Thursday, June 13, 2002

Taking Action Timothy Wilken writes: Humans are Time-binders. Ours is the power to know and that knowledge grows without limits. If we remain in our childhood as a species, our conflict and indifference will continue injuring us until we eventually we produce such unlimited weapons that must by definition destroy us. If we are to enter our adulthood as a species we must put away childish things. We must put away the conflict of the adversary way. We must put away the indifference of the neutral way. And, we must put away not only nuclear weapons, but in fact we must put away all weapons. And then and only then will it truly be safe. We do have the intelligence necessary to organize ourselves into a synergic community. If we kill our brother we can understand the effect on the community of man. Our actions are either responsible or irresponsible. We lost our innocence not with the bite of an apple in the Garden of Eden, but with a bite of our first kill on the African Savannah. If we choose to act adversarily ours is not an act of innocence. We humans have choice — the ultimate choice  —  we can choose in time, space and energy. We humans are part of a larger whole. We are a part of the community of humankind. Our time-binding power  —  the power to understand allows us to produce unlimited knowledge. If we use our knowledge to kill  —  if we use our knowledge the adversary way, we will produce unlimited weapons  —  we will produce unlimited death.   (06/13/02) Shit Still Flows Downhill BBC NEWS -- Scientists in Australia and Canada say that pollution from western countries may have caused the droughts which ravaged Africa's Sahel region in the 1970s and 1980s. Millions died in the droughts, which hit Ethiopia hardest in 1984. The research says that sulphur dioxide from factories in Europe and the United States has cooled the Northern Hemisphere, driving the tropical rain belt south - away from the Sahel. Rainfall in the region has declined by between 20% and 50%, leading to severe droughts in 1972, 1975, 1984 and 1985. (06/13/02) An Inexorable Emergence Raymond Kurzweil writes: The twenty-first century will be different. The human species, along with the computational technology it created, will be able to solve age-old problems of need, if not desire, and will be in a position to change the nature of mortality in a postbiological future. Do we have the psychological capacity for all the good things that await us? Probably not. That, however, might change as well. Before the next century is over, human beings will no longer be the most intelligent or capable type of entity on the planet. Actually, let me take that back. The truth of that last statement depends on how we define human. And here we see one profound difference between these two centuries: The primary political and philosophical issue of the next century will be the definition of who we are. But I am getting ahead of myself. This last century has seen enormous technological change and the social upheavals that go along with it, which few pundits circa 1899 foresaw. The pace of change is accelerating and has been since the inception of invention (as I will discuss in the first chapter, this acceleration is an inherent feature of technology). The result will be far greater transformations in the first two decades of the twenty-first century than we saw in the entire twentieth century. However, to appreciate the inexorable logic of where the twenty-first century will bring us, we have to go back and start with the present. (06/13/02) Understanding Ourselves Timothy Wilken writes: We humans are a form of life. This is a fact of reality paramount to understanding ourselves. And, yet this fact is so pervasive and constant that it rarely enters our consciousness. Our clear and distant superiority to all other forms of life have made it easy for us to neglect our biological basis. As we have seen ourselves different and superior to all other forms of life, we have missed the point . While we differ from plants and animals, we share their aliveness – we are still forms of life – we are still living organisms –we are still living systems. When we examine ourselves scientifically, we discover that humans are living systems, and it follows therefore that our powers and our problems will be those of life.  (06/13/02) The Crash Of The Airline Industry And Telecom Steve MacLaughlin writes: Both industries also have reached the stage where customers and customer service are in constant pitched battles with one another. Have you ever seen more advertising that says "we swear that we really give a damn about you, and we're willing to work harder not to prove it." To be fair, I wouldn't want to hear a person complain about how their flight to the Cayman Islands got delayed or deal with someone who’s in denial that their 16 year old could have run up a $1,841.86 long distance bill. The sad part is that both systems achieve a momentous feat each and every day that gets overlooked by most people. Think about it: You can talk to anyone at anytime, anywhere on the planet. You can hop on a plane and be on the other side of the globe in just a few hours. I suppose the fast paced technology driven world makes us forget some of the workhorses of the economy. Kinda like how email overshadows the fact that you can send a piece of mail to anyone in the country for $0.34.  (06/13/02) More For Less New York Times -- Writing in the current issue of the journal IEEE Transactions on Nanotechnology, researchers at I.B.M.'s laboratories in Zurich report that they have achieved a storage density of one trillion bits of data per square inch, about 25 times as great as current hard disks. Dr. James C. Ellenbogen, an expert on molecular electronics at the Mitre Corporation in McLean, Va., described the work as "incredible engineering." Still more remarkable, this new technology is a return to an obsolete one, at least in concept. Like computer punch cards — which were invented more than a century ago and went out of vogue in the 1970's, about the same time as slide rules — I.B.M.'s system stores data in a pattern of little holes. But I.B.M.'s holes are much, much tinier — half of a billionth of an inch across. While mechanical devices have steadily given way in recent decades to electronic ones that are faster, cheaper and more reliable, that trend may reverse at the molecular scale, where friction and wear and tear act differently. "Back to the future of mechanics," said Dr. Peter Vettiger, leader of the I.B.M. project, known as Millipede. Millipede has another advantage over punch cards: the holes can be closed up so that data can be rewritten over and over.  (06/12/02) Rewriting Science New York Times -- "A New Kind of Science" may be the scientific publishing event of the season, but whether it is a revolution in science as well must await the judgment of Dr. Wolfram's peers. So far, some seem amazed by his courage, others by his chutzpah. In the book Dr. Wolfram argues that the ability of such a simple system to engage in complicated-looking behavior means that scientists have underestimated nature, seeking complex reasons where simple ones will do. As a result, he says, science has been going in the wrong direction. Most systems of even modest complexity, he concludes, are so complicated that they are beyond the grasp of mathematical formulas. Science should be looking for a simple program, not a T-shirt's worth of equations, if it wants to explain the universe, a project, he says, that would redefine our understanding of space and time, evolution, intelligence, free will, and philosophy, as well as physics. "If the whole history of our universe can be obtained by following definite simple rules," Dr. Wolfram writes near the end of his book, "then at some level this history has the same kind of character as a construct such as the digit sequence of pi. And what this suggests is that it makes no more or less sense to talk about the meaning of phenomena in our universe than it does to talk about the meaning of phenomena in the digit sequence of pi."  (06/12/02) spaceshipEARTH A beautiful and valuable site for all humans. This was created by the Buckminster Fuller Institute. "Think of it. We are blessed with technology that would be indescribable to our forefathers. We have the wherewithal, the know-it-all, to feed everybody, clothe everybody, give every human on earth a chance. We know now what we could never have known before - that we now have an option for all humanity to 'make it' successfully on this planet in this lifetime." - Buckminster Fuller, 1969   (06/12/02) Living With Paradox Timothy Wilken, MD writes:  We, the People, — That’s us, you and me, and ~6,230,392,000 others as well. We are the real victims of the present adversary-neutral culture and our adversary-neutral governments. We the People is where the buck really stops in modern culture. It is we the People who will lose our lives and our childrens’ future in a high-tech war/accident made probable by massive high-tech weapon buildup and the continuing global dissemination of these weapons. It is we the People who will lose our jobs, our businesses, our homes, and possessions in a global economic collapse made probable by continually increasing federal and trade deficits by our adversary-neutral governments. It is we the People that have the least power of all the players, and paradoxically the most power.  (06/12/02) Technotopia and the Death of Nature James John Bell writes: There is no question that technological growth trends in science and industry are increasing exponentially. There is, however, a growing debate about what this runaway acceleration of ingenuity may bring. A number of respected scientists and futurists now are predicting that technological progress is driving the world toward a "Singularity" -- a point at which technology and nature will have become one. At this juncture, the world as we have known it will have gone extinct and new definitions of "life," "nature" and "human" will take hold. "We are on the edge of change comparable to the rise of human life on Earth," San Diego University Professor of Computer Science Vernor Vinge first warned the scientific community in 1993. "Within 30 years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will end." ...  