Sunday, June 16, 2002

Three Ways Timothy Wilken writes:  One of my strongest childhood memories is of fear and running. A pack of boys are chasing me and my brother. If they catch us, they will beat us up. I am very tired. We have been running for nearly thirty minutes. My heart is pounding so hard I can hear little else. Perspiration fills my eyes making it difficult to see. A hundred yards ahead my twin brother is running easier. He is taller and a great runner. The pack cannot catch him. But, they are getting closer to me. Recess is almost over now, if we can just hold out until the bell rings, we will escape back into the safety of the classroom. But our escape will be short-lived. I remember dreading every recess – every lunch hour. Just like in boxing, at the sound of the bell we would all come out fighting. At every recess, the war would resume. ... To my seven year old mind, conflict seemed really stupid. Both sides got hurt. I tried to give as good as I got. Hurt and be hurt. I realized in that first year at the new school that there were no real winners in conflict. Even, when you "won" somehow you lost. It didn't make any sense to me.  (06/16/02) What Does It Mean to Be You? Win Wenger writes: IF we do proceed on the presently questionable assumptions that we ARE individually unique and that our choices and actions DO have significant meaning, we have at least a somewhat better chance of meaningful achievements than if we don't thus proceed. Given those alternatives, the presumption seems justified on the grounds that, as of yet in this snapshot moment of unfolding civilization and history, we have yet to unfold the right questions, much less the right answers. There is so little that we arrogant kings of the universe have found out, have thought through or worked through, we have so far yet to go! It would be foolish to forego our chances at meaningful lives and meaningful accomplishment, deciding it all now preclusively on the basis of such woefully inadequate information. There are things your eyes have seen that no other human eyes have seen — thoughts you've thought (consciously or no), insights and appreciations you've arrived at. (Not that most of us ever pay attention to any of these.) Certainly that's true of much of my own experience. Again, that may just be some of the mere fractalian swirl of chance circumstance. But if I assume that this has no special meaning, my life and my experience are infinitely poorer than if I assign those unique parts of experience special meaning. Thank you, I choose to be the richer, pending further understanding on the topic. (06/16/02) Only Integrity is Going to Count R. Buckminster Fuller said: That’s why I talk about integrity. Integrity of the individual is what we’re being judged for and if we are not passing that examination, we don’t really have the guts, we’ll blow ourselves up. It will be all over. I think it’s all the difference in the world. When I was born, humanity was 95 per cent illiterate. Since I’ve been born, the population has doubled and that total population is now 65 per cent literate. That’s a gain of 130-fold of the literacy. When humanity is primarily illiterate, it needs leaders to understand and get the information and deal with it. When we are at the point where the majority of humans them-selves are literate, able to get the information, we’re in an entirely new relationship to Universe. We are at the point where the integrity of the individual counts and not what the political leadership or the religious leadership says to do. It’s a matter now of humanity getting to the point where it’s now qualifying to make some of its own decisions in relation to its own information. That’s why we’ve come to a new moment of integrity.  (06/16/02) Thinking About Religion Wiseman Daniel Quinn explains:  In fact, to the authors of the stories in Genesis, it looked as if their brothers to the north had the bizarre idea that they had eaten at God's own tree of wisdom and had gained the very knowledge God uses to rule the world. And what knowledge is this? It's a knowledge that only God is competent to use, the knowledge that every single action God might take--no matter what it is, no matter how large or small--is good for one but evil for another. If a fox is stalking a pheasant, it's in the hands of God whether she will catch the pheasant or the pheasant will escape. If God gives the fox the pheasant, then this is good for the fox but evil for the pheasant. If God allows the pheasant to escape, then this is good for the pheasant but evil for the fox. There's no outcome that can be good for both. The same is true in every area of the world's governance. If God allows the valley to be flooded, then this is good for some but evil for others. If God holds back the flood then this too will be good for some but evil for others. Decisions of this kind are clearly at the very root of what it means to rule the world, and the wisdom to make them cannot possibly belong to any mere creature, for any creature making such decisions would inevitably say, "I will make every choice so that it's good for me but evil for all others." And of course this is precisely how the agriculturalist operates, saying, "If I scour this plain to plant food for myself, then this will be evil for all the creatures that inhabit the plain, but it'll be good for me. If I raze this forest to plant food for myself, then this will be evil for all the creatures that inhabit the forest, but it'll be good for me."  