Origami

Today's Google Doodle honors origamist Akira Yoshizawa, who popularized it as an art in the modern era, which is reason enough to admit that I was fascinated with paperfolding as a teenager and love it still. The Google Blog has instructions on making origami letters via Adding an origami doodle to the fold. But the documentary "Between the Folds" is a fascinating portrayal of the artistry and mathematics of paperfolding. I saw it via PBS's Independent Lens and on Netflix.

"Cave of Forgotten Dreams" and atlatls

Werner Herzog's "Cave of Forgotten Dreams" was a great movie. It seemed like the first time that I really got my money's worth for a 3D movie.¹ All these summer action movies that are using 3D favor wide open, expansive shots, perhaps to give it an "epic" feel. But since strong foreground/background contrast is rare, most of the 3D effect manifests itself as brief gimmicky-seeming shots where a spear seems to swing out toward the audience. "Cave", by contrast, depicts an enclosed space, where there is always strong contrast between foreground and background, so the 3D effect is quite pronounced; at times it seems like you're looking into a box.

And it is used to good effect. The Neolithic art in the cave was not painted on a flat surface, but undulating walls, curved stalactites, and rock curtains. The 3D effect provides a lot of useful visual information about how the art fits into the cave. And it's amazing, as light and shadow play over the space: in one scene, we can see a painting of a rhinoceros on the far wall. Nearer to the viewer, a sheet of rock juts out, on which is painted a pair of lions: it looks as if we are witnessing the lions sneak up on the rhinoceros from behind the cover of stone.

In the end, 3D does seem gimmicky, even though it's used well in this film. Film remains a two-dimensional medium, and the 3D effect is a visual trick: by the end of the movie, the effect became so disorienting that I had to take my glasses off and look away for a moment to readjust.

Herzog finds some really wonderfully nerdy people, like the experimental archaeologist and the fragrance expert. I do wish there was more atlatl: they are awesome. An atlatl dart is like a precursor to the bow and arrow, in which the energy stored and released in the flexing bow is instead stored and released in the flexing atlatl missile. IIRC, the atlatl dart in flight has a somewhat lower velocity than an arrow, but a much greater mass, so an atlatl dart can have greater penetration of the target. While atlatl darts may be better against large game, it's easier to carry numerous arrows than the larger darts. Fortunately the World Atlatl Association has some members across the river from Louisville.



MAKE also has a weekend project video on making atlatls, and YouTube has some videos of successful hunts with them of emu, bison, and hog.

1. I also enjoyed "Coraline", but the 3D there also seemed like a more gimmicky use of the effect.

3D POD

Sean K. Reynolds points us to Shapeways, which appears to offer 3D printing on demand. Very cool stuff. Ceramicwombat offers stainless steel dice; Bathsheba offers mathematical sculptures like hypercubes; and there is stuff like gyroscopes, astrolabes, orreries, and rings. The company also has a StampMaker and RingPoem maker. They also have a cool blog.

Communicating with folk 500 generations hence

Via Matthew Yglesias, I found this Salon article about communicating with people 10,000 years in the future about the dangers of nuclear waste via Atomic Priesthoods, Thorn Landscapes, and Munchian Pictograms.

The main basis of the article is the government report Sandia Report SAND92-1382: Expert Judgement on Markers to Deter Inadvertent Human Intrusion into the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, from November 1993, concerning the WIPP, near Carlsbad, New Mexico. It really is quite an interesting report.

I've been thinking about these issues mostly in terms of computer obsolescence and digital decay. In the very long run, it seems that the best way to preserve data for a long time or communicate with the people of the future would be through aluminum (or rather, minimally reactive durable) punch cards, or well-labelled ceramic or stone tiles that contain images, text, and clearly visualized pictographic instruction on binary or base-16 mathematics, to provide multiple points of reference for future archaeologists to decrypt the text. It's easier with the assumption that you're communicating with the kinds of people who deciphered Maya hieroglyphs, the Rosetta stone, and Sumerian cuneiform.

Charles Piller's 2006 LA Times story doesn't appear to have a durable URL, but it was carried in the Cincinnati Post and the Edmonton Journal. Here's from the Cincinnati Post, May 10, 2006:

As chief scientist of the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, [Roger] Nelson oversees a cavernous salt mine that is the first geological lockbox for what he calls the "fiendishly toxic" detritus of nuclear weapons production: chemical sludge, lab gear and filters laced with tons of radioactive plutonium.

Nearly half a mile underground, workers push waste drums into crystalline labyrinths that seem as remote as the moon. A faint salty haze glows in powdery beams from miners' headlamps and settles on the lips like a desert kiss. Computer projections predict that within 1,000 years the ceilings and walls will collapse in a crushing embrace that seals the plutonium in place.

