Writing on Stone Provincial Park,
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Yesterday I visited Writing on Stone Provincial Park. This is a series of sandstone hoodoos that have been exposed by the millenial action of the Milk River and that continue to be eroded by wind, snow, rain and the relentless sun at these northern latitudes.

Writing on Stone was at one point the premiere social application for the local Blackfoot Indian Nation; a place where they'd carve petroglyphs into the rock. This could be pictures of gods, battles, shield warriors, horse, bison, otter and the like. There were also 'peckings' and as well 'paintings' using an ochre hematite / fat based medium that would chemically bond with the sandstone - some of which is still slightly visible today. A prehistoric Paul Graham might indeed have commented on the confluence of forces here that led to an emergence of Peckers and Painters. The most recent aboriginal petroglyphs show a depiction of two early automobiles and separately a raging battle between two indian tribes that includes rifles. The earliest petroglyphs show shield warriors which must predate the re-introduction of horses. One drawing of a fish is speculated to be a map of the nearby sweetgrass hills of other sites.

I always wonder about the age of the people who mark up the land in this way; we perceptually apprehend these things from a certain position of adulthood; a certain posture of responsibility; but most of these artists, both ancient and more modern were probably pretty young; this was something between reverence and graffiti. In fact most of the cliff faces are overwritten with names and dates ranging from those of early Mounties sent to prevent whisky smugglers, to local farmers kids to modern day tourists. Friends of mine who grew up there, and their parents, and their parents, had often carved their names into the soft stone and unwittingly vandalized the indian burial sites and the like.

Of note there is apparently more native work that the provincial government and archeologists do not know about and that locals were reluctant to advertise for fear of losing their land to a provincial park. As well it was interesting to note that artists tended to make some small effort to avoid each others work; holding in the edge of a phrase or moving their drawings up and around some earlier work; so the entire production is more like the glyphs on a map; spaced out rather than simply randomly over-writing each other.

Rewinding History,
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I'm fascinated by the deeply altered landscape that we live upon; how humans have written upon the land itself, marking it up incessantly by reshaping, building, creating monuments, drawing and painting. It is fascinating to think about the sense of urgency and need that caused these people to try and leave their traces. How much of our own history; migration, conflict, engagement is lost to us yet written upon the land itself and still waiting for us to read it?

If we had some kind of tools to let us build up a single synthethic record of all these small fragments we might be able to re-assemble the puzzle pieces of our history, to build a model or a simulation that would show a hidden story of human activity on this planet. Something like a WorldWind for time where one could not only roll the marble of our globe around but could also wind and unwind history itself.

The way we mark the landscape, it is like a deeply urgent message to ourselves.

Such a tool that integrated these marks wouldn't even really be for pure historians per se; it would be a way to appreciate the kinds of forces that act on us in general; it could teach us how to duck the blows that are coming to us. One doesn't have to be Al Gore to see that there are significant changes coming down the pipe.

Our understanding of our past,
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It is fascinating to think about how a key or hithero unknown aspect of our history may still remain in the slight traces and marks left in a slowly fading sandstone in some vast and windswept plain, or on some slowly crumbling rock in a maple forest.

The degree to which the landscape is deeply rewritten; almost entirely composed of a mulch of our own activity is surprising. At Writing on Stone we see some marks; but it is also visible almost everywhere else if one looks closely enough. Not only has life written and rewritten the land itself; to such a degree that even standing on top of a mountain one is likely to find that the very rock itself is composed of millions of fossil sea-shells; but humans too have felt such an incessant need to remark upon the world. We live within a world that is almost entirely a reflection of ourselves; it fits us perfectly because it is us. Like an ant remarking upon an anthill; we see praries that we've reshaped, cities that are surreal in comparison to a natural world, and then even in those wild places, a veneer of human marks that coats almost every surface. It may not be till we are off-planet that we truly see an alien place.

Most human marks we scarcely see; the traces are too worn, or the possibility deemed too unlikely. Modern observers strongly respond to clearly visible and difficult to reproduce works such as round stone sculptures in Costa Rica or prehistoric stone buildings in South America ( http://www.ku.edu/~hoopes/balls/ and http://www.kassablanca.de/zo/thema/messages/pumapunku/mehrbilder.html ). But there is a lesser history of alteration of our geography at all levels. I personally witnessed some of this myself when I was in small town south of Chennai a few years ago. As I wandered around the hills I heard a constant tinkling sound; it was hundreds of stone-masons carving small sculptures for sale; but aside from this they were also carving everything. They were carving rocks embedded near the path into the shape of lions or other imaginary creatures, they had carved temples out of the cliff walls; they were deeply altering the landscape as an almost automatic almost uncontrollable urge and in a way that must have been going on for millenia.

