Good Morning,
I made contact with an interesting scientist. His name is Stephen Thaler and he is the founder of an interesting company called Imagination Engines, Inc. His current focus in on the creation of a World Brain.
I currently preparing some e-papers for him on Understanding Human Knowing and Intelligence.
Meanwhile at the SynEARTH network there is a lot to read....
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Timothy Wilken, MD explains: Disease results within a living system whenever the system’s stressor adaptability (the total ability of the living system to adapt to stressors) is exceeded by the sum of the stressors acting upon the system. DISTRESS—Stage 1—Distress exists within a living system when the sum of stressors acting upon the living system exceeds the stressor adaptability of the system producing a localized or generalized loss of function. The living system, by using reserves and stored energy, is able to restore function without disability. DISABILITY—Stage 2—Disability exists within a living system when the sum of stressors acting upon the living system exceeds the stressor adaptability of the system producing a localized or generalized loss of function. The living system is unable to restore function even using reserves and stored energy. This must always include functions considered essential; should include functions considered normal; and when more is know, will include functions thar are considered optimal. When using this definition of disability, it is necessary to state the level of organization with the living system to which the disability refers. Disability, by definition, is reversible. DAMAGE—Stage 3—Damage exists within a living system when the sum of stressors acting upon the living system exceeds the stressor adaptability of the system producing a non-reversible disability. Damage can exist at any level of organization within the living system or within the living system as a whole. No cure is possible at this stage of disease. DEATH—Stage 4—Death exists within a living system when the sum of stressors acting upon the living system exceeds the stressor adaptability of the living system producing a loss of ability of the living system to produce negentropy or order. Death is irreversible. (06/21/02) | |
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Laurence Evans writes: By "holism" I mean that nature shows an interdependence, expressed as a reciprocity between long-associated organisms (living plants and animals), forming a natural panoply. PERPETUITY is the continual and natural drive or impulse for survival and the perpetuation of the individual. Survival and perpetuity reflect an aspect of natural selection, which is the consequence of good design. ... I show that evolutionary processes lead to interactions and behaviour that provide a degree of compatibility (interdependence) between long-associated organisms. A compatible animal exhibits behaviour reducing its effect upon the habitat upon which it depends for survival. (06/21/02) | |
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In Eco-Economy a recent book by Lester R. Brown, he notes that if China were to have a car in every garage, American style, it would need 80 million barrels of oil a day-more than the world currently produces. If paper consumption per person in China were to reach the U.S. level, China would need more paper than the world produces. There go the world's forests. If the fossil fuel-based, automobile-centered, throwaway economic model will not work for China, it won't work for the other 3 billion people in the developing world-and it will not work for the rest of the world. ... But Brown is optimistic as he describes how to restructure the global economy to make it compatible with the earth's ecosystem so that economic progress can continue. ... In the new economy, wind farms replace coal mines, hydrogen-powered fuel cells replace internal combustion engines, and cities are designed for people, not cars. Glimpses of the new economy can be seen in the wind farms of Denmark, the solar rooftops of Japan, and the bicycle network of the Netherlands. (06/21/02) | |
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Timothy Wilken writes: All ‘whole-parts’ in ‘space-time’ have substance and form. The substance is ‘matter- energy’, and form is the ‘order’. Order is relationship—the pattern, organization and form of that ‘matter-energy’. Jules Henri Poincaré explained in 1908: “Science is built up of facts, as a house is with stones. But a collection of facts is no more a science than a heap of stones is a house.” ... It is the order, pattern, organization, form and relationship of the facts that make a science; and the order, pattern, organization, form and relationship of the stones that make a house. An understanding of this concept of order—pattern, organization, form and relationship; and its compliment concept disorder—patternlessness, disorganization, formlessness; and relationshiplessness that is essential to a full understanding Universe. (06/20/02) | |
