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Monday, October 13, 2003
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 Interview with R. Buckminster Fuller -- Interviewer: A study of one thousand adolescents in Boston showed that seventy per cent are extremely pessimistic about the future, to the point where they don’t expect to have any future. In your travels, have you sensed this kind of pessimism among young people, and do you have any suggestions on how to convey to them your conviction that we are capable of making the world a hundred per cent physical success? ... RBF: It certainly is true, I find audience after audience did not know we have an option to make it. There is no way they could, unless they–I’ve said it’s so difficult, because, in the first place, you have to get into technology very deeply to understand what I call the design revolution. They have to be involved where I’ve told you just about–knowing what the uses of tin are and where it is. And so I find, because we’re dealing in an invisible reality and humanity is so specialized, it is very difficult for them to understand from one person to another. At any rate, when I have an audience, I never have an audience that doesn’t come out–very rarely, you’ve been with me many times–they almost always give a standing ovation. In other words, I find the audiences very excited. But then they come and say to me, "Your optimism has brushed off on me. I didn’t know we had an option. I feel so much better." They say, "Your optimism." And I am not optimistic or pessimistic. I feel that optimism and pessimism are very unbalanced. I am a very hard engineer. I am a mechanic. I am a sailor. I am an air pilot. I don’t tell people I can get you across the ocean with my ship unless I know what I’m talking about. So, I think it’s absolutely touch-and-go whether we’re going to make it. But the point is, for me to tell you that you have an option is not to be optimistic. But in real answer to that question, time and again, of course I am running into millions who don’t know we have the option, because it’s invisible, and I feel I have tremendous responsibility. So when people ask me to come and talk to them, I do my best to let them know they do have the option. Of course they’re pessimistic, not knowing that. ... Interviewer: How would you, right now in your life, define integrity? ... RBF: I find that I have to use the word courage, due to the circumstances of humanity. The courage to cooperate or initiate are based entirely on the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth as the divine mind within you tells you the truth is. It really does require a courage and a self-disciplining to go along with that truth. That’s the way I define it. (10/13/03)
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 Jonathan Rauch writes: That genetic engineering may be the most environmentally beneficial technology to have emerged in decades, or possibly centuries, is not immediately obvious. Certainly, at least, it is not obvious to the many U.S. and foreign environmental groups that regard biotechnology as a bête noire. Nor is it necessarily obvious to people who grew up in cities, and who have only an inkling of what happens on a modern farm. Being agriculturally illiterate myself, I set out to look at what may be, if the planet is fortunate, the farming of the future. It was baking hot that April day. I traveled with two Virginia state soil-and-water-conservation officers and an agricultural-extension agent to an area not far from Richmond. The farmers there are national (and therefore world) leaders in the application of what is known as continuous no-till farming. In plain English, they don't plough. For thousands of years, since the dawn of the agricultural revolution, farmers have ploughed, often several times a year; and with ploughing has come runoff that pollutes rivers and blights aquatic habitat, erosion that wears away the land, and the release into the atmosphere of greenhouse gases stored in the soil. Today, at last, farmers are working out methods that have begun to make ploughing obsolete. ... The conservation people in Virginia were full of excitement over no-till farming. Their job was to clean up the James and York Rivers and the rest of the Chesapeake Bay watershed. Most of the sediment that clogs and clouds the rivers, and most of the fertilizer runoff that causes the algae blooms that kill fish, comes from farmland. By all but eliminating agricultural erosion and runoff—so Brian Noyes, the local conservation-district manager, told me—continuous no-till could "revolutionize" the area's water quality. Even granting that Noyes is an enthusiast, from an environmental point of view no-till farming looks like a dramatic advance. The rub—if it is a rub—is that the widespread elimination of the plough depends on genetically modified crops. ... Greenpeace declares on its Web site: "The introduction of genetically engineered (GE) organisms into the complex ecosystems of our environment is a dangerous global experiment with nature and evolution ... GE organisms must not be released into the environment. They pose unacceptable risks to ecosystems, and have the potential to threaten biodiversity, wildlife and sustainable forms of agriculture." ... Under this policy the cleaner water and healthier soil that continuous no-till farming has already brought to the Chesapeake Bay watershed would be undone, and countless tons of polluted runoff and eroded topsoil would accumulate in Virginia