I never knew

We often forget, that what we know of history, evolution, etc., is only the small fraction that we’ve found out of the small fraction of what’s left to be found. In other words; we take things for true and established that are a minute fraction of what was and don’t necessarily represent “truth”. For example, all the bones of the skeletons we use to trace our evolution fit in one pickup truck. I’m sure we’re missing some hugely important parts.

In that vein, this incredible find:

Standing on the hill at dawn, overseeing a team of 40 Kurdish diggers, the German-born archeologist waves a hand over his discovery here, a revolution in the story of human origins. Schmidt has uncovered a vast and beautiful temple complex, a structure so ancient that it may be the very first thing human beings ever built. The site isn’t just old, it redefines old: the temple was built 11,500 years ago—a staggering 7,000 years before the Great Pyramid, and more than 6,000 years before Stonehenge first took shape. The ruins are so early that they predate villages, pottery, domesticated animals, and even agriculture—the first embers of civilization. In fact, Schmidt thinks the temple itself, built after the end of the last Ice Age by hunter-gatherers, became that ember—the spark that launched mankind toward farming, urban life, and all that followed. (Emphasis mine)

…Enthusing over the “huge great stones and fantastic, highly refined art” at Göbekli, Hodder—who has spent decades on rival Neolithic sites—says: “Many people think that it changes everything… It overturns the whole apple cart. All our theories were wrong.“
—History in the Remaking

Of course the whole thing could be based on some dating error…

[Update] There’s a photo set on Smithsonian magazine’s site (via Kottke)

I have a file with a bunch of things I mean to post about, it seems it got much longer than I thought so I’m deleting things, simply bookmarking to delicious, etc. I have this paragraph which I’d written some months ago and meant to expand on. Here it is… with no expansion, for my own archiving purposes.

Social web marketing/pr is analogous to an Observer Effect, as soon as you purposefully participate in a community or conversation and write for markerting or pr, it changes it. You can read about how it works, learn it’s component but after that you can’t do it on purpose, you just have to be authentic and interact with humans in a normal fashion. Anything done specifically with the purpose of getting something back —other than the communication with others— taints the act. The same could be said of writing a blog with ad revenu in mind, it breaks the honesty of the thing and changes it.

I’ve seen people referring to this as augmented reality. I don’t see how that’s reality. Or if it is, it’s a web representation of something “realler” than the automated panoramas the maps are based on. It’s more “reality augmented web” than augmented reality.

Anyway, very cool addition to the street level view and very impressive technology.

I mentioned 6 months ago that Tiny Speck was going to be interesting and now information has started coming out about their new project, a game named Glitch. There’s a lot of interesting stuff in this Cnet interview with Stewart Butterfield and the team but I especially liked their development schedule:

From the get-go, the Tiny Speck team set out to craft their game using a series of five three-month development cycles, each of which would comprise two months of hard-core work, followed by a month of “cleaning up after ourselves,” essentially testing and optimization, and each of which had a set of specific goals and milestones.

Each cycle had a name, and when I first started visiting with Butterfield and Henderson, they had just finished the first, which they called Happy Place. The goals for that three-month period? To get done “the minimum amount of stuff we needed to get done (for the game) to be fun.”

Five cycles is probably quite long for many project and impossibly long for boot strappers but I still like the cycle system with one third for “cleaning up after ourselves”. For smaller projects cycle length and/or number of cycles could be smaller and you could also aim to release something minimal after the first cycle and then perfect the thing after each cycle*.

* At which point it’s a version of Agile but I still like their model.

I haven’t thought of it much so I’m sure there’s angles to be considered which might affect my opinion but at first glance I love this idea. Iceland is in the process of passing a package of laws to become a haven for investigative journalism.

On Tuesday, the Icelandic parliament is expected to introduce a measure aimed at making the country an international center for investigative journalism publishing, by passing the strongest combination of source protection, freedom of speech, and libel-tourism prevention laws in the world.

Supporters of the proposal say the move would make Iceland an “offshore publishing center” for free speech, analogous to the offshore financial havens that allow corporations to hide capital from authorities. Could global news organizations with a home office in Reykjavík soon be as common as Delaware corporations or Cayman Islands assets?

…the amendments would cover source protection, whistleblower protection, immunity for ISPs and other carriers, freedom of information requests, and strong limits on prior restraint. They would also provide protection against libel judgements from other jurisdictions, much as the United States may soon do with the Free Speech Protection Act of 2009.
—Iceland aims to become an offshore haven for journalists and leakers

Also see: The video of the Berlin talk where the concept was presented, The Guardian with Iceland aims to become haven for investigative journalism and BBC with Wikileaks and Iceland MPs propose ‘journalism haven’.