Jaron Lanier - Cockroach DNA time capsule

One of my favorite things to think about is the difficulty of communicating with humans generations from now, or even tens of thousands of years from now. An example: The Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management overseeing Yucca Mountain, the proposed Nevada site for disposal of nuclear waste, has been working with artists to develop a warning system that would alert future visitors to the area of the dangers buried in the mountain. From the website, “The monumental challenge is to address how warnings can be coherently conveyed for thousands of years into the future when human society and languages could change radically.” The purpose of the warning sign is “to deter intentional or inadvertent human intrusion or interference at the site and to effectively communicate over the course of the next 10,000 years that the integrity of the site must not be compromised in any way in order to prevent the release of the radiation contained within.” It’s an interesting visual challenge that must not rely on our own cultural biases. Here’s one artist’s response to the challenge, though perhaps it’s too reliant on the 20th century “Radioactive Danger” symbol.

In 1999, the New York Times Magazine ran a six-issue Millenium special, one part of which was an invitation to artists, scientist, and other thinkers, to develop a way of communicating with the future. Jaron Lanier, researcher and scientist, proposed genetically engineering a DNA-coded archive of a year’s worth of the New York Times Magazine and inserting it into the common cockroach’s genome (and the New York Times’ discussion of the idea). Owing to the millions-of-years-long stability of the cockroach genome and the species tenacious ability to survive ice ages, floods, and other earth-altering natural disasters, the cockroach proves to be a perfect candidate. With careful gene splicing techniques, coded DNA could be inserted into unused areas of the cockroach genome, providing a carrier for what could be, if the encoded information expanded beyond the scope of the New York Times Magazine, a living, breathing, self-replicating, everywhere Library of Alexandria (the burning of which illustrates the importance of millenia-long preservation of our academic and cultural knowledge). Under Lanier’s proposal, cockroach reproduction would spread the DNA-coded archive into the every cockroach in New York City in just 14 years. Future humans or other visiting species would hopefully decode this time capsule upon study of the species and human knowledge will have survived across the millenia, regardless of extinction or other disasters.

Weird and ingenious.

(via Metafilter)

I’d written before about one state legislator’s efforts to get state money to support Connecticut’s newspapers, but the idea is gaining steam. Now come reports that Senator Benjamin Cardin (D-Maryland) has introduced legislation that would allow newspapers to restructure as nonprofits and give the papers a number of tax breaks. Hard to say whether this will get anywhere. According to the article, the bill has no co-sponsors as of yet.

(via the new APhotoADay blog)

Hot on the heels of the Tribune Company’s beginning the bankruptcy protection procedure, the Annenberg School of Communications website reports that Los Angeles Times editor Russ Stanton has said that the paper’s online revenue now exceeds the paper’s editorial payroll costs (third paragraph, last sentence). This is being widely noted (most links go to this Recovering Journalist post), and Jeff Jarvis has some followup with numbers.

This seems like good news, and hopefully more papers can soon make the same claim. I’m worried, though, like one commenter on Recovering Journalist, that the good news has come after at least 523 layoffs at the paper this year (Papercuts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5). Getting the website to cover payroll is likely much easier with 500+ fewer employees. And while I don’t have numbers to back this up, a newspaper requires a lot more money than its payroll in order to operate. There’s continual equipment and material fees, legal fees, and many other expenses involved in putting out the news. The New York Times, for instance, has it’s own Research and Development Group (and here’s a great tour through the facilities with Talking Heads front man David Byrne), which has got to be expensive to operate but which is necessary to forge ahead in the new media environment. Covering the payroll is a part of the picture, and it’s a great step, but in order for newspaper journalism to continue either in print or online, the companies will need more money.

(via APADnews)

Typepad, the blogging platform, has created a journalism bailout program. While getting a free blog and the possibility of revenue from advertisements won’t save journalism, it might get the wheels in motion for more than a few of the recently laid off. It’s a weird approach, and it probably won’t pay your rent for a long time if ever, but it’s worth a try. Here’s a (month-old) announcement on Six Apart’s blog (Six Apart runs Typepad) which talks about how and why the bailout was created and what the response has been so far. (via this AskMetafilter question)