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Thursday, September 05, 2002
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Good Morning, This is the beginning of my three day strongend. I hope to finish volume one of my book on Knowing and Human Intelligence. Meanwhile lots to read on the SynEARTH network.
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B. Deric Morris writes: From a century notable more for excess than success, more for inhuman atrocities than human advances, we find ourselves at the threshold of the most critical phase of our development. Never before have we been so much at risk, nor so nearly had the means to avert our self-destruction. Though it may already be too late. A definitive characteristic of humans, as a species, is our common background of protean survivability. Thus far, at least, our species has managed to get by through generalization, as opposed to specialization; adaptability beyond adaptation. It could be said that, of all living species, the human ancestral journey has exploited more different biomes than any other, and expanded into further environments where no known species has evolved, in and of itself, to survive. ... Starting from where we are right now, our prospects don't look very good. The Four Horsemen are as busy as ever; from deliberate, organized genocide (going on even as this is being written, in Sudan); to the disease of the week, unstoppable and lethal; to mass extinction, starvation, and pollution; our current inventory of woes is nothing short of appalling. All due to human actions. The continent of Africa, where our remote ancestors are thought to have emerged, is today a threat to our whole human species. Since Africa has also been the source of the most virulent diseases, not to mention recent outbreaks of mutating viruses, and since global transportation can spread plagues literally in a matter of hours, the risk of another pandemic, much worse than the last, is greater now than it has ever been. (09/05/02) | |
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In a recent Red Herring magazine article, writer Geoffrey James said "pundits can't stop hyping the business opportunities of artificial intelligence" and described AI as a "technological backwater." Ray Kurzweil challenges this view, citing "hundreds of examples of narrow AI deeply integrated into our information-based economy" and "many applications beginning to combine multiple methodologies," a step towards the eventual achievement of "strong AI" (human-level intelligence in a machine). (09/05/02) | |
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New York Times Magazine -- Tehran, IRAN -- In the north, high-price call girls anger their disapproving neighbors by taunting them, bragging that their clients include government officials. Again, down south it's a different story. As dawn breaks it is easy to find chador-clad and probably heroin-addicted working girls sleeping outdoors in certain parks. They tend to cluster around the public toilets, which have become their refuges, affording them a place to wash, as well as to shoot up. As a result, H.I.V. and AIDS are now very much on the public-health agenda of the Islamic republic. ... More and more young Iranians are turning to metaphorical means of escape. In the wealthier northern suburbs of Tehran, kids pop Ecstasy tabs and smoke dope at secret parties. In the poorer south, it's heroin and opium. ... Down in the basement, a man with a resemblance to the ''Sgt. Pepper''-era John Lennon is rehearsing. With him in the hot, stuffy studio is a bassist dressed in black, a drummer and a 10-year-old Afghan boy playing small tambour drums. Behind the glass, a sound engineer is switching switches and twiddling knobs. A girl in jeans, T-shirt and sneakers is slouched on a sofa with a young man with whom she clearly has rather more than a passing acquaintance. Two other girls are watching the session. As I enter this studio, my first impression is that I have stepped through the looking glass right into another country. A country far from the streets above us, with its women in black chadors, vast murals of revolutionary martyrs and throngs of demonstrators chanting ''Death to America'' and ''Death to Israel.'' But of course, I am not in another country. Iran is a country with two faces. There are the public face of conformity with Islamic rules and the private face, which as often as not shuns, ignores or even despises those strictures. (09/05/02) | |
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London Times -- “Less than 10 per cent of the remaining habitat of the great apes of Africa will be left relatively undisturbed by 2030 if road-building, mining camps and other infrastructure developments continue at current levels,” the UN report said. The future of the orangutans of South-East Asia looks even bleaker. In 28 years there will be almost no pristine habitat left. The shrinking habitat has been accompanied by a sharp decline in great ape populations. Some estimates put the chimpanzee population at 200,000, compared with more than two million a century ago. There are a few thousand lowland gorillas left and only a few hundred mountain gorillas on the volcanic slopes of Rwanda, Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Researchers say that the great apes are highly intelligent with sophisticated social structures. Chimpanzees share 98.4 per cent of human DNA, more than any other mammal. “They are like us in more than their biological composition,” Jane Goodall, the leading primatologist, said. (09/05/02) | |
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CNN -- West Nile virus has now claimed 32 lives in the nation this year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported Tuesday. Three of four people who received organ transplants from a single donor last month have West Nile virus, and the donor also had the illness, evidence the virus could have been transmitted through the donated organs, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced Tuesday. One of the transplant patients has died. The others are recovering. ... The key of the investigation may be the source of the virus for the organ donor, a Georgia woman who was fatally injured in a car accident July 30. Her kidneys, heart, and liver were donated and implanted in the four patients after her death. The woman received blood transfusions from more than 60 people before she died. Health authorities are trying to figure out whether the woman was infected through the donated blood or by a mosquito bite, which so far is the only known cause of human contamination. "In terms of how did the donor acquire this West Nile virus infection, the two possibilities are a mosquito bite before the time that the person was injured in the automobile accident, or received a blood product immediately after being injured," Hughes said. "I think we have to aggressively pursue the possibility that a blood product is responsible for this." (09/05/02) | |