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Raymond Kurzweil writes: As we move into the biological world, consider the intricate dance of spirals of DNA during mitosis. How about the “loveliness” of a tree as it bends in the wind and its leaves churn in a tangled dance? Or the bustling world we see in a microscope? There’s transcendence everywhere. A comment on the word “transcendence” is in order here. To transcend means to “go beyond,” but this need not compel us to an ornate dualist view that regards transcendent levels of reality (e.g., the spiritual level) to be not of this world. We can “go beyond” the “ordinary” powers of the material world through the power of patterns. Rather than a materialist, I would prefer to consider myself a “patternist.” It’s through the emergent powers of the pattern that we transcend. Consider the author of this chapter. I am not merely or even principally the material stuff I am made of because the actual particles that comprise me turn over quickly. Most cells in the body are replaced within a few months. Although neurons persist longer, the actual atoms making up the neurons are also rapidly replaced. In the first chapter I made the analogy to water in a stream rushing around rocks. The pattern of water is relatively stable, yet the specific water molecules change in milliseconds. The same holds true for us human beings. It is the immense, indeed transcendent, power of our pattern that persists. The power of patterns to persist goes beyond explicitly self-replicating systems such as organisms and self-replicating technology. It is the persistence and power of patterns that, quite literally, gives life to the Universe. The pattern is far more important than the material stuff that comprises it. (06/20/02) | |
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Wendy Priesnitz writes: If we are going to improve the lives of our communities, we must recreate our institutions and rethink how we relate to them. And if we look critically at how we educate ourselves, we’ll find an institution that long ago ceased to serve our needs. ... Let’s face it: The majority of the problems facing society today – pollution, unethical politicians; poverty, unsafe cars...the list goes on – have been created or overseen by the best traditional college graduates. Whether these problems were created by design or accident, we cannot fix them by continuing the status quo. We need to create a society that chooses action over consumption, that favors relating to others over developing new weapons, that encourages conservation over production. And this just won’t happen unless we de-institutionalize learning. (06/20/02) | |
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New York Times -- WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Bush on Wednesday proposed spending $500 million over the next five years to keep mothers in parts of Africa and the Caribbean from passing the AIDS virus to their babies. He called on other world leaders to help ``save children from disease and death.'' ``Medical science gives us the power to save these young lives. Conscience demands we do so,'' Bush said. ... The Global AIDS Alliance branded Bush's plan ``grossly underfinanced.'' Bush's announcement is part of a White House strategy to project a compassionate image for the United States ahead of a summit next week in Canada. The aim is to soften criticism that America doesn't spend enough helping poor countries, a senior Bush adviser said. (06/19/02) | |
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Forbes.com -- An awkward silence ensued. The blue suits did not even confer among themselves. They just sat there, stonelike. Finally, the chief suit responded. "OK," he said, "maybe you don't infringe these seven patents. But we have 10,000 U.S. patents. Do you really want us to go back to Armonk [IBM headquarters in New York] and find seven patents you do infringe? Or do you want to make this easy and just pay us $20 million?" After a modest bit of negotiation, Sun cut IBM a check, and the blue suits went to the next company on their hit list. In corporate America, this type of shakedown is repeated weekly. The patent as stimulant to invention has long since given way to the patent as blunt instrument for establishing an innovation stranglehold. (06/19/02) | |
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Mary M. Leue writes: The difference here is that learning is a process that only works well when it is basically self-chosen, which is why I posed the question of "Which way: top down or bottom up?" as the title of this chapter. It is my profound conviction that we of the Albany Free School have survived and thrived largely because we did very little in the way of prior planning for structure, but instead, made it up as we went along. So you would have to say that we have lived by the law of "bottom up." I doubt that we would have survived this long if we had pre-planned how things ought to go - because if we had, the second generation of people now coming into the community would have seen it as already established, which would have left them no room for innovation or change. This criterion of spontaneity goes for adults as well as for children. Engaging in the learning process on the basis of a voluntary choice for nearly thirty years has left me with no doubt whatsoever that this is the right way to go! And having worked with a socio-economically integrated group of children in the ghetto in an "unschool" (as you might call it) in which the designated teachers were also self-chosen for their roles - we have never hired a single teacher nor fired one for lack of credentialization, for "incompetence" or for any other reason - I can testify to the fact that it WORKS! Our kids come to us by their own (not their parents') choice, and leave us on the same basis when they want something else. So do our teachers. There are not two rules, one which applies only to children, another to the adults, as there are in most learning centers. And we have always been open for visitation, because (unlike some free schools) our children love visitors! In fact, they surround them, take them by the hand and lead them to wherever they want them to go! And bid them a fond goodby when they leave. (02/19/02) | |
