Friday, January 02, 2004

CommUnity Timothy Wilken, MD writes: Synergic Community is a community that works together—in a word CommUnity. If we wish to make the Earth safe for ourselves and our children, we must solve our problems. But today’s problems are much too large to be solved by any one individual, no matter how talented or brilliant he or she might be. We need a community of minds whose mission is to solve humanity’s big problems through co-Creation, co-Laboration, co-Action and co-Operation. It is a complete waste of time to expect big government, big business, or big religion to help us. They are the problem. They are invested in a model of society that depends on separation and scarcity. We need individuals of integrity to join with us to build a new model of society that generates co-Operation and abundance. Working together, we humans can solve our problems. We can organize a synergic thinktank to focus on those problems. We can use a system of “Open co-Laboration” modeled after the "Open Source Software Community" used to create Linux. This is well described by Eric Steven Raymond in his seminal paper The Cathedral and the Bazaar.  ... It is time for humanity to move to CommUnity. (01/02/04) Eating Sanely ECO writes: Born and raised on a farm, my favorite foods use to be: a big slice of prime rib, rare, with horseradish sauce and a baked potato with sour cream, or a rolled pork tenderloin; a big slice of brown sugar cured ham with hash browns, or a ham salad sandwich, then there was beef stew with lots of browned potatoes and veggies, and then for the holidays there was always a huge turkey with stuffing. And where would breakfast have been without bacon and eggs or sausage? Nothing tasted better than a huge salmon fillet layered with lemon slices and broiled over the charcoal grill, then there was also albacore tuna flaked on a sourdough roll, and crab cakes that melted in your mouth. Ice cream and cheese were consumed lavishly along with whipped cream and butter. When I lived in Florida, we use to get huge tubs of shrimp and sit around on the beach eating them with lemon and home made cocktail sauce, and the lobster with lemon butter was to die for. As good as these things tasted, I don’t eat any of them anymore except for the veggies and fruits, and the reason being that our food chain has become so contaminated as to not be fit for human consumption.  As I have reported previously, one serving of ice cream may contain as much as 1500 times the amount of dioxin, one of the deadliest chemicals known to humankind, as is considered safe to be dumped as industrial waste. This relates to all fatty tissue as toxins congregate there, as for example, in cheese, milk, cream, beef fat, etc. While vegetables and fruits contain toxins, eating organically grown ones reduces intake of toxins somewhat.  The other factor is that vegetables and fruits contain antioxidants which appear to counteract toxins and become disease preventers and healers. As for seafood and fish, I have eliminated these for not only are the world’s fisheries 80% over fished to the point where reproduction is dramatically decreasing, but much of the fish caught is contaminated with mercury. (01/02/04) Tim Berners-Lee Knighted BBC Technology -- The inventor of the world wide web, Tim Berners-Lee, has been awarded a knighthood for his pioneering work. Dubbed the "Father of the Web", he came up with a system over 10 years ago to organise, link and browse net pages. The famously modest man said he was "quite an ordinary person", and although it felt strange, he was "honoured". Sir Tim was recently reunited with the machine he used to invent the web when he e-mailed 80 schools from the UN's summit on the information society. The British scientist, who lives in the US, was told he was getting the unexpected Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the New Year honours list a few days ago - by telephone, not by e-mail. He said he never expected his invention would lead to such an accolade. The physicist created his hypertext program, which was to revolutionise the net, while he was at the particle physics institute, Cern, in Geneva. The computer code he came up with let scientists easily share research findings across a computer network. In the early 1990s, it was dubbed the "world wide web", and is still the basis of the net as we know it. He recently told the BBC World Service's Go Digital programme his invention was "just another program", and that he originally wanted it to help achieve understanding. "The original idea of the web was that it should be a collaborative space where you can communicate through sharing information. The idea was that by writing something together, and as people worked on it, they could iron out misunderstanding." (01/02/04) Living Together Efficiently BBC Environment -- Analysis by Dutch academic Jan Kooijman for the UK packaging industry says more radical shifts in habits are needed. He said people should use less heating