A 1998 Harris poll of the 5,000 members of the American Institute of Biological Sciences found 70 percent believed that what has been termed "The Sixth Extinction" is now underway. A simultaneous Harris poll found that 60 percent of the public were totally unaware of the impending biological collapse. At the same time that nature's ancient biological creation is on the decline, artificial laboratory-created bio-tech life forms -- genetically modified tomatoes, genetically engineered salmon, cloned sheep -- are on the rise. Already more than 60 percent of food in US grocery stores contain genetically engineered ingredients -- and that percentage is rising. Nature and technology are not just evolving: They are competing and combining with one another. Ultimately there could be only one winner.   ... Or, perhaps NO WINNER.    (06/12/02) Whats Next ? Forbes.com -- Twelve scientists lay odds on the next great inventions. One of the twelve Dean Kamen holds more than 150 patents. His inventions include a portable dialysis machine and the Segway Human Transporter. Kamen is also the founder of FIRST, an organization dedicated to motivating students to understand, use, and enjoy science and technology. He writes: "We must invent delivery systems and economic models that allow us to share our incredible technology with the emerging world. Two-thirds of the world sees us sitting here with air conditioning in the summer and heat in the winter. We have anesthesia and clean drinking water. We have a bulldozer, and they have a pickax. Who's going to be resentful? We must help the rest of the world create value with the technology. Until they spend their time writing software code instead of finding clean water or burying their babies, we're going to be in a race with catastrophe." See eleven more ... (06/12/02) Good News for a Change The Tennessean -- Vanderbilt children's neurologist and inventor Robert Holcomb may be, in the words of one university official, the Thomas Edison of our age. ... He has invented a chemical process that would allow power companies to burn coal without spewing pollution into the air. The same process, changed somewhat, preserves lumber without using toxic chemicals that are being banned by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. With another change, it makes gasoline burn more cleanly, he said; change it again, and it purifies sea water that would destroy ordinary filters. This process, which one executive in the wood-preservation industry called ''magical,'' is called Inorganic Polymer Electret. IPE-C, the name for the substance used to treat coal, consists of ordinary ingredients such as sand, water and alkali. ...  Black & Veatch, the worldwide engineering company, was hired to test samples of crushed coal mixed with an IPE product. Even when the company burned high-sulfur coal mined near Jamestown, Tenn., there was almost no pollution in the smoke.  ... Vanderbilt has invested $500,000 in IPE and Demeter Systems LLC, the company formed to market it.  (06/11/02) Preparing for the Crash Robert Waldroup shares his plan for surviving the Fossil Fuel Depletion-Over Population Crisis:  Cultivating 105 useful or edible plants on our property, including 67 perennials, with room to expand in future years (the more I work my yard, the more room I find it has to grow things, I have entire nooks and numerous crannies yet to plant). ... Have pretty much taken a personal vow of material celibacy; I buy only essentials, I don't buy new clothing or new "stuff" but rather patronize the after market in thrift shops and flea markets if I need tools, books, and etc. Note that my garden is in its third year; this year we have had fruit every day and salad since the first of May, without patronizing the agribizness corpses. ... Really working hard on local networking, both in and out of cyberspace. Cultivating relationships with farmers. Bought a bike. Helping one farmer to start an organic vegetable subscription farm and a natural poultry and pork business. ... MORE.  (06/11/02) Rich Capitalist Pigs Welcome In China New York Times -- PINGHU, China — Li Qinfu, snapping his fingers to emphasize the points he is making, races his purple Lamborghini toward what looks like the United States Capitol rising above the canola fields south of Shanghai. As he turns into the manicured grounds surrounding the domed marble building, a slightly smaller copy of Washington's own, he points to the pinnacle. There, instead of the original's Statue of Freedom, stands an 18-foot, three-ton bronze likeness of himself, right hand raised as if beckoning to the future. ...  