The lesser record of alteration could fix in space and time aspects of human migration, land use, discovery, the meeting of cultures, cataclysm and the like; and stretch out our historical record. We suffer from a foreshortening lens of the present; the present and the near past have the most clarity and everything else rapidly diminishes - the datum sample points for many phenomena increase in quantity as one nears the present day, and creates a sense of huge change where perhaps there is none.

One website that talks about some of this kind of 'lesser record' is http://www.nativestones.com/index.htm . It is an effort to preserve for posterity some of the structures, carvings and alterations that earlier peoples have done to the land. It feels sadly fragmentary; small pieces of a text that probably will never be re-assembled.

Westford Knight
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Let's take for example one very faint marking; and its possibility to rewrite our perception. If true it would be like finding an amphorae on the moon.

The 'Westford Knight' possibly shows a pre-columbian image of a Templar Knight pecked into a rock in Massachusetts; or perhaps it just shows a glacial scraping that humans interpret as having been created by human hands. The assertion is that some Scots and Venetians had travelled to the area in the late 1300's, interbreeding with the local Miqmaq, homesteaded, traded goods, smoked tobacco and generally had a good time. This carving if indeed it is not natural is apparently a funeral effigy from one of their early visits where a member had died.

Note that although today we think of the Knights Templar as perhaps even something imaginary but in fact they were a well respected organization until disbanded by the Catholic Church in the late 1200's.

It is generally accepted that Vikings and possibly even Celts visited North America. The Vikings actually lived there for a time but perhaps lacking the 'germs' part of 'guns, germs and steel' failed to make a dent in the local population; or perhaps their value system simply wasn't one of domination and conquest in quite the same was as we ascribe to them (I sometimes wonder if 'germs' is not a euphemism for genocide). As well many other people apparently made it to western shores aside from the aboriginal population. Roman Amphorae have been discovered in Castings Bay Maine and Jonesboro, Maine and larger quantities off the coast of Honduras and Rio Di Janeiro. As well small artifacts such as roman cups, bronze spindles and roman coins have been discovered in America; presumably indicating precolumbian shipwrecks and the like blown off course.

But what makes the possibility of a Scottish visit to North America interesting is how much it impact it may have had on recent human history that we are not quite aware of. The Scots were active trading partners with a Venice at its zenith, Venice being a pragmatic trading nation, wealthy and relatively progressive in its values, both the Scots and the Ventians harboured descendents of the Templars; effectively a burgeoning humanism, a reaction to the Church. And their engagement with aboriginals may have been different. It may have been quiet, unadvertised, it may possibly have been gentler. We have a whole possibility of events, a history of pacifism that might have been overwhelmed by Christopher Columbus later ( who killed and enslaved natives, kept concubines and traded slaves ). Unearthing that possibly quieter more gentle history might give us a different apprehension of ourselves.

The conquest of the Americas that took place in the 1500's has overwritten this landscape; there is a vested interest as well in a certain kind of apprehension of history. Nobody wants to be second; and in some ways the landscape is interpreted to favor the interpreter. When Muslim power blocked off land routes between Portugal and India and China it was eventually inevitable that Catholics and Christians would go west as soon as opportunity was discovered.

But the record still exists; there are still hints of an alter-history. And it would be quite interesting to piece together all these fragments, to try and build a model that proved or disproved the record of these early ventures. In the way that particles are occasionally first predicted by theory in physics the same could happen here; enough pieces could fall together to illuminate new places to look and to then further strengthen a model.

Note that if you're interested in this particular subject there are other things to look at; in particular the early Norse vessels which were of different construction than Spanish ships; faster and more durable. As well the geography of the landscape in that region; there were more islands aside from Iceland and Greenland to hop between that have now slightly subsided beneath the ocean. Also take a look at the Rossyln Chapel which has stone carvings of North American plants. Also I recommend if you have a chance to goto Iceland and Venice and look at some of the related artifacts yourself (as you will find citations of if you explore this topic at any depth). Unfortunately I haven't had a chance to visit the Newport Tower or the Rossyln Chapel yet myself and would be curious to hear first hand impressions of those subjects. In particular I'd like to see somebody do a much more rigorous analysis; like a laser scan of the Westford Knight before it erodes completely; ideally making this available online.

A historical tool
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My father's course in life was in some ways set by Sputnik. When the Soviet Union launched Sputnik the Americans started to subside computer technology in higher education. My father was caught up in that momentum; eventually starting his own computer retail business. My own course was set by vast sweeping events; growing up during an oil boom in Alberta where people would even pay kids to write software; the need was so high. A particularily cold winter convincing me to move to the Bay Area and the like. We were simply swept along by things we did not understand at the time.

