”The Clock of the Long Now, also called the 10,000-year clock, is a proposed mechanical clock designed to keep time for 10,000 years.
The clock is one of several projects through which the foundation intends to promote long-term thinking. In the words of Stewart Brand, a founding board member of the foundation, ‘Such a clock, if sufficiently impressive and well-engineered, would embody deep time for people. It should be charismatic to visit, interesting to think about, and famous enough to become iconic in the public discourse. Ideally, it would do for thinking about time what the photographs of Earth from space have done for thinking about the environment. Such icons reframe the way people think.’
The basic design principles and requirements for the clock are:
- Longevity: The clock should be accurate even after 10,000 years, and must not contain valuable parts (such as jewels, expensive metals, or special alloys) that might be looted.
- Maintainability: Future generations should be able to keep the clock working, if necessary, with nothing more advanced than Bronze Age tools and materials.
- Transparency: The clock should be understandable without stopping or disassembling it; no functionality should be opaque.
- Evolvability: It should be possible to improve the clock over time.
- Scalability: To ensure that the final large clock will work properly, smaller prototypes must be built and tested.
No clock can have a guaranteed lifetime of 10,000 years, but some clocks are designed with guaranteed limits. (For example, a clock that shows a four-digit year date will not display the correct year after the year 9999.) With continued care and maintenance the Clock of the Long Now could reasonably be expected to display the correct time for 10,000 years.
Whether a clock would actually receive continued care and maintenance for such a long time is debatable. Hillis chose the 10,000-year goal to be just within the limits of plausibility. There are technological artifacts, such as fragments of pots and baskets, from 10,000 years in the past, so there is some precedent for human artifacts surviving this long, although very few human artifacts have been continuously tended for more than a few centuries.
‘I want a build a clock that ticks once a year. The century hand advances every one hundred years, and the cuckoo comes out on the millenium.’ - Danny Hillis, 1995.”
- Wikipedia
Rashad Alakbarov from Azerbaijan is “painting” with light in ways that don’t even seem possible. He organizes found objects into formations that cast light and shadows onto walls in the most spectacular creations.
Also known as the “master of shadows,” Alakbarov plays with the ideas of concealing and revealing with his giant installations. Upon initial view, his pieces are seemingly in disarray. After further investigation, the viewer discovers a painting of shadows and light cast on the wall and is able to look at the piece in a different way, with a fresh, new set of eyes. The final results are mesmerizing. This work is currently on view through January 29 at De Pury Gallery in London.
Fly to Baku @ De Pury Gallery
(via peplos)
EVERYONE HAS TO WATCH THIS RIGHT NOW. EVERYONE.
She is so cute?!??!
She’s like the Avatar of Tumblr.
THIS IS ACTUALLY ONE OF THE MOST ADORABLE THINGS I’VE EVER SEEN
who is this lady she is like moe incarnate
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(Source: dreamongood, via fannie-annie)
I don’t know if this guy has been submitted already, but if he has, he deserves to be submitted again.
Simo Häyhä lived in Finland and was a farmer and hunter for most of his life. He served in the military for a year, then went back to his farming life. He was known for his marksmanship and was said to have many awards for it. Sounds like your average guy, right?
Wrong.
Soon, the Winter War started between Finland and Russia. Now, the Finns in general were total badasses in this war, coming out victorious even though they were vastly outnumbered, but Simo really stood out from the rest. Simo signed up and became a sniper; in fact, he became one of the best snipers history had ever seen. It has been confirmed that he killed 505 people, though some estimates put this total closer to 700. The Soviets staged entire missions to kill this man, but he usually ended up killing them first. They started throwing bombs where they thought he was; the most they did was tear his coat as he continued shooting.
Finally, one near-fateful day, he was shot with an exploding bullet in the jaw. Fellow soldiers described his wound as looking like he had lost half of his face. His injuries caused him to fall into a coma. 2 weeks later, he woke up on the same day that the Winter War ended. He went back to a quiet life of farming and hunting and lived to be 96 years old.
