Chris Jordan’s presentation at TED is sobering. I’m not up to date in the field of contemporary art but I can’t imagine that there is a more important artist for our time. His message to try and help us understand our culture better so that we might consciously change is exactly what we need.
On a tangential note: I used to play the game Civilization II for hours. ( Civ is a simulation game where you manage the development of a civilization from huts to space ships. ) I found it fascinating to manage the growth of a civilization. Although climate, and the number of competing civilizations, were the biggest factors in how a game began they all ended the same for me. By the 1500s I would have dominated the world and from there all my time was spent building a vast, sprawling civilization that transformed every inch of the land into a city. It’s just what I did.
But the simulation is very good. Near the end all my efforts in managing the civilization were in effect to clean up the mess that I created to get to that point. In the game industrialization comes at the cost of, you guessed it, global warming. So once industrialization was well under way I had access to create solar plants and recycling centers.
By the very end of the game every city had maxed out its productivity, taxes were set to practically nothing, and there was no military. It took a huge management effort to get my civilization to that point but that’s what always happened.
Oddly enough I think that’s why I’m optimistic that we’ll reach that same state in our real civilization. But there was one major difference: I was the benevolent despot that managed single handedly. Any chance we could manage that in a global civilization with conflicting cultures and governments?
You know, I could watch Video.Google.com all day . . . okay, a few minutes a day but that’s it. Here’s the latest funny. Don’t try this with my processor.
This music video has lots of closeup views of the sun and isn’t a bad song to boot. Note: the sun doesn’t show up until about 40 seconds into the video.
This reminds me: I’d really like to volunteer to teach/tutor about programming and mathematics a day or two a week at the local high school. I’ll check into that next Fall. Remind me if I forget
This is a great looking application. Should be lots of fun for kids to play around with. If I had the time I’d try something like this in Actionscript. But it’s way down on my list of 2Dos.
