1 Matching Annotations
- Oct 2017
-
academic.oup.com academic.oup.com
-
In fact, members of the Long Now would have me say that it was founded in the year 01996, a way of writing dates that presently accommodates a further 97,985 years. To put this into perspective—50,000 years before the Long Now runs out of digits, Niagara Falls will have eroded its remaining 32 kilometers to Lake Erie. That communion will occur a full 30,000 years after, according to one lexico-statistical model, the point at which human languages will have retained only one percent of their present-day words. By the time the Long Now has a Y100k problem, the constellations you recognize will be gone from the sky. I lay this out to make the point that Long Now folks embed a puckishly provocative optimism in everything they do.
Is it just me, or am I detecting an underlying disdain from the author towards The Long Now Foundation? If so, I would not blame her as the beliefs The Long Now hold appear surreal and unbelievable to me. I was unaware that their was a group that held such views.
-