Sunday, July 13, 2003

What is a GIFTegrity? Timothy Wilken, MD 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. Let us begin by describing how a GIFTegrity might be structured and how it could work. Every member of a synergic help tensegrity would participate in two roles. That as a giftor and that as a giftee. 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. The GIFTegrity works on trust. I give help to those in need and trust that when I am in need there will be those who will give me help. (07/13/03) Interspecies Global Mind Howard Bloom writes: The global brain is not just human, made of our vaunted intelligence. It is webbed between all species. A mass mind knits the continents, the seas, and skies. It turns all creatures great and small into probers, crafters, innovators, ears and eyes. This is the real global brain, the truest planetary mind.  The honey badger uses the black throated honey guide as its surveillance craft. The bird cruises the forest hunting a bee hive, then, chattering and darting, leads the badger to its find. The clawed beast tears apart the tough walls of the hive, and both honey guide and badger share in a wax-comb-and-honey repast1 .When black-capped chickadees spot danger and shriek their mobbing call, ten other bird species recognize the signal and prepare to flee or to defend their all .Off the shores of Costa Rica, tuna and dolphins hunt together, meshing information to increase the harvest of their prey. Seabirds watch their movements carefully and follow in their wake, waiting for them to churn a school of fish to the surface so they, too, can partake. Fishermen scrutinize the movements of the seabirds and from them learn where the meaty tuna and the dolphin churn. (07/13/03) Guns! A Public Health Crisis The New Scientist -- The US Congress is close to passing a bill giving gun makers immunity from liability for deaths or injuries caused by their products; legislation that would place gun makers in a uniquely privileged position. The move highlights the special place granted to guns in US culture, whereby the heavy toll of death and injury that guns inflict is normally viewed as a social and political problem, in which the need to tackle gun crime and accidents is set against traditional rights and freedoms to bear arms. But many experts in the field are arguing that the casualties caused by guns should be seen as something different: a public health crisis that must be tackled with the same vigour as infectious diseases, mental illness and industrial and traffic accidents. To reduce the staggering numbers of gun-related deaths and injuries, they say, manufacturers should embrace a raft of technologies that make guns safer and stop them being used to commit crime. There are 200 million privately owned guns in the US, including 65 million handguns. Firearms are now the second biggest cause of injury-related death in the country, killing 28,663 people in 2000, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, Georgia. For African-American teenagers aged 15 to 19, gun-related homicide is the leading cause of death, and for all American teenagers of similar age gun-related homicide and suicide come second only to motor vehicle accidents. "If it's the number one cause of death for portions of the population, how can it not be a compelling public health problem?" asks Stephen Teret of Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research in Baltimore, Maryland. (07/13/03) Where have all the sparrows gone? BBC Environment -- The population of sparrows is falling in UK cities with numbers thought to have halved in the past 25 years, a new survey reveals. The study, conducted in gardens across the country, found Lincoln had the highest proportion of sparrows while London had the lowest. About 250,000 households across the UK took part in the survey conducted by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB). They counted the number of sparrows in their gardens between 3 May and 11 May, during the bird's breeding season. The population is thought to have slumped to between six and seven million pairs since a high of 12 million in the early 1970s. ... The results of this latest survey will be used to help piece together the reasons behind the decline of house sparrows, and to also offer guidance to people wanting to help them. (07/13/03) Oldest Forest in Europe Falls BBC Environment -- Trees in the last remaining tract of Europe's original forest are being cut down, to the dismay of Polish naturalists. The trees are in the Bialowieza forest, in some respects a treasure comparable to the Amazon rainforest. The official in charge says he is saddened by the government's acquiescence in the felling. Polish conservationists are demanding European Union pressure to halt the destruction. ... The problem is simple: there are patches of the original primeval forest scattered throughout Bialowieza, not simply concentrated in the inviolable central section. Fallen trees disfigure the forest That is why conservationists want all the forest protected. But on 10 May a new management plan for Bialowieza came into effect. It annulled a ban on the felling of trees more than 100 years old. In the two months since then foresters have felled a number of trees in old-growth stands in Bialowieza, the oldest probably about 130 years old. The trees had all been attacked by spruce bark beetles, which eat the bark and leave the tree to die. But conservationists say this is a natural process vital to the forest's health. As the dead tree rots it allows new life to emerge. And the beetles attack only spruce. (07/13/03) 7:33:09 AM

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