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Wednesday, October 15, 2003
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 Buckminster Fuller speaking: I have put up on the wall my Dymaxion Airocean World Map. I am sure it doesn't look familiar to you. Some of you may have seen it-there was an early version of it published in Life magazine in 1943 — but it was a little different from the one on the wall. The same spectrum colors were used, but it was a slightly different geometrical pattern. If we were to go around this school building and look at the world maps on its walls, we would probably see several Mercator maps. Sometimes we would see U.N. maps. These projections do not show the Antarctic. The U.N. map is a north-polar azimuthal. It is greatly distorted in the Southern Hemisphere and has no Antarctic and, therefore, misses a very large continent. You are probably thinking that my world map is "interesting," but that you would rather have a "regular" map. Our concept of the "regular" map is typical of our mental fixation in the educational processes. On the Mercator, as you know, the North Pole area is so completely distorted that it is seemingly thousands of miles from Greenland to Alaska. Many thousands of miles are indicated at the top edge of the Mercator between North Pole points one mile apart-completely misinforming. The Mercator map tends to show Europe and Asia split in two, so that "never the twain shall meet," as Kipling said. The Americas are in the center. The "tops" of the continents don't join together at all, and there are the great open blank spaces of the Arctic and Antarctic. Those were very good maps for the era of sailing when the Arctic and Antarctic were unexplored "infinities." My world map which you are looking at on the wall has strange sixty-degree angle-edge patterns. If you will cut out along the gray edges and bring them together, you will find that the map will make an icosahedron-that is, a "solid" faced with twenty equilateral triangles. If you will compare its data and graphic patterning with that of a globe, you won't find any fault with it at all. It will seem to be saying just what the world globe says. The shapes of the land masses are correct; there is no visible distortion of the relative shapes or relative sizes of its geographical features. This is a pretty good map because no other projection will do that. The polar azimuthals, the polyconics, and the Mercators-the prime "regular" types-all have a very great distortion in them. My map does not. I discovered a topological transformation between spheres and planes. I was able to get a United States patent-the first United States patent ever granted on a method of projection. Though my map is hung in many distinguished men's offices, the fact is that it is not hung in the schools. The big map companies go right on turning out the maps that, as far as I am concerned, are extremely distorted, misinforming, and obsolete. (10/15/03)
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 William Greider writes: If capitalism were someday found to have a soul, it would probably be located in the mystic qualities of capital itself. The substance begins simply enough as personal savings and business profits, then flows like oxygen through labyrinthine channels into the heart and muscle of economic life. Once set in motion, the surplus wealth (Marx provocatively called it "stored labor") becomes one of capitalism's three classic factors of production, alongside human labor and nature (the land and resources consumed to make things). Capital puts up the money to build the factory, buys the machines and pays the company's bills until its goods are produced and sold, thus yielding the new returns that pay back the lenders and investors with an expected increase. It is not simple, but that is the essence. Given the vast wealth of the country, the financial system forms a rather narrow funnel through which tens of trillions of dollars are continuously poured. Yes, the transactions are dizzyingly diverse and complex, involving thousands of large and small financial firms, but the work itself is actually done by a fairly small number of people. On Wall Street (an emblem of the system now dispersed nationwide) fewer than 1 million Americans manage the money. And only a relative handful of those people make the big decisions. Collectively, they are very, very powerful. Nobody elected them, but their exalted position in American life is reflected in their incomes. My central complaint is with the narrowness of their value system rather than the financial mechanisms. With a few important exceptions, the agents of capital operate with dedicated blindness to capital's collateral consequences, an indifference to the future of society even as they search for the future's returns. The capital system does not authorize financial agents to think about such things and may well penalize them if they do. Yet finance capital shapes and polices the "social contract" in America far more effectively than the government, which has largely retreated from that role. The great contradiction--and the reason reform is possible--is that Wall Street works with other people's money, mainly the retirement savings of ordinary Americans whose values it ignores, whose common interests are often trampled. In fact, the huge fiduciary institutions holding this wealth own 60 percent of America's 1,000 largest corporations and yet are utterly passive as investors--meekly following the advice of banks and brokerages rather than asserting the true self-interests of the "beneficial owners." That is a central element of all that must be changed. (10/15/03)
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 New York Times: Science -- The first high resolution images of the West Nile virus show something that looks like a minuscule golf ball. The virus is just one five-hundred-thousandth of an inch wide. "This is a small virus," said Dr. Richard J. Kuhn, a professor of biological sciences at Purdue. To obtain the images, Dr. Kuhn and his colleagues at Purdue chilled the fragile virus to about minus 300 degrees Fahrenheit in liquid ethane, a hydrocarbon, then bombarded it with high-energy electrons. The deflection of electrons off the virus's atoms produced the images. The Purdue researchers are reporting their findings in the current issue of the journal Science. Detailed information about the structure of West Nile could help scientists understand its unusual life cycle. That information should help researchers pinpoint West Nile's vulnerabilities and develop drugs to disarm it. The virus usually lives in birds, but also spreads from birds to mosquitoes to people and horses and other animals. Since it appeared in New York in 1999, West Nile has quickly spread across the country. So far this year, West Nile has infected more than 6,600 people and caused 139 deaths, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. ... Unlike H.I.V., flu, measles and most other viruses which have proteins that stick out like sharp spikes, the West Nile virus has surface proteins that snap together in a pattern resembling the fabric of a herringbone jacket, forming a smooth sphere. The researchers deduced more about the location of atoms within West Nile based on its close resemblance to the virus that causes dengue fever, another mosquito-borne disease. "It's a very different disease, but it's a very similarly organized virus particle," Dr. Kuhn said. The main differences between dengue and West Nile probably lie in the proteins that make up their outer shells, he said. The proteins' shapes determine which types of cells the viruses can infiltrate.