Often the causes of world events, the real motivators, are caused by forces we don't see. We tend to identify and isolate the individual but this is more like noticing driftwood washed in by a storm. The person marks and is a result of a phenomena but is not the cause of that phenomena. This is not to say we shouldn't look for the heroic figures who are willing to stand out and defend something correct. But there is a need for some kind of tool - possibly a digital prothesthetic - that can help us have a bigger perspective; to become more human than we are.

Worldwind and OSM stand out in this area as examples of such tools. They break with the decade old tradition of fairly impoverished web applications. The web is still struggling to recreate interfaces that were already boring twenty years ago ( tile map engines anyone? ). Instead of trying to jam yet more functionality into fundamentally crippled grammers such as CSS, Flash, SVG, HTML we see efforts to simply 'capture the data' and 'present it any way they can' regardless of limits, standards and barriers.

Yet there is this hint about something even richer down the line for these tools. OSM in particular shows that classical cartography captures a fairly static and structured representation of streets but that there is a possibility of future cartography becoming much more informal. We may in the future all simply subscribe to 'heat-maps' of human transit in real time; where traffic, blockages, legalisms such as speed laws and the like are all simply reflected by the glowing traces left by recent passers-by.

We, as youth, scarcely imagined what needs we would have for fast Internet today. People spoke about shipping movies in real time and the like but this all seemed a bit unnecessary. Today however WorldWind and OpenStreetMap already need this kind of pipe. These kinds of projects are somewhat unanticipated by all of us. Certainly Buckminister Fuller and the like speculated about such possibilities but what I see happening is even a bit more than that.

The weakness of current cartography is its poor representation of time. The surface of the earth is treated as a static thing. Even in recent human history there have been massive changes in sea-levels. The emergence and subsidence of land has even more recently affected human movement; with islands in the North Atlantic possibly being stepping stones to North America and the like.

There are several time and geography related projects on the web. Some of these are mentioned in Mapping Hacks, and one can google for others. But these are often academic projects, or esoteric projects. What if consumerist tools like WorldWind could also deal with time? Imagine a collaborative WorldWind plugin (perhaps not dissimilar from the one that ShockFire is writing at http://shockfire.blogspot.com/2006/06/accepted-to-summer-of-code.html ) where one could submit facts about history and have them fitted into a model that would challenge or support them.

With an appropriately rich consumer oriented and collaborative visualization tool - let's call it TimeWind - one could trace backwards the path of individuals; adding one's grandparents, adding ones own location, adding the places and times one met other people or saw other things. And by collaboratively filling in as many pieces as possible one could start to recreate a kind of tangled underground root-system of the motions of people. This could extend backwards to capture the people who represent those key and pivotal events; perhaps...

I have a kind of rule that I call the law of entanglement; that things seem to become entangled in peverse ways. We see this in simply trying to pull a single cable from a bundle of cables in a drawer; we may curse at the astounding ways things manage to become entangled but it seems to extend to every part of life; it is like it is an underlying rule of nature. It is as if the complexity we see today actually emerges from a deeper underlying complexity and that we are in fact the cruder simpler thing. Imagine if we could unwind that weave; to pick at the basis of what contributed to what we are. I'm also fascinated by this idea of limits - of huge forces that counter exponential growth. Kurzweil talks about the emerging singularity and that seems like a good example of where there must be other far vaster forces that technological trends will slam up against and be crushed. It feels like if we could look at history in grand scale we might get an appreciation of how some of these limits act upon us.

If we could find a way to contribute to a shared digital vision, an aggregator and visualizer perhaps of places and points, that it would be possible to write tools that could perform analysis on that data and provide us with a kind of 'history knob' that would let us rewind and audit that history; find gaps, perform actual research; to see limits, to see gaps in reasoning. It could even be a tool for identifying and focusing on future concerns as well. Having a deeper apprehension of the forces that act on us is like developing a deep sense of a video-game; one gets a feeling for how to react, how to anticipate. The same patterns emerge over and over and we are prey to them because of our foreshortened vision. The challenges for us are not environmental; they are of coordination and organization. We are simply too stupid, too small, to limited to act in concordance as we are. If there was a way to share our vision, to become more human, then we could share our action instead of squabbling in a little death match over remnant resources before being extinguished from the surface of the earth.

In closing - a group of us geowanker types had a BOF at Where 2.0; we sat out late one evening and simply speculated about the near term future of social place sharing. It was a lot of fun. In particular one point that Dan Greening @ BigTribe made has some relevance here. Dan mentioned this idea of a 'push back system'. A system that was not just for viewing the world but for actually altering it. He cited an example where he wanted a restarant to change their menu. He posted a note on some forum telling people that whenever they went to this restarant they should ask the owners to change the menu; and lo and behold one day shortly thereafter they changed the menu after having left it unchanged for years. This goes beyond a 'wikipedia' kind of idea and becomes something like a 'heropedia' or an active action network; something that is focused not on simply observing but actually acting.

- a