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Friday, March 07, 2003
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Renea Roberts has created a beautiful film documenting the Burning Man festival. I had been aware of the festival for some time, but had never realized the importance of the Gifting Economy concept to the event. It became more and more clear, as I watched the film, that this festival was a prototype for the future. Ms. Roberts is, as far as I know, the first to document that phenomena. I highly recommend her film. (03/07/03) | |
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Timothy Wilken, MD writes: Within synergic community, actions that injure humanity as community and/or humanity as individuals are prohibited. ... Further, it is understood that actions that injure the EARTH and environment—the natural resources, fertile soils, waters, minerals, ores, metals, and the very air we breathe—also injures humanity. It is understood that actions that injures LIFE—the plants and animals and the biodiversity of all non-human Life—also injures humanity. It is understood that actions than injures the wealth produced by human action—whether in the form of Time-binding Trust or Property of living humans—also injures humanity. Therefore, the Synergic Guardians stand to protect humanity both as community and as individuals. (10/29/02) | |
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Laurence B. Winn writes: It is said, and not entirely without justification, that computer models of the world economy fail to predict real outcomes. For example, perhaps the most famous of such programs is the Forrester world dynamics model used by the MIT-lead Club of Rome that produced the 1972 report The Limits to Growth. Some of the details of that report, being in error, make the entire range of findings subject to derision from interests not well served by a focus on limits. However, for a first look at a system as chaotic as the world economy, Limits was a very good try. It correctly predicted the current world population of six billion. It was on the mark with its prediction of runaway growth in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, and it was very likely correct in its prediction of a peak in world material standard of living around 2000. Many present-day prognosticators see the report's predicted 2080 die-off due to famine, disease and war as somewhat optimistic, especially in Africa. Dennis Meadows, who lead the MIT team and authored the report, did indeed vary the conditions of the model in order to test "what-if" assumptions. If, for example, we had zeroed population growth by 1975, restricted capital growth by requiring that investment equal depreciation and recycled everything, then the model gives us long-term (but not perpetual) equilibrium at an average world income level of around $3 U.S. per day, equally distributed among nations. If we wait until 2000 (oops), equilibrium is no longer sustainable. There was no model that suggested the possibility of sustainable growth without unlimited resources, which you can get only from space. In the same year Limits was published, then President Richard Nixon shut down the U.S. space program for planetary exploration with human crews, presumably to avoid embarrassing the Communists. For awhile after that, optimists persisted in a lot of talk about space habitats, and by 1975, J. Peter Vajk of the University of California's Lawrence Livermore Laboratory had published a paper titled "The Impact of Space Colonization on World Dynamics". The chief criticism of the Forrester model of world dynamics had been that it consisted of only one "sector", in which the entire world economy was treated as a single "lumped" system, everything averaged. Vajk found that predictions from a two-sector model adequately represented the output of models with as many as 10 sectors, so he settled for the simpler two-sector approach. Then he added a third sector, a space industrial infrastructure ala Gerard K. O'Neill, interacting with the terrestrial economies. Vajk proposed, as did O'Neill, that the space economy would pay for terrestrial imports with energy, specifically, energy from the sun transmitted to earth by proven microwave technology. (03/07/03) | |
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New York Times -- Emptied of most of its innards, filled with concrete and encased in a 40-foot steel canister, a decommissioned nuclear reactor here is headed for a nuclear graveyard in South Carolina. Or is it? Officials here at the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station, where for 24 years the reactor produced electrical power, have been stymied in every effort to find a path across the country for the reactor's shell, which weighs 770 tons and displays mild radioactivity readings. Railroads, ports, environmental groups and antinuclear coalitions — even the Panama Canal — have thrown up roadblocks. Initially set to depart last month, the reactor might not leave until the end of the year, possibly on an 11,000-mile sea voyage around Cape Horn, at the southern tip of South America, and northward to whichever East Coast port chooses to accept it. So far, none have. And that trip will happen only if the Chilean government permits the reactor's passage through its territorial waters. Another option is to go west from California, around the world. "This thing is the proverbial garbage barge," said Mark Massara, the San Francisco-based director of coastal programs for the Sierra Club. "This is a dangerous coastal transport project of unprecedented proportions." (03/07/03) | |