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New York Times -- After a week of intensive negotiations, diplomats here at the World Summit on Sustainable Development arrived at a plan early this morning that is intended to reduce poverty and preserve the earth's natural resources. The breakthrough came after diplomats worked late into the night on Tuesday to resolve a dispute over language in the conference's plan on health care for women. Also on Tuesday, Russia announced that it would ratify the Kyoto Protocol, a treaty intended to ease global warming — a move virtually ensuring that the treaty would go into effect despite its rejection by the United States. ... The plan is meant to set the global agenda for coming years. It calls on nations to reduce by half the number of poor people who lack sanitation by 2015; to commit to the sound management of chemicals with the goal of minimizing their adverse effects on health and nature by 2020; and to reduce significantly by 2010 the number of animals and plants having endangered status. The plan calls for the reduction of agricultural subsidies in wealthy countries, which, poor nations say, protect farmers in the United States and Europe from competition. It also urges nations to promote renewable energy sources like solar and wind power as well as to expand access to energy services by the poor. (09/05/02) | |
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New York Times -- Dr. Keith Echelmeyer, a professor of geology and geophysics at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks and an accomplished bush pilot, has been flying his two-seat Piper PA-12 regularly over glaciers since 1993 and using laser altimetry to plot changes. After comparing their data against topographical maps that go back 50 years, he and his colleagues recently published their findings in Science for the first 67 glaciers measured, representing about 20 percent of the area covered by these Alaskan ice rivers and the geographically connected regions of the Canadian Yukon. From climate models, as well as years of field work, Dr. Echelmeyer had expected a general thinning of the glaciers that would be consistent with Alaska's summer temperature increase averaging 5 degrees over the past three decades. Instead, the researchers found that since the mid-1990's, Alaskan and Yukon glaciers had been dumping enough water into the ocean to raise sea level by 0.2 millimeters a year. Minuscule though that sounds, it is nearly twice the amount released during the same period by the massive Greenland Ice Sheet. Besides, as Dr. Echelmeyer pointed out, to coastal communities, a one-inch sea-level rise can mean a 500-inch incursion across a nearly flat beach. "Boy, to find two- or three-times faster thinning," Dr. Echelmeyer said, "that's a huge amount. The contribution of Alaskan glaciers to sea-level change is important, and big." (09/05/02) | |
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Is the human race hurtling towards oblivion, to be impaled on the spikes of accelerating technological change and population growth? ... Best of Times -- Damien Broderick tells us that developments in computer, gene and nano (molecular) technologies, he says, will produce by 2030, or 2050 at the latest, a ‘spike’ or ‘technological singularity’: a period of change of such speed and scale it will render the future opaque, where things become unknowable. The spike could end in human obsolescence, transformation or transcendence. It could mean, as computing power continues to obey Moore’s Law and double every year, the rapid emergence of not only intelligent machines but superintelligent, conscious machines, which leave humanity in their evolutionary wake. Or it could result in bionically and genetically enhanced superbeings who are effectively immortal. ... Worst of Times -- While simultaneously, Reg Morrison warns that with another 30 to 50 years of population growth (despite the declining birth rate), and the accelerating rate of energy and resource consumption, we seem to be well set up for ‘an evironmental coup de grace’ in the second half of the this century. ‘...(W)e are facing precisely the same conclusion that all mammal plagues eventually face – a hormonally orchestrated autodecline followed by an environmental backlash that cleans up most of the stragglers.’ ... PARADOX-- There is a fascinating symmetry to these spikes, both the result of exponential growth – one in technological power, the other in human numbers – both occurring at about the same time in history. (09/04/02) | |
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As a philosopher and mystic, Saint-Yves d'Alveydre drew upon many esoteric systems, from both East and West, in developing his ideas. In the early 1870's, he proposed Synarchy: a "government by an elite of enlightened initiates". This was to be a single world government forming one institute which would govern humanity based on the highest spiritual and social fundamentals. Synarchy was to be more than a purely political movement, it was to be sensitive to the history and evolution of the human race, changing and developing a "social law" that would evolve with humanity. (09/04/02) | |
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REUTERS -- Tokyo's Nikkei average dropped to an 18-year low on Tuesday as tech-related shares led a broad-based decline sparked by growing concern about the sustainability of Japan's fragile economic recovery. "Market sentiment is absolutely awful right now. Stocks look very cheap at these levels but nobody is ready to buy yet," said Masaharu Sakudo, an adviser at Tachibana Securities. ... "It was only a matter of time until we fell this low," said Masanori Hoshina, head of global portfolio marketing at BNP Paribas. "Part of our weakness lies in concerns about the cloudy economic outlook in the U.S. But the key problem is that there are still no signs of a sustainable economic recovery in Japan," he added. ... High government debt levels are also a worry. "With a public debt of around 140 percent of GDP, the Japanese government doesn't have many cards left up its sleeve," said Hiroshi Nishiyama, senior portfolio manager at SG Yamaichi. "But the perception is growing that this government's economic reforms are going nowhere. Without some decisive action, such as a cut in the consumption tax to rev up spending, I can't be optimistic about the outlook for stocks." (09/04/02)
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8:23:48 AM 
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© TrustMark
2002
Timothy Wilken.
Last update:
10/1/2002; 6:08:18 AM.
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