and water, drive less, take fewer flights and live in larger households. Dr Kooijman says the current trend of people living alone is making matters worse because each household needs hundreds of essential items from toothpaste to toilet brushes and bread knives to clocks. Each of these items has created greenhouse gases as part of the production process. Although surveys reveal that people believe recycling is one of the best things they can do for the environment, Dr Kooijman - in a study for UK packaging industry body Incpen - says this is a myth. While recycling does help the environment, Dr Kooijman says that using water wisely, walking, cycling or taking public transport instead of driving, and turning off electricity, all have much more impact. He says people should never to make a special car trip to the bottle bank as this wastes more energy than it saves. Lowering the room temperature by two degrees saves almost the same amount of energy as used for the total year's supply of packaging for the average household, he calculates. And he says by switching from a four-wheel drive car to a normal car for a year, a family could save as much energy as it does by 400 years of recycling bottles. The packaging industry feels aggrieved it is being forced to improve its environmental performance while the government shies away from the root factors of climate change: lifestyles and a growing economy. (01/02/04) Earth Losing Its Magnetism BBC Science -- Scientists have known for some time that the Earth's magnetic field is fading. Like a Kryptonite-challenged Superman, its strength has steadily and mysteriously waned, leaving parts of the planet vulnerable to increased radiation from space. Some satellites already feel the effects. What is uncertain is whether the weakened field is on the way to a complete collapse and a reversal that would flip the North and South Poles. Compasses pointing North would then point South. It is not a matter of whether it will happen, but when, said scientists who presented the latest research on the subject at a recent meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco. But when is hard to pinpoint. The dipole reversal pattern is erratic. "We can have periods without reversals for many millions of years, and we can have four or five reversals within one million years," said Yves Gallet, from Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris, France, who studies the palaeomagnetic record and estimates that the current decay started 2,000 years ago. Over the last century and a half, since monitoring began, scientists have measured a 10% decline in the dipole. At the current rate of decline it would take 1,500 to 2,000 years to disappear. (01/02/04) The Future of the Internet BBC Technology -- The internet is set to become the basis for just about every form of communication, according to net pioneer Vint Cerf, and he should know what he is talking about. ... Mr Cerf helped design the net's basic protocols that ensure that all those packets of data reach their intended destination. With Bob Kahn, Mr Cerf wrote the blueprint for the formidably named "Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol" (TCP/IP) that defines the format of net data packets and how they get to their destination. ... He said that the first decade of the net, 1972-1982, was about designing, testing and deploying the net's basic technologies. The second decade was about consolidation and commercialisation and the third about broad, popular use. The next decade, he believes, will see the net spread even further and start to become the basic communications infrastructure for almost anything. To begin with, he thinks, the net will stop being a part of the telephone network. Instead the telephone network will become a part of the net. This could be thanks to Voice Over IP technology that chops up phone calls into bits of data and sends them across the net instead of dedicated, and expensive, phone lines. In Japan NTT's profits have been dented because people can call much more cheaply via the Yahoo BB VoIP service they get as part of their ADSL subscription. be just the start, believes Mr Cerf. "You are going to see a fairly dramatic increase in services riding on top of basic internet infrastructure," he said, "You will see more and more layers of functionality showing up in the net." One such could be Grid computing that virtualises processing and storage resources and lets people use, or rent, the capacity they need for particular tasks. Other key areas revolve around novel naming systems that allow objects other than web servers and net domains to become part of the net. The Enum initiative attempts to turn phone numbers into net addresses and give people a universal way of contacting anyone, provided they know at least one e-mail, address, phone or pager number for them. (01/02/04) 6:39:32 AM

© TrustMark 2004 Timothy Wilken. Last update: 2/2/2004; 6:15:25 AM. This theme is based on the SoundWaves (blue) Manila theme.