13 August 2002

2002's signature colours: orangey, with some greenish and browning No actual colours to look at, but savour Color Marketing Group's descriptions: gingko, "the botanical green of dried grasslands, bridging the fresh excitement from mustard greens with the relaxing feel of a forest's treasured mosses", and moon shadow, a "hueful neutral"... 1:58:37 PM     comments

The long view: designing 10k year danger communication at radioactive waste-disposal site US Government project to protect a radioactive waste-disposal site for 10,000 years by marking the site to deter inadvertent human interference. [old story, via Plastic, Slashdot] Sandia National Laboratories charged a panel of outside experts with the task to design a 10,000-year marking system for the WIPP [Waste Isolation Pilot Plant] site, and estimate the efficacy of the system against various types of intrusion The question becomes: how do we communicate across a large cultural space/time. This report's goals are similar to one submitted to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in the early 80s by Thomas Sebeok. He believed that spoken and written languages were likely to decay to the point of incomprehensibility over a long period of time. Ultimately, the solution he endorsed was to form a self-perpetuating "atomic priesthood" (viz Beneath the Planet of the Apes) that could pass down the knowledge from generation to generation. Related things: The Long Now organisation, which is attempting to build a clock that will last 10k years Greg Benford: Deep Time: How humanity communicates across millennia Communication across space and time, SETI radio message beamed into space messages placed on Voyager 1 in late 70s. 8:39:42 AM     comments

Flash inspired by Lego The story of Flash by its creator. "As I looked for challenges beyond Lego ships, I dreamed of architecture. What greater achievement for man is there than creating great buildings?" 8:35:49 AM     comments