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Lorna Mills and Sally McKay
Digital Media Tree this blog's archive OVVLvverk Lorna Mills: Artworks / Persona Volare / contact Sally McKay: GIFS / cv and contact |
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 | There's really good click-n-learn earth science stuff on Berkeley's Explorations Through Time website. I found it while looking for humanity-in-relation-to-geologic-time analogies.There are a bunch: the toilet paper roll is good, and so is the beer glass (you gotta scroll down). The Berkeley site uses a book. I can't remember where my favourite one came from (Stephen Jay Gould? My friend Ben?) but it goes like this: Suppose the length of your arm represents geologic time. Now take a nail file and make one swipe across the tip of the nail on your middle finger. The width of the amount of nail you removed represents the length of time that humans have been in existence. This one, from Ohio History Central, is good too: Geologic time covers a VERY long period of time, often counting hundreds, even thousands of millions of years. If we think in terms of human life-spans --- using 70 years as the average --- one hundred million years would be the equal to about 1.43 million human lives strung out in succession, one after the other. |