I mean, let’s face it, who doesn’t love a badass? OK, his face was perminently deformed from the bullet wound, but that doesn’t change anything :3
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Turnin’ Kisses to Bites | Elainepramos
I didn’t mean to post that mix on here, but ooooooohkay, I guess it’s on and it spread a little bit! It’s just a noob mix I made, obviously for the purpose of making a little love! ;) I was out while it was uploading, and when I got home, BAM it was on my Tumblr :| It’s only about 30 minutes long, and I was hoping I could add more songs onto it before posting but I guess the cat’s out of the bag! So…Let me help you set the mood right! ;)
Track Listings:
1) Number One Sex - R. Kelly ft. Keri Hilson
2) What You Need - The Weeknd
3) Dance in the Mirror - Bruno Mars
4) Lotus Flower Bomb - Wale ft. Miguel
5) Wetter - Twista
6) Wet the Bed - chris Brown
7) Lingerie - Jeff Bernat
8) Be My Vixen - Miguel
9) The Morning - The Weeknd
10) Read Your Mind - Avant
11) Neighbors Know My Name - Trey Songz
12) Trading Places - Usher
13) Skin - Rihanna
14) On Top - Trey Songz
15) The Zone - The Weeknd ft. Drake
(via kittykha)
This is how white people are typically depicted xD
Also: http://www.matt-thorn.com/mangagaku/faceoftheother.html
A common misconception about anime cartoons amongst uninitiated audiences in majority-English-speaking countries is that anime characters are drawn to look ‘White’ rather than ‘Asian’. First of all, neither of terms are factual fixed categories - they are social constructions. That is, the meaning attached to race, whether ‘White’, ‘Black’, ‘Asian’ and so on, and the groups classified under these labels, change from one society to another, depending upon culture, time and place.
In an excellent exploration of the social construction of race in popular culture, sociologist Julian Abagond shows that Japanese animators do not, in fact, draw anime characters to personify their aspiration to be ‘white’. Instead, these characters reflect the animators’ own cultural biases - which is that Japanese people are the prototype model of the ‘default human being’. Abagond writes in Sociological Images:
If I draw a stick figure, most Americans will assume that it is a white man. Because to them that is the Default Human Being. For them to think it is a woman I have to add a dress or long hair; for Asian, I have to add slanted eyes; for black, I add kinky hair or brown skin. Etc.
The Other has to be marked. If there are no stereotyped markings of otherness, then white is assumed.
Americans apply this thinking to Japanese drawings. But to the Japanese the Default Human Being is Japanese! So they feel no need to make their characters “look Asian”. They just have to make them look like people and everyone in Japan will assume they are Japanese – no matter how improbable their physical appearance.
You see the same thing in America: After all, why do people think Marge Simpson is white? Look at her skin: it is yellow. Look at her hair: it is a blue Afro. But the Default Human Being thing is so strong that lacking other clear, stereotyped signs of being either black or Asian she defaults to white…When you think about it there is nothing particularly white about how anime characters look:huge round eyes – no one looks like that, not even white people (even though that style of drawing eyes does go back to Betty Boop).
- yellow hair – but they also have blue hair and green hair and all the rest. Therefore hair colour is not about being true to life.
- small noses – compared to the rest of the world whites have long noses that stick out.
- white skin – but many Japanese have skin just as pale and white as most White Americans…
Some Americans, even some scholars, will argue against this view of anime. They want to think the Japanese worship America or worship whiteness and use anime to prove it. But they seem to be driven more by their own racism and nationalism than anything else.
As Abagond’s analysis shows, perceptions of race and gender influence how people ‘read’, understand and draw meaning from animation. For Japanese animators, their characters reflect their view of normality - that everyone in their creation is Japanese (or Korean or Chinese or wherever the anime is produced). Audiences that have an uncritical view of race and Whiteness presume that ‘Asian’ drawings should look ‘Asian’. Yet this term - Asian - means different things to different groups. In Japan, the category of Asian is not very meaningful. Instead, mainstream Japanese culture portrays the Japanese people as the ‘default human being’. Gender and class also affect how this default human being is imagined (usually male, affluent and lean).
Just all art forms embody the biases and taken-for-granted cultural assumptions about the world, what audiences see in anime drawings are mediated by theethnocentrism of the animators and audiences. Ethnocentrism is the belief that one’s group is superior to others. Viewers who think Japanese anime characters are trying to look ‘White’ are therefore viewing this artform through ethnocentrism.
Credit
Quotation originally from Abagond’s blog, viaSociological Images.Image of Jubei from Ninja Scroll from Jinni.
(via kdbp)
