beyond the long now

Acclaim for Kottke for directing our attention to the well-curated Wikipedia property that concerns itself with distant future scenarios for the known Cosmos as we presently understand it, beginning with events postulated to take place beyond ten thousand years from now.
As illustrated in this timeline, due to the gradual shift of the lunisolar calendar, in AD 20 874 Gregorian and Islamic calendars will share the same year number, just a few hundred years after Chernobyl becomes once again safely habitable for humans, and still five thousand years until the earliest possible receipt of the Arecibo message by an alien intelligence. Assuming the same limitations still apply, a reply would take another twenty-five thousand years—coinciding with the planned return and unsealing of an orbiting space time capsule to be launched in 2019. There’s a lot of fascinating facts to wade through and I’m sure everyone will find something resounding to stand in awe of. Off this scale by many orders of magnitude and of course a gradual and on-going occurrence, astronomers poignantly believe that by one hundred billion years in the future the Universe will have expanded to the point that no civilization would see starry night skies and look up to wonder about their neighbours.

jai guru deva om

Against the advice of his gurus and meditative-betters, philosopher and author Robert Wright not only took notes to be later adapted into a book during his silent retreats, he also shared his feelings of inadequacies and failing when it comes to practicing mindfulness.  
Why Buddhism is True does not privilege it above other religious traditions and articles of faith are not addressed but is rather true in the sense that its core teachings and methods of coping—suffering comes from misunderstanding and meditation leads to liberation—work on a physical and psychological level because they allow us to transcend the inscrutables of billions of generations of evolution. The great chain of being that has led to you and your condition is miraculous but also has brought the hitchhikers of history which may have conferred advantage (Fear is the mind-killer.) at one point when our lives were more precarious but are now nuisances and sources of unbidden bias and anxiety. Perhaps not to be edited away could we identify the offending gene, the willingness to be still and confront and embrace the distressing renders it less powerful. The take-away is—by the way—that there is no wrong way of being attentive (Do or do not. There is no try.) and that daily practice yields daily reward.

oppède-le-vieux

Having discovered and explored this enchanting place ourselves back in October 2013 but not knowing the full story behind how the town came to be abandoned and left to fall into disrepair only to see a brief resurgence, we really appreciated this travelogue by Messy Nessy Chic correspondent Luke Spenser on Oppède in Vaucluse, near the Côte d’Azur. From the Latin for town (oppidum) this place is actually comprise of two towns, a valley settlement (Oppède-les-Poulivets, “with the nice view”) and an old town, Oppède-le-Vieux, hewn into the ramparts of the Petit Luberon mastiff. As picturesque as the old town was, the local agricultural community grew less and less willing to make the arduous climb up and down the mountain to work the fields every day and eventually transplanted themselves to the valley permanently. Roofs of buildings above were removed so the former residents were no longer liable for property taxes. During World War II and Nazi occupation, members of the resistance formed a short-lived artist colony amid the rubble and ruin. One member of that community was writer and artist Consuelo de Saint Exupéry (née Suncín), who was the inspiring but rather tumultuous muse for the character of Rose in her husband’s work The Little Prince. The article brought back some nice memories and I think it is high time to return to that part of France.

algorithmic engagement

We’ve previously explored numerous times how fraught social media is with manipulative and inscrutable sets of instructions that determine what content one is presented—or confronted with—that has led to people bemoaning the changes in myriad ways. We ought not be so obsessed with what’s hot off the presses but missives can grow stale and many times pledges and opinion do not age well—and it’s a psychological distressing struggle that a billion denizens charge towards daily and mostly fail by the hour.  People rate what comes across as an asynchronous jumble from a nuisance when they’d just care to experience events chronologically without some strange dream sequences or unbidden flashbacks to something more sinister when something from weeks and months past is unearthed.
Considering the geopolitical climate of the present, however, it seems that the war for our attention is going far beyond the vaguely menacing to the patently terrorising insofar as the figurative war is being translated into very real ones in the name of optimising revenue and we lose on both fronts. Online engagement is perhaps its own apotheosis in reality, but sensationalism distorts our perception of threats and given that our experience across all demographics is necessarily either dogmatic and doctrinaire or impressionable because of the limits of what we can know and can take part in have suddenly been made rather unlimited and the propagandists were the first on the scene.

very fine people on both sides

Trump’s lie-filled, unhinged tirade that passed as a press-conference taking reporters’ questions after delivering a few prepared remarks on the state of US infrastructure (“We’re like a third-world country.”) is indefensible and for those who hadn’t already caught on further evidence of the urgent imperative to dislodge him and his entire regime, but please do not allow Trump to make what transpired over the weekend about himself.
This does affect all of us, but the events that transpired are not about how not all white people are bigots nor how not all Trump supporters are white supremacists—that’s the same sophistry of moral relativism that Trump and his handlers have used to re-craft his stance. The mixed-messaging is revolting but we already had strong suspicions about Trump’s character and that he harboured such sentiments and even a resolute denouncement would probably reveal itself to be less than genuine. There is blood on his hands, assuredly, but the fact that his natural constituency is comprised of such an angry, disaffected mob bearing tiki-torches is the issue at hand, and as much as we’ve drilled to withstand the forces of hate and rabid nationalism when confronted with this raw, unmediated and stultifying meltdown, we are unsurprisingly are ill-equipped to frame.  Shock and shame are not to be conflated with surrender or acculturated normalcy. 

the bell that rings the hour

Along with rather urgent plans to remodel and refurbish the Houses of Parliament, London’s public works will also be silencing Big Ben from next on to 2021 (with some exceptions, like for New Year’s) for repairs to the clockwork—and groaningly, the addition of an elevator for tourists.
Although not the first intermezzo for this icon, we hadn’t appreciated what a cultural touchstone and cue that the chimes could be for those outside of ear-shot. More used to hearing the pips, we weren’t aware that a live broadcast of the bells attended the 1800 and midnight BBC dispatches and the station surveyed the whole of the UK for a substitute for the interim. The chimes of Nottingham Council House (Big Tom) were considered but as the bells do not toll at midnight and weren’t an exact match, the network decided to use a recording during repairs.

6equj5

Forty years ago this week not only saw the launch of the Voyager, our cosmic embassy, probes but also the reception of the Wow! Signal by Ohio State’s Big Ear radio telescope, discovered a few days later when volunteer astronomers were reviewing the print-outs.
Though never repeated (and it’s worth pointing out that for all our errant broadcasting, we’re not particularly chatty, either—the pixelated Arecibo message of 1974 is one of the few interstellar missives humans have sent) the strong, narrow-band that blip remains the prime and sole candidate for an alien transmission. The alphanumeric values represents the intensity variation of the signal over about a minute of time and appears to have originated in the direction of the constellation Sagittarius.

viva piñata

Via Dangerous Minds, we find ourselves regaled with the sculpturally elegant and fantastical piñatas inspired by the monsters and chimera of Hieronymus Bosch of south Texan artist Roberto Benavidez. All connoisseurs would of course perish the thought of assaulting any of these exquisite papier-mâché creations with a bat. View more of the artist’s gallery of works at the links above.