EGAD

The Long Organ?

Recalling Scavhunt '00: Rocket 00000. Widely considered one of Mathews House's better moments, ridiculous overkill seemed the only fitting way to approach Pynchon in that, the last year of the Mathews independent team. I don't know who originally took this photo.

Well, doesn't this just tickle two of my fonder obsessions: long range thinking and pipe organs. The locals of Halberstadt, Germany, have decided to take on the definitive rendition of Cage's As Slow As Possible for the organ. The organ is uniquely suited to such a performance, since it just keeps sounding for as long as a key is pressed (and the electricity holds out). In this case, it runs slowly enough that there's plenty of time to make and install new pipes as needed between note changes. All told, the performance should last 639 years.

Speaking of which, the LA Times this week has yet another article on an old problem: how to communicate danger to people tens of thousands of years in the future. Long after even the Long Clock's design lifetime expires, plutonium leftover from making nuclear weapons will remain dangerous. It seems only neighborly to put up a "Don't dig here" sign, but how? Weekend America is talking about that right now.

Let's see what else distracted me this week.

Comet Schwassmann-Wachmann 3 is now a fairly easy binoculars object under dark skies, although observers are still uncertain whether it will become bright enough to be an impressive naked-eye comet, despite the fact that it will pass the Earth at less than 25 times the Earth-Moon distance mid-month. As it swings closer to the sun, it is in the process of spectacularly crumbling apart.

And it really tickled me when the Vatican dissed Creationism.

But far be it from me to end on an entirely cheerful note. As Matt Yglesias points out this week, there are actually sound economic reasons why globalization seems to produce a large number of uncomfortable outcomes. It's capital efficiency at work.