But plutonium remains deadly for 250 times that long -- an unsettling reminder that some of today's hazards will outlast the civilizations that created them. The so-called "forever problem," unique to the modern technological age, has made crafting the user manual for this toxic tomb the final daunting task in an already monumental project. The result is a gargantuan system that borrows elements equally from Stonehenge and "Star Trek."

Communicating danger might seem relatively straightforward, but countless human efforts to bridge the ages have failed as societies fall, languages die and words once poetic or portentous become the indecipherable marks of a long-forgotten scribbler.

... The U.S. Energy Department predicted such a problem when it began planning for the $9-billion waste dump, dubbed WIPP, in 1974 and for a similar repository in Nevada at Yucca Mountain, near Las Vegas. That site is not yet open. Eventually it will store highly radioactive spent fuel from nuclear power plants as well as high- level waste from the weapons program.

Trying to communicate across 500 generations posed an unprecedented challenge of linguistics, semiotics and materials science, so the government first asked scientists, futurists and historians to envision what the far-distant future might be like.

Their report combines dry analysis and projections worthy of sci- fi disaster films, including massive climate change and feminist corporations that disbelieve WIPP warnings because they were written by men. Civilization is so interdependent and fragile, one panelist grimly noted, "that any massive global catastrophe might lead to reversion to at least a pre-industrial era." Greed or desperation could give rise to legends that WIPP holds buried treasure -- apparently confirmed by surface warnings to keep out.

...If Egyptian pyramids have lasted more than 5,000 years, today's monuments should fare better. ...To grasp the scale of the warnings, start with the Great Pyramid in Egypt, built from more than 6.5 million tons of stone covering 13 acres. Multiply that mass by five, and you have the first warning layer of this contemporary construction: a 98-foot-wide, 33-foot- tall, 2-mile-long berm surrounding the site. That's just to get the attention of anyone who happens by.

Ten thousand years, of course, twice as long as it took for Proto-Indo-European to change and diversify into Latin and Sanskrit, and then to Hindi, Farsi, Italian, Russian, Icelandic, and contemporary English.

Such warnings could indeed become the Rosetta stones of the future, with warnings on carved stone slabs in the contemporary UN languages English, Spanish, Russian, French, Chinese, Arabic, local languages such as Navajo, and space for the languages of the future when contemporary languages become obsolete and unintelligible. The report also includes a number of proposed warnings.

The monuments themselves, proposed in the report, are indeed interesting. I was most intrigued by Forbidding Blocks (for all the wrong reasons, of course). Despite a massive effort to deny use, it seems like the most likely for future civilizations to take an interest in. Such a site seems less likely to be investigated by future scholars and archaeologists than bored adolescents, clever seekers of shelter, and get-rich-quick looters.

The End of Life, Saifai, and Everything

To follow up this, Charles Stross asks how habitable Earth is: I want you to imagine that, instead of being a perplexed mostly-hairless primate reading a blog, you're the guiding intelligence of an interstellar robot probe. ...Your first destination planet is the cloud-whorled third planet out from an undistinguished G2 star, orbited by an airless, tidally-locked moon with roughly 1.3% of the planet's own mass.

...However, the Earth is a lot more than 200 kiloyears (Ky) old; the surface formed roughly 4.6 Gy ago (gigayears — 1Gy = 1,000,000,000 years). And we can expect the Earth to persist for about another 3-5 Gy, until the sun leaves the main sequence of the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram and becomes a red giant, presumably swallowing the Earth (or at any rate rendering it too crispy for comfort). So if we're being honest (and not cherry-picking our candidate stellar colony mission targets) we've got a 8-10Gy span to probe.

...The point to take away from this is that, between T minus 4.6 Gy and T minus 0.56 Gy, the Earth's atmosphere was largely free of oxygen. ...Even after the oxygen catastrophe, our space probe isn't going to find a terribly hospitable planet.

Best to find a more habitable planet elsewhere, really.

(Via MR).

Stross also discovers why the later Star Treks are so terrible: former Star Trek writer and creator of the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica Ron Moore revealed the secret formula to writing for Trek. He described how the writers would just insert "tech" into the scripts whenever they needed to resolve a story or plot line, then they'd have consultants fill in the appropriate words (aka technobabble) later.

Which I suppose makes this the appropriate place to linkdump Star Trek Mark Two and Brain Bugs, as well as David Brin's war on "Star Wars" (1, 2, 3). And all the evidence we need that the Weekly Standard would be rooting for the Empire.

HeroMachine

That's like the Paladin Store, right?

HeroMachine is a Flash visualizer for fantasy, horror, and superhero characters. I've seen it before, but for some reason tonight, I've been glued to it. There are also some other generators on the site, for zombies and pinups, as well as some older versions.

Simple pleasures.

Here is a rather goofy-looking wizard.


Everybody likes ninjas, so here is a member of the Ophidian Hand.