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Ray Kurzweil writes: By the second half of this twenty-first century, there will be no clear distinction between human and machine intelligence. On the one hand, we will have biological brains vastly expanded through distributed nanobot-based implants. On the other hand, we will have fully nonbiological brains that are copies of human brains, albeit also vastly extended. And we will have myriad other varieties of intimate connection between human thinking and the technology it has fostered. Ultimately, nonbiological intelligence will dominate because it is growing at a double exponential rate, whereas for all practical purposes biological intelligence is at a standstill. By the end of the twenty-first century, nonbiological thinking will be trillions of trillions of times more powerful than that of its biological progenitors, although still of human origin. It will continue to be the human-machine civilization taking the next step in evolution. Before the twenty-first century is over, the Earth’s technology-creating species will merge with its computational technology. After all, what is the difference between a human brain enhanced a trillion fold by nanobot-based implants, and a computer whose design is based on high resolution scans of the human brain, and then extended a trillion-fold? (06/19/02) | |
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ScienceDaily Magazine -- CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Life did not begin with one primordial cell. Instead, there were initially at least three simple types of loosely constructed cellular organizations. They swam in a pool of genes, evolving in a communal way that aided one another in bootstrapping into the three distinct types of cells by sharing their evolutionary inventions. The driving force in evolving cellular life on Earth, says Carl Woese, a microbiologist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, has been horizontal gene transfer, in which the acquisition of alien cellular components, including genes and proteins, work to promote the evolution of recipient cellular entities. ... The three primary divisions of life now comprise the familiar bacteria and eukaryotes, along with the Archaea. Woese argues that these three life forms evolved separately but exchanged genes, which he refers to as inventions, along the way. (06/19/02) | |
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Yahoo News -- SYDNEY (Reuters) - Australian scientists have used stem cells to grow an organ in mice critical to the immune system, saying the technique could be used to restore the human immune system in AIDS -HIV and cancer patients. "We are very confident that this work will be able to progress to humans within the next three to five years," said Jason Gill from Monash University Medical School in Melbourne. Gill and fellow researcher Richard Boyd said on Tuesday they had discovered a "small population of cells that can generate a complete and functional thymus." The thymus, a small lymphoid organ situated in the neck, is critical in generating cells vital to the immune system, including infection-fighting T-cells. (06/18/02) | |
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Energy Resources Yahoo Group -- Andrew McKillop writes: As Bush found out after Sept 11, public opinion goes wacky in war time, there is no dissent at all, something all demagogues have known from Ancient Greek times where for example in the Spartan Republic, in its repeated wars, dramatic changes were made to civil law "by popular request and acclaim", such as forbidding heterosexual marriage (only homosexual relations were permitted), forbidding private property (maybe Bush would balk at that), and instituting summary execution for any public person taking a bribe (Bush and Cheney's circle of friends would thin out somewhat). (06/18/02) | |
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WIRED -- Here, George Gilder, one of the tech world's more famous - and controversial - prophets is contemplating how he could have been so right over the past half-dozen years and yet seen everything turn out so terribly wrong. A look of anguish clouds his face. "I knew that it was going to crash, I really did," Gilder says, looking out a window on to Main Street. Since 1996, he has published the Gilder Technology Report, a monthly newsletter that in its heyday was arguably the most influential tout sheet on Wall Street. He glances my way and notices my arched eyebrows. I had plowed through several years' worth of issues, and while I read page after page of praise for a lengthy list of seemingly promising telecommunications companies, I saw nary a hint of warning in anticipation of the Nasdaq's March 2000 tumble and the financial tumult that followed. He adds quickly, "I told people in early 2000 they should sell half their shares in these companies." Then he says, in a tone of self-rebuke: "I didn't say it often. I didn't put it in a newsletter." He made the recommendation to sell, he admits, only within the limited confines of the Telecosm Lounge, his online salon for newsletter subscribers. He fumbles for words, starting one sentence, then another, before growing uncharacteristically silent and staring off into the distance. (06/18/02) | |
