» Swollen Now - Long Views: The Long Now Blog

Swollen Now

May 20th, 02008 by Alexander Rose - Twitter: @zander

The folks at Radio Lab have produced a good piece on time in general. It covers a lot of materia, some of it more campy than informative, but had some new info for me at least.

Spice Clock: A clock that tells you what time it is in the dark based on smells released during the night.

Clock of Birds: A highlands people of Papua New Guinea use the songs of certain birds to determine the time of day.

Clock of Flowers: Linnaeus carefully crafted a flower garden that had certain flowers that would unfurl at certain times of day to tell the time.

Leif Inge produced an art installation of Beethoven’s 9th that was stretched to 24hours which sounds wonderful.

The piece ends with a discussion of how time is relative based on experience, and how the very best moments we remember in life have a feeling of a swolen now.

(Thanks to Kent Corbell, charter member 172, for sending this in)

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 20th, 02008 at 1:50 pm and is filed under Clock of the Long Now, Long Term Art, Long Term Thinking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

John Keily

I would have thought that for true long term thinking, all clocks should be put away, not reinvented, or reworked.

When I was growing up on a farm, some in the district were known as 'clock watchers'. These 'clock watchers' were always intent on the next anticipated event in their lives, whether it be a lunch break, or the end of the day. In other words, what they did was always tempered by the immediate future. Others in the district, those that were not 'clock watchers', focused on the task at hand, were not influenced by impending events and stuck at a task for 'as long as it took'. This latter group were renowned for their long term thinking, planning and organisation. After all, that's how they stayed in business for generations.

So, what's with this focus on timepieces?