The End of Prehistory

Assuming the internet is forever and searching this stuff becomes even easier, how many of your descendants do you think will read your blog? A little bit, at least.

Imagine 200 years from now. Estimate 25 years a generation. You have 2^8 = 256 great-great-great-great-great-great-grandparents. That's probably too many to really spend any time thinking about each one individually. Maybe that's the wrong approach, though. Would you pick and read something from a couple of them? Maybe if you have over 2 kids per generation then you are expected to get readers.

I'm hoping this blog will get at least one reader post-2200. I just have to figure out what will still be interesting by then.

From Cory Doctorow:

Tomorrow's lives will be remembered by the historians of the day-after-tomorrow with astounding clarity and thoroughness, reconstructed through the midden of personal blips, twits, and chirps emitted by our social tools. By comparison, our own lives will be as opaque and unimaginable as the lives of the poor schmucks who inhabited the same cave for 200,000 years, generation after generation leaving no mark more permanent than a mouldering knucklebone lost in the soil.

Olden Days

According to The Hacker Crackdown: In America, Mother's Day is by far the busiest day of the year for the phone network.

On the other hand, the busiest day of the year for the internet is generally "last Tuesday".*

* is this true? Not sure.

Bizarro Walmart

From Marginal Revolution:

Wal-marts in China are upscale and appreciated for their high quality American goods.

I recommend Marginal Revolution. It's probably my favorite blog. Mostly dry freakonomics-but-better style, with a heavy dose of music, food, and other culture recommendation. If it wasn't for them I wouldn't be so into "beepcore" ;-)

Linguistic Archaeology

From the book Guns, Germs, and Steel which I am reading for the second time because it is so great.

p.343:

How can a linguist, studying only modern languages, figure out whether Austronesians living on Taiwan 6,000 years ago had pigs?

The solution is to reconstruct the vocabularies of vanished ancient languages by comparing vocabularies of modern languages derived from them. For instance, the words meaning "sheep" in many languages of the Indo-European language family, distributed from Ireland to India, are quite similar: "avis", "ovis", "oveja", "ovtsa", "owis", and "oi" in Sanskrit, Latin, Spanish, Russian, Greek, and Irish respectively. Comparison of the sound shifts that the various modern Indo-European languages have undergone during their histories suggests that the original form was "owis" in the ancestral Indo-European language spoken around 6,000 years ago.

Nearly 2,000 other words of their vocabulary can similarly be reconstructed, including words for "goat", "horse", "wheel", "brother", and "eye". But no Proto-Indo-European word can be reconstructed for "gun", which uses different roots in different modern Indo-European languages: "gun" in English, "fusil" in French, "ruzhyo" in Russian, and so on. That shouldn't surprise us: people 6,000 years ago couldn't possibly have had a word for guns.

Proceeding in the same way, we can compare modern Taiwanese, Phillipine, Indonesian, and Polynesian to reconstruct a Proto-Austronesian. Interestingly, the language had words for "pig", "dog", and "rice", which must therefore have been part of Proto-Austronesian culture. The language is also full of words indicating a maritime economy, such as "outrigger canoe", "sail", "giant clam", "octopus", "fish trap", and "sea turtle".

Musical Robots

I wonder if you could make the reverse - a robot that heard you whistling and did stuff accordingly. Maybe just "dancing to the beat".