There are now thousands of multimillionaires in China, and the super-rich have reached such critical mass that Forbes compiles a list, however imperfect and incomplete, of the country's wealthiest individuals. Mr. Li ranks 71st, though he asserts that his true ranking is much higher. Last year, No. 5, a Shanghai real estate developer, stunned tycoon-thick Hong Kong by paying $30 million for the territory's most ostentatious house, an unheard-of public show of wealth by a mainland businessman. (06/11/02) Edward Jenner Rolls Over In His Grave SWABI, Pakistan -- A smallpox epidemic is spreading, but the Pakistani government has failed to respond to concerns expressed by health officials and the local media. "The smallpox epidemic is rapidly spreading in these parts of the province, but the district health department has failed to take any step to contain this deadly disease," said Muqaddam Khan in a report for Dawn, the Pakistan English language newspaper. Reports of children and adults with the disease are widespread in different parts of the Swabi district (population over one million), indicating the disease is spreading. "Authorities concerned have failed to take any action to prevent this disease or immunize the people against it," said Khan. He did not give the number of people who have contracted the deadly disease, but he said the growing number of both children and adults who are infected is extensive.  (06/11/02) How The Other Half Lives New York Times -- A study released last week has concluded that lung cancer rates in developing countries could be lowered sharply by a change relating to smoke that has nothing to do with tobacco: switching from fire pits to vented stoves. The study, published last week in The Journal of the National Cancer Institute, looked at cancer rates among 21,232 farmers born into households in Yunnan Province in China at a time when their families used smoky coal in fire pits for cooking and heating. Over their lives, 80 percent of the farmers switched to stoves with chimneys.  The researchers conducted tests that indicated that vented stoves cut levels of indoor air pollution by two-thirds.  (06/11/02) Damned If We Do Arundhati Roy writes: How you can snatch a river away from one and gift it to another.  ...  Big Dams are to a Nation's 'Development' what Nuclear Bombs are to its Military Arsenal. They're both weapons of mass destruction. They're both weapons Governments use to control their own people.  ... They represent the severing of the link, not just the link - the understanding - between human beings and the planet they live on. They scramble the intelligence that connects eggs to hens, milk to cows, food to forests, water to rivers, air to life and the earth to human existence.  ...  Can we unscramble it?  (06/11/02) Mental Illness Grips American Rosalinda writes: It is affecting top political circles, including the President and the White House, much of the general population. It takes the form of the denial of the economic collapse, even though people are faced daily, with the contrast of a catastrophic collapse of the economy and the financial markets stumbling around, as against the hype coming out of the news media and the government asserting that the future is bright, and that things are getting better every day. Many people don't want to think what their lives would be like, if the whole system goes down, so they deny that it could happen to them. They may not openly deny the crash, but they deny it in the way they act, in the movement of hands and feet. (06/11/02) Toward A Networked Humanity I believe that we are observing the genesis of a new life form. That the 'Unified Cultures of Earth' will operate more like a living organism then a political state. I believe that the agricultural revolution, the industrial revolution, the communication revolution, and the computation revolution represent the organizing nests of cells that will form the organs for the new life form. The last system completed within the development of a embryo is the nervous system and brain. We are now entering the final revolution– The Knowing Revolution. This is where the brain of the new culture will emerge.  (06/11/02) How To Cheer Yourself Up When You're Down Got the colder weather, sour relationships, no money, poor health, plain ol' down 'n dirty blues? Try some of these strategies to blow away those dark clouds and let the sunshine into your life again.  (06/10/02) Managing Companies in the New Economy John Robb writes: One thing I learned was that a corporation isn't beholden only to the shareholders, it is responsible for meeting the needs of a complex web of stakeholders.  Stakeholders come in a variety of different flavors: 1) Financial--Shareholders and lenders. 2) Insiders--Managers and employees. 3) Co-dependents--Business partners and suppliers. 