rivers and streams while debaters debated and researchers researched. Recall David Sandalow: "Biotechnology has huge potential benefits and huge risks, and we need to address both as we move forward." A lot of environmentalists would say instead, "before we move forward." That is an important difference, particularly because the big population squeeze will happen not in the distant future but over the next several decades. For reasons having more to do with politics than with logic, the modern environmental movement was to a large extent founded on suspicion of markets and artificial substances. Markets exploit the earth; chemicals poison it. Biotech touches both hot buttons. It is being pushed forward by greedy corporations, and it seems to be the very epitome of the unnatural. Still, I hereby hazard a prediction. In ten years or less, most American environmentalists (European ones are more dogmatic) will regard genetic modification as one of their most powerful tools. (10/13/03)
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 The Guardian UK -- The "war on terror" has weakened national arms controls and fuelled the proliferation of conventional weapons, a coalition of leading human rights charities warned yesterday. Launching a global campaign to regulate the arms trade, Amnesty International, Oxfam, and the International Network on Small Arms said that on average 500,000 people were killed each year by armed violence - roughly one victim a minute. Existing arms control laws, including those in Britain, are riddled with loopholes, the agencies claim, and what is needed is a common approach similar to the initiative that produced the 1997 Ottawa treaty banning landmines. ... In the "war on terror" ...Many countries, including the US, have relaxed controls on sales of arms to allies known to have appalling human rights records. "In the past two years, the US has increased arms sales to [such states] and Britain has followed suit. British arms sales to Indonesia [the second highest recipient of UK overseas aid] rose from £2m in 2000 to £40m in 2002." Shipments of arms had been delivered on the basis that "the enemy of my enemy is my friend", despite knowing that allies could become future dangers, said the charities. In June 2003, there were thought to be 24m guns in Iraq - enough to arm every man, woman and child. The charities term small arms the true "weapons of mass destruction", which claim hundreds of thousands of lives, destabilising countries and prolonging conflicts. (10/13/03)
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 BBC Science -- A major project will attempt to map out just how genes are controlled in the human body, scientists in the UK and Germany have told BBC News Online. The Human Epigenome Project will look for patterns in our "life code" that are associated with gene regulation but are also implicated in causing disease. Researchers at Epigenomics AG in Berlin and the Sanger Institute in Cambridge will take part in the five-year study. It was the Sanger centre which decoded one-third of the DNA found in humans. ... The full-scale Epigenomics/Sanger work will now extend the pilot to take in the rest of the human genome. The data obtained in the multi-million-pound project will be released in specific batches following its discovery and made available on the internet. The Human Genome Project, which set out to read all 2.9 billion bases in human DNA, was completed earlier this year. (10/13/03)
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 BBC Science -- Everyone would love a supercomputer but with a price tag of around $100m each they are not easy to come by. But in the United States staff and students at Virginia Tech have built one of the world's most powerful supercomputers for just $5m by plugging together hundreds of the latest computers from Apple. The project involved placing 1,100 brand new Apple G5 towers side by side, making it the world's most powerful "homebuilt" system. It is capable of 17.6 trillion floating point operations per second, with a combined storage capacity of 176 terabytes. "Each individual G5 is a dual processor, 2GHZ machine with 4GB of memory. So it's extremely fast," said Pat Arvin, Project Coordinator at Virginia Tech. The network is linked using 2,900 cables and runs at about 100 times faster than an average corporate network. ... The supercomputer, unofficially nicknamed Big Mac, was built in just three months. Right from the start there were major hurdles that could only be overcome with significant construction in and around the building. Running 1,100 computers in a 3,000-square-foot (280-sq-metres) area sends the air temperature well over 100 degrees Fahrenheit (38 Celsius). The heat is so intense that ordinary air conditioning units would have resulted in 60-mph (95 km/h) winds. Specialised heat exchange cooling units were built that pipe chilled water into the facility. "There are two chillers for this project," explained Kevin Shinpaugh, Director of Cluster Computing. "They're rated 125 tonnes each in cooling capacity, and they pump 750 gallons per minute each. The water is at about 45 degrees Fahrenheit." The power supply was another huge challenge. The supercomputer uses the same amount of electricity as 3,000 average sized homes. (10/13/03)
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6:51:51 AM 
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© TrustMark
2003
Timothy Wilken.
Last update:
11/3/2003; 6:43:17 AM.
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