fiction in action - Deadbooks.com and Phasma Ex Machina (0)
• Your five-year internet fast starts now, courtesy of Elton John (4)
• Yet more free fiction (0)
• WWII code-breaking computer goes head to head with modern pc (2)