4)Customers. And 5) External--Government, community, environmental, labor unions, etc..  ... The inevitable train wreck had to happen.  When faced with the new economic realities  that increased competition and lowered profitability, corporate America decided to cook the books. Worse, CEOs cooked the books in order to line their own pockets with deeply in the money stock options. ...That has all changed. ... The ignored stakeholders now have new power enabled by better information flow.  Customers, employees, external stakeholders, and business partners have a new deal for managers:  reward us, provide us more for less, integrate with us, train us, and invest in us -- if you do, you get to keep your job.   (06/10/02) The End Is Nigh Steve MacLaughlin writes: It's all gonna come crashing down. I'm normally a glass-is-half-full kinda guy, but everywhere I look the walls are swaying. Perhaps that's because so many of them are really just set decorations and not the real thing. I think the real estate market is gonna come crashing down. I think the music industry is gonna come crashing down. I think the professional sports television contracts boondoggle is gonna come crashing down. I think the airline industry and telecom are gonna come crashing down. I think higher-education is gonna come crashing down. I think network news is gonna come crashing down. Today's way of doing business is not sustainable. The Cult of Free has something to do with it, but the companies themselves have been willing accomplices. Now just to prove that I'm a cynical optimist I believe that banking, healthcare, adaptive technology, privacy/security, and biotech are on their way to the top. (06/10/02) Broadband Goes Wireless New York Times -- Mr. Holt and his business partner, John Furrier, both software engineers, have started a company with a shoestring budget and an ambitious target: the cable and phone companies that currently hold a near-monopoly on high-speed access for the "last mile" between the Internet and the home. ... The pair's company, known as Etherlinx, has taken the 802.11b standard and used it to build a system that can transmit Internet data up to 20 miles at high speeds — enough to blanket entire urban regions and make cable or D.S.L. connections obsolete.  (06/10/02) First Strike Is Now Policy Washington Post -- The Bush administration is developing a new strategic doctrine that moves away from the Cold War pillars of containment and deterrence toward a policy that supports preemptive attacks against terrorists and hostile states with chemical, biological or nuclear weapons. The new doctrine will be laid out by President Bush's National Security Council as part of the administration's first "National Security Strategy" being drafted for release by early this fall, senior officials said. One senior official said the document, without abandoning containment and deterrence, will for the first time add "preemption" and "defensive intervention" as formal options for striking at hostile nations or groups that appear determined to use weapons of mass destruction against the United States. Bush hinted at the new doctrine in his State of the Union address in January, when he labeled Iraq, Iran and North Korea an "axis of evil" and warned that he would not allow them to threaten the United States with weapons of mass destruction. The president articulated the doctrine for the first time June 1 in a commencement address at West Point.  (06/10/02) GIFTegrity Specifications Timothy Wilken writes: Tensegrity is the pattern that results when push and pull have a win-win relationship with each other. The pull is continuous and the push is discontinuous. The continuous pull is balanced by the discontinuous push producing an integrity of tension and compression. This creates a powerful self-stabilizing system. The term tensegrity comes from synergic science. The gifting tensegrity is a newly invented mechanism for the exchange of human help. The continuous pull of the giftees' needs are balanced by the discontinuous push from the giftors' offers  of help. Again we see as an INTERdependent life form, there will be times when we will help others and times when others will help us. ... Here is the latest revision of how this might work.  (06/10/02) The New Humanists John Brockman writes: In 1992, in an essay entitled "The Emerging Third Culture," I put forward the following argument:  "In the past few years, the playing field of American intellectual life has shifted, and the traditional intellectual has become increasingly marginalized. A 1950s education in Freud, Marx, and modernism is not a sufficient qualification for a thinking person today. Indeed, the traditional American intellectuals are, in a sense, increasingly reactionary, and quite often proudly (and perversely) ignorant of many of the truly significant intellectual accomplishments of our time. Their culture, which dismisses science, is often nonempirical. It uses its own jargon and washes its own laundry. It is chiefly characterized by comment on comments, the swelling spiral of commentary eventually reaching the point where the real world gets lost." ... Ten years later, that fossil culture is in decline, replaced by the emergent “third culture” of the essay’s title, a reference to C. P. Snow’s celebrated division of the thinking world into two cultures—that of the literary intellectual and that of the scientist. This new culture consists of those scientists and other thinkers in the empirical world who, through their work and expository writing, have taken the place of the traditional intellectual in rendering visible the deeper meanings of our lives, redefining who and what we are.  (06/10/02) New World New Mind Robert Ornstein and Paul Ehrlich writing in 1995:  Why does the growing budget deficit attract relatively little attention while the comparatively meaningless stock market "crash" makes headlines? Why do many popular writers yearn for a return to an education suitable for Oxford men before World War I, when the world has changed in critical ways to a greater extent since World War II than it changed between the birth of Christ and that war? Why do the numbers of nuclear weapons expand astronomically but largely unheralded, while a small girl trapped in a well commands the front pages? Why do we collectively spend billions on medical care while neglecting the simple preventative actions that, if we took them, would save many times the lives?  We believe it is no accident. All these things are happening now, and are happening all at once, in part because the human mental system is failing to comprehend the modern world. So events will, in our opinion, continue to be out of control until people realize how selectively the environment impresses the human mind and how our comprehension is determined by the biological and cultural history of humanity. These unnoticed yet fundamental connections to our past, and how we can retrain ourselves for a "new world" of the future, one filled with unprecedented threats are what this book is all about.  (06/10/02) More Paradox While our Deputy Secretary of State visits India and Pakistan pleading for military restraint, our Department of Defense is selling both sides major weapons packages.  New Zealand Herald --  "The US has taken the lead by signing in April a US$146 million ($298 million) deal with New Delhi for artillery radar at a time when more than a million Indian and Pakistani soldiers face off along the 3200km frontier. The build-up began after a militant raid on India's Parliament last December.  Another 20 "big ticket" military items have been approved by the Bush Administration for sale to India, including engines and advanced avionics for the indigenous light combat aircraft program, submarine rescue facilities and ground sensors, and electronic fencing for installation along Kashmir's Line of Control.  Pakistan, too, is being sold these satellite-linked sensors and has unofficially been told that "low-key" military sales will resume shortly. "  (06/09/02) Paradox Paradox is defined as a situation which is contrary to received opinion or expectation. One of the major powers of time-binding is the ability to predict. When time-binders make a prediction and the result is different, they are surprised. Paradox is when things are not as we would expect them to be. The idea that best describes our present human condition is paradox.  It is the best of times, and it is the worst of times.  (06/09/02) A Preview of the Near Future The GAP between rich and poor continues to widen. The very rich are under the illusion they can somehow stay above it all. Washington Post --  SAO PAULO, Brazil -- Michael Klein, a 52-year-old executive known as the Home Appliance King, switched off the lights in his cavernous office, took a private elevator to the gusty rooftop of his fortress-like corporate headquarters here and caught his evening ride across town -- in a helicopter. Beefy bodyguards guided Klein into the dimmed cabin of his midnight blue Agusta A119 Koala. Within moments, it lifted off, joining other airborne limousines darting over the hazy skyline. Klein is one of hundreds of new helicopter commuters in Sao Paulo, the world's fourth-largest metropolis, where the rich and powerful soar high above exploding urban ills. En route to his mansion in Alphaville -- a walled city where the privileged live behind electrified fences patrolled by a private army of 1,100 -- Klein quietly stared out the window. His pilot clipped low over the honeycomb-like slums and clogged highways below. More than halfway through a nine-minute commute, the copter grazed over a cluster of inner-city prisons. A squad of machine-gun-toting guards stood near a perimeter wall, their gaunt faces squinting upward as Klein's copter buzzed by.  (06/09/02) 9:10:05 AM

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