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David C. Korten writing in 1997: The problem is this: a predatory global financial system, driven by the single imperative of making ever more money for those who already have lots of it, is rapidly depleting the real capital—the human, social, natural, and even physical capital—on which our well- being depends. The truly troubling part is that so many of us have become willing accomplices to what is best described as a war of money against life. It starts, in part, from our failure to recognize that money is not wealth. Wealth is something that has real value in meeting our needs and fulfilling our wants. Modern money is only a number on a piece of paper or an electronic trace in a computer that by social convention gives its holder a claim on real wealth. In our confusion we concentrate on the money to the neglect of those things that actu ally sustain a good life. It is striking how difficult our very language makes it to express the critical difference between money and real wealth. When we are told that person is wealthy or has a lot of money, we do not know whether she keeps boxes of money under her bed, has bars of gold bullion stored in a bank vault, or is the owner of vast empire of factories, buildings, land, or other physical assets. Nor do such terms as capital, resources, and assets distinguish the differences. (06/18/02) | |
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Rashmi Mayur writing in 1996: Almost 1.2 billion of the world's people live in wretched environmental, social and economic conditions without home or shelter-at the edge of survival. At the present rate of deterioration, another 200 million people will join their numbers by the year 2001-an indicator of the accelerating disintegration and collapse of urban civilization. The most dramatic examples of spreading urban pathology are found in the megacities of the South-such as Bombay, Mexico City, Bangkok, Lagos, and Sao Paulo-where crushing congestion, poisonous pollution, the nightmare of traffic jams, proliferating slums, rising crime rates, poverty, disease and death are endemic. In Northern cities rising crime rates, alienation, pervasive drug addiction and alcoholism, shattered families, and suicides suggest similar urban pathology. Whereas the populations of the largest cities in the West have been stabilized, in India, as in the other countries of the South, megacities and large metropolises are on a runaway population growth path. With approximately 70 percent of its 945 million people still living in villages, India remains an agricultural country by international reckoning. Yet it also has 280 million city dwellers, the largest number of urbanites of any country in the world. The populations of Bombay, Delhi and Calcutta have doubled in the last 25 years. (06/18/02) | |
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BBC NEWS -- Scientists at the Australian National University (ANU) made a beam of light disappear in one place and reappear in another a short distance away. The achievement confirms that in theory teleportation is possible, at least for sub-atomic particles; whether it can be done for larger systems, such as atoms, remains to be seen. The more likely applications will come in telecommunications, enabling much faster transfer of data and the use of encryption that can never be broken. ... But for a human to be teleported, a machine would have to be built that could pinpoint and analyse the trillions and trillions of atoms that make up the human body. (06/18/02) | |
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BBC NEWS -- Mandayan is a farmer in Padinettankudi, a poor rural village in the south Indian state of Tamil Nadu. For months he has been suffering from watery eyes and blurred vision. Today he has come into the thatched hut behind the village tea stall to seek help, not at a doctor's surgery, but at what has become the village internet kiosk. The young local woman who runs the kiosk switches on a webcam. The computer whirrs on the desk beside her as she carefully takes pictures of Mandayan's eyes and records his symptoms, using an online patient questionnaire. She then sends the pictures and voice recording to the world-famous Aravind Eye Hospital in the city of Madurai, 40 km away. What would have taken days or weeks by post is achieved instantly, by e-mail. ... Dr Venkatasamy is fully aware of the huge potential of the internet for reaching the millions of people in rural India who are needlessly blind, and his vision goes beyond simply restoring sight. "This is very exciting, because poor people need not be poor. If a man recovers his sight and earns even a dollar a day, that means six million people recovering their sight each year could be earning 6 million dollars a day," he says. (06/18/02) | |
