I spent a wonderful evening yesterday chatting about a new book that my former colleagues at Forum for the Future have put together called About Time. Loads of interesting links to the project I’m working on next year in London in partnership with the Long Now Foundation (who, incidentally, have just unveiled the next version of the 10,000 year clock).
As we were talking about the effect of speed on our lives, I couldn’t help thinking about a bit of Mostly Harmless where Arthur Dent ends up on a planet called Lamuella:
“The days were just a little over twenty-five hours long, which basically meant an extra hour in bed every single day and, of course, having regularly to reset his watch, which Arthur rather enjoyed doing.
He also felt at home with the number of suns and moons which Lamuella had — one of each — as opposed to some of the planets he’d fetched up on from time to time which had had ridiculous numbers of them.
The planet orbited its single sun every three hundred days, which was a good number because it meant the year didn’t drag by. The moon orbited Lamuella just over nine times a year, which meant that a month was a little over thirty days, which was absolutely perfect because it gave you a little more time to get things done in. It was not merely reassuringly like Earth, it was actually rather an improvement.”