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New York Times -- Drivers of some General Motors minivans will soon be pulling into a Shell station here to fill up on hydrogen, the two companies announced today. They said it would be the first hydrogen pump at an American service station and that hydrogen cars could be in showrooms by the end of the decade. ... The six experimental minivans that are scheduled to arrive in Washington in May have cost more than $1 million apiece, said Larry Burns, G.M.'s vice president for research and development and planning. Each minivan, an Opel Zafira converted to house a stack of fuel cells that generate electricity through a chemical reaction that uses hydrogen, has enough power to accelerate crisply and reach 100 miles per hour, he said. "We think we can build a compelling and affordable car by 2010," he said. "It's a big challenge, but as a technologist, you have to be optimistic. Four years ago, I never dreamed we'd have made as much progress as we have by now. So far, we haven't seen anything that says it can't be done." ... One obstacle to the spread of hydrogen cars is the chicken-and-egg problem of building cars for which there are no refueling stations. "Shell's work with G.M. will show that filling up the car with hydrogen is as simple and safe as filling up with gasoline," said Donald Huberts, the chief executive of Shell Hydrogen. He said that a local Shell station would be reconfigured by October to dispense hydrogen during the rest of the experiment, which is to last until 2005. (03/07/03) | |
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New York Times -- A ruptured sewage pipe serving most of central New Jersey is diverting 2.5 million gallons of raw sewage into upper New York Harbor each hour, closing shellfish beds and threatening the health of Raritan Bay and nearby waters into the summer. ... The pipe, eight and a half feet in diameter, broke early Sunday morning because of a chain of events that started when electricity to a pumping station was briefly interrupted, Mr. Fitamant said. ... The department halted shellfish harvesting in the region's 30,000 acres of shellfish beds, leaving the baymen, already idled by a harsh winter, unable to work as the weather turned warm. ... The break also is a blow to the river estuaries and the lower bay, which has begun to recover from centuries of contamination, said Andrew J. Willner, who has the title of baykeeper for the American Littoral Society, an advocacy group for the shore area's waters. (03/07/03) | |
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New York Times -- Even though oil companies have greatly improved practices in the Arctic, three decades of drilling along Alaska's North Slope have produced a steady accumulation of harmful environmental and social effects that will probably grow as exploration expands, a panel of experts has concluded. Some of the problems could last for centuries, the experts said in a report yesterday, both because environmental damage does not heal easily in the area's harsh climate and because it is uneconomical to remove structures or restore damaged areas once drilling is over. The report, produced by the National Research Council, was immediately hailed by opponents of drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, which lies east of established oil fields and is the only part of America's only stretch of Arctic coastline that for now is off limits to drilling. Advocates of drilling called it biased. Administration officials said improved techniques would lessen the environmental impact of future drilling. The council, the research arm of the National Academies, an independent advisory body on science, produced the report at the request of Republican lawmakers supporting oil drilling in the Arctic refuge. (03/07/03) | |
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CNN News -- Hundreds of bug experts have gathered for a six-day conference to discuss ways to control mosquitoes, amid fears of future West Nile virus outbreaks and concern that the insects could bring other diseases to the country. Last year, the United States recorded more than 4,000 cases of West Nile and 256 deaths from the mosquito-borne virus that causes fevers and aches and can lead to potentially fatal swelling of the brain. "It's just an amazing story of an invasion," said Roger Nasci, a research entomologist in the Fort Collins, Colorado, office of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. ... Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, said West Nile is here to stay and other diseases are likely to follow. The world is more mobile, "fast and furiously" transporting exotic products, animals and bugs from continent to continent, he said Monday. As a result, there is an increased chance of spreading more mosquito-borne diseases such as yellow fever, dengue fever, malaria, encephalitis and Rift Valley fever -- a virus transmitted from livestock to humans by mosquitoes that causes diarrhea, internal bleeding and can result in death. (03/07/03) | |
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CNN News --Twenty-four bombers will begin moving from bases in the United States to Guam as part of a planned beefing up of U.S. military forces in the Pacific to send a "message" to North Korea, the Pentagon said Tuesday. The move is part of the U.S. Pacific Command's effort to maintain a robust military presence around the Korean Peninsula while forces are being built up in the Persian Gulf region. Officials say they intend to send a nonthreatening message to North Korea not to take advantage of the Iraqi situation and assume the U.S. military is distracted. ... Twelve B-1 bombers and 12 B-52 bombers received deployment orders Saturday. It was not immediately clear where the deployed B-1s are based, or whether the B-52s would come from Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota or Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana. (03/07/03) | |
5:26:31 AM 
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© TrustMark
2003
Timothy Wilken.
Last update:
4/1/2003; 5:16:50 AM.
This theme is based on the SoundWaves
(blue) Manila theme. |
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