What the authors of the stories in Genesis perceived was that their brothers to the north had taken into their own hands the rule of the world; they had usurped the role of God. Those who let God run the world and take the food that he's planted for them have an easy life. But those who want to run the world themselves must necessarily plant their own food, must necessarily make their living by the sweat of the brow. As this makes plain, agriculture was not the crime itself but rather the result of the crime, the punishment that must inevitably follow such a crime. It was wielding the knowledge of good and evil that had turned their brothers in the north into farmers--and into murderers.  (06/15/02) Accelerating Acceleration “For the first time in history it is now possible to take care of everybody at a higher standard of living than any have ever known. Only ten years ago the ‘more with less’ technology reached the point where this could be done. All humanity now has the option to become enduringly successful. This confident assertion was made in 1980 by the late R. Buckminster Fuller–inventor, architect, engineer, mathematician, poet and cosmologist. As early as 1959, Newsweek reported that Fuller predicted the conquest of poverty by the year 2000. In 1977, almost twenty years later, the National Academy of Sciences confirmed Fuller’s prediction. Their World Food and Nutrition Study, prepared by 1,500 scientists, concluded, “If there is the political will in this country and abroad . . . it should be possible to overcome the worst aspects of widespread hunger and malnutrition within one generation.” Even with tragedies like Ethiopia and Somalia, it is becoming clear that, as Fuller predicted, we have arrived at the possibility of eliminating hunger and poverty in all the world within our lifetime. (06/15/02) Toward a World Brain From July 9- 10, 2002 , Imagination Engines will host the World Brain Consortium Conference, in St. Louis, Missouri. During this event, Dr. Stephen Thaler will present the theory, practice, and limitless opportunities offered by the Creativity Machine Paradigm and its derivative technologies that include the Self-Training Artificial Neural Network Object (STANNO). Then he will propose a very bold new direction for this patented technology wherein TCP/IP nodes of the Internet are transformed into a synthetic intelligence capable of producing a torrent of new science, technology, and art. (06/14/02) Making the World Work Timothy Wilken writes:  Let us imagine an aerial view of our community on an average evening at 10:00pm. Looking down we notice that within one square mile there are several small convenience stores open from seven to eleven. These small stores are all competing with each other as well as with larger supermarkets now staying open 24 hours in order to compete with them. At this hour of night there are only a few available customers to be divided up among all these providers. Each store is paying one or more clerks to staff the store, plus the costs for lighting and heating each store. From our view above our community, it is obvious that most of the clerks could be sent home and most of the stores closed and still allow every customer seeking products and services at that hour to get what they needed. This would also produce enormous savings for this group of providers. To all stay open, the providers must pass the costs of doing business on to their customers, so this means that the prices in all of these stores is higher to subsidize this inefficiency. Why is this happening? In today’s world we mostly ignore each other. After all, we are all independent. Each individual is supposed to look out for himself. So there is little communication between provider and consumer. The providers are keeping the stores open in hopes that someone will need something. If they were communicating with their customers, they would know when to be open and when they could close. They could then operate much more efficiently. Now imagine that this same inefficient process is going on with many different kinds of products in every community in our nation and you start to sense the enormous amount of wasted time and energy. (06/14/02) Clean Coal DuLuthSuperior.com -- The solution to one of the most vexing problems confronting coal-fired power plants around the world might come from work under way in Northeastern Minnesota. ... a small Minnesota company testing a new system at the Boswell Energy Center in Cohasset says it can slash power plant emissions of sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide. What's more, this little company called EnviroScrub Technologies has the ear of a corporation with the resources to make things happen -- Minnesota Power. ... EnviroScrub's system relies on a fine black powder called pahlmanite. It's a proprietary product derived from a naturally occuring material, which EnviroScrub won't disclose. ... Smoke from the coal plant is pushed through bags caked with pahlmanite, and the material functions as a filter, trapping sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide, often referred to as "sox'' and "nox.'' ... In tests independently confirmed by Interpoll Laboratories Inc., a 30-year environmental monitoring firm from Circle Lakes, Minn., EnviroScrub's equipment removed more than 99 percent of sulfur dioxide and 92 percent of nitrogen oxide from previously untreated emissions at Boswell. (06/14/02) 7:21:26 AM

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