{A high-resolution image of the West Nile virus, top. Its surface proteins snap together to form a smooth sphere, unlike the viruses for H.I.V., middle, and the measles, bottom.} (10/15/03)
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 The New Scientist -- Monkeys can control a robot arm as naturally as their own limbs using only brain signals, a pioneering experiment has shown. The macaque monkeys could reach and grasp with the same precision as their own hand. "It's just as if they have a representation of a third arm," says project leader Miguel Nicolelis, at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. Experts believe the experiment's success bodes well for future devices for humans that are controlled solely by thought. One such type of device is a neurally-controlled prosthetic - a brain-controlled false limb. Nicolelis says his team's work is important because it has shown that prosthetics can only deliver precision movements if multiple parts of the brain are monitored and visual feedback is provided. Gerald Loeb, a biomedical engineer at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, says the new experiment already has some parallels in everyday life. For example, he says, when you drive a car it becomes an extension of your body. But Nicolelis says the monkeys appeared to be treating the robot arm as their limb, not an extension. "The properties of the robot were being assimilated as if they were a property of the animal's own body." (10/15/03)
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 BBC Nature -- Many marine creatures, from seahorses to turtles, are at risk from the rapid destruction of the Earth's seagrasses, according to the United Nations. It has released the first map of their global distribution, and says 15% of them have gone in the last 10 years. Seagrasses are flowering plants - not seaweed - that flourish in some of the shallow waters that line our coasts. They provide an important habitat for a range of other sea life and benefit people by helping to combat erosion. The World Atlas Of Seagrasses is the work of the UN Environment Programme's World Conservation Monitoring Centre (Unep-WCMC), based in Cambridge, UK. ...the authors say the seagrasses are being steadily destroyed by the run-off of nutrients and sediments from human activities on land, and by boating, land reclamation, dredging, and some fishing methods. Dr Klaus Toepfer, the executive director of Unep, said seagrasses were "a vital marine ecosystem whose importance has largely been overlooked until now". He said: "The scientists have presented us with a worrying story. In many cases, these vitally important undersea meadows are being needlessly destroyed for short-term gain without a true understanding of their significance." (10/15/03)
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 Gold Digest -- After repeated warnings from currency analysts and market advisors (including yours truly) that the U.S. currency system is on the verge of becoming a blocked, two-tier system we now have confirmation that the country is one step closer to realizing this. When fully implemented, the new U.S. dollar will mean a "banana republic" type currency and across-the-board devaluation. According to a CNN/Money news wire report of Oct. 7, the new U.S. $20 bills will be released this week at banks across the country. ... So what is the significance of this change of color in the U.S. $20 note? Well according to the Feds it is designed as a deterrent to stop counterfeiters. But accordingly to currency analyst Lawrence Patterson, who authored the 1994 monograph titled "Currency Recall", which accurately forecast the new multi-colored notes, the new colored money is part of a two-tiered currency system that will have drastic implications for investors and non-investors alike here in the U.S. Patterson calls the new notes "crayola currency" and claims they will circulate domestically while the normal green currency that we've grown accustomed to will circulate offshore all over the globe. According to commentator Terry Savage, "Two-thirds of the U.S. paper currency is circulating in foreign countries." With the coming two-tiered currency system, foreigners will continue to be allowed to use the greenback while U.S. citizens will be stuck with the "crayola currency" which cannot be exchanged. Patterson forecasts the coming use of foreign exchange controls for the U.S. dollar domestically, which would prohibit Americans from transferring capital to any other world currency. ... Patterson states, "I want every one...to think carefully about this...because we are coming very, very close to the end of the freely convertible domestic dollar. The cut in value could be as much as 50%. (10/15/03)
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9:10:07 AM 
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© TrustMark
2003
Timothy Wilken.
Last update:
11/3/2003; 6:43:17 AM.
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