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Terence R. Wilken writes: Go and get the check book Martha, the markets have gone down again. Now is the time that we have to buy more. That has been what the stock sellers have been telling us for years. The markets will always go up. Buy on the dips. There is no consequence to corporate bad investments, bad marketing, or bad accounting. They can only make money, so let us join the club. It seems that no one has ever heard of the business cycle. We have made it a thing of the past. That was what our parents had to live with. We have learned from their mistakes, and figured out how to never have a down turn in the economy ever again. Our parents went through the great depression. That can never happen again. In order for the government to continue to keep our thoughts in the “proper” frame of mind, it has become important for them to insure that the markets show some sparks of life. Have you noticed that markets have not gone down two days in a row for months. Somehow they always amazingly come back at the end of the second day. Of course I am sure that that is a normal thing, and the markets come back because they are fairly valued. After all CNBC cannot be telling me untruths! Wait until next year. I for one have been enjoying the bull and bear commercials. For some reason the bear has been made a much more likable character. (06/17/02) | |
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Vernor Vinge writes: The acceleration of technological progress has been the central feature of this century. We are on the edge of change comparable to the rise of human life on Earth. The precise cause of this change is the imminent creation by technology of entities with greater than human intelligence. ... I think it's fair to call this event a singularity. It is a point where our old models must be discarded and a new reality rules. As we move closer to this point, it will loom vaster and vaster over human affairs till the notion becomes a commonplace. Yet when it finally happens it may still be a great surprise and a greater unknown. (06/17/02) | |
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The new science of artificial societies suggests that real ones are both more predictable and more surprising than we thought. Growing long-vanished civilizations and modern-day genocides on computers will probably never enable us to foresee the future in detail—but we might learn to anticipate the kinds of events that lie ahead, and where to look for interventions that might work. (06/17/02) | |
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Mark Hertsgaard writes: What we need is a Global Green Deal: a program to renovate our civilization environmentally from top to bottom in rich and poor countries alike. Making use of both market incentives and government leadership, a 21st century Global Green Deal would do for environ-mental technologies what government and industry have recently done so well for computer and Internet technologies: launch their commercial takeoff. Getting it done will take work, and before we begin we need to understand three facts about the reality facing us. First, we have no time to lose. While we’ve made progress in certain areas–air pollution is down in the U. S.–big environmental problems like climate change, water scarcity and species extinction are getting worse, and faster than ever. Thus we have to change our way profoundly–and very soon. (06/17/02) | |
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New York Times -- The Bush administration decided last week to relax air-quality rules governing older coal-fired power plants. ... The power companies and the big refineries were thrilled. ... The (original) provision compelled utilities to install modern pollution controls whenever they build new power plants or significantly upgrade existing units so as to produce more power (and, inevitably, more pollution). Written in 1977, the provision was aimed mainly at hundreds of aging, coal-fired plants that were exempted from the act's stringent regulations in the expectation that they would soon be retired. Most of these "grandfathered" plants are still going strong, contributing heavily to smog and acid rain. Plants in the Midwest send so much pollution eastward on the prevailing winds that it is almost impossible for states like New York, New Jersey and Connecticut to meet federal clean air standards. (06/17/02) | |
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New York Times -- The advance of Hubbard Glacier seems to run counter to what many glaciologists see as one likely effect of global climate change: a great loss of ice by most of Alaska's glaciers. But the Hubbard, being a tidewater glacier, operates differently than valley glaciers, which do not empty into bodies of water. At the glaciology symposium, research was presented by the Geophysical Institute at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, showing that over the last five years, Alaskan glaciers — even factoring in those like Hubbard that are growing — have been melting and adding almost twice as much water to the world's oceans as the entire Greenland ice cap. The melting is most pronounced in the region that includes Yakutat. (06/17/02) | |
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New York Times -- ANCHOR POINT, Alaska, June 13 — To live in Alaska when the average temperature has risen about seven degrees over the last 30 years means learning to cope with a landscape that can sink, catch fire or break apart in the turn of a season. ... In Barrow, the northernmost city in North America, it means coping with mosquitoes in a place where they once were nonexistent, and rescuing hunters trapped on breakaway ice at a time of year when such things once were unheard of. From Fairbanks to the north, where wildfires have been burning off and on since mid-May, it means living with hydraulic jacks to keep houses from slouching and buckling on foundations that used to be frozen all year. Permafrost, they say, is no longer permanent. (06/16/02) | |
8:16:25 AM 
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