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Monday, January 26, 2004
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 Timothy Wilken, MD writes: 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. ... When you join a Gift Tensegrity you sign in and register as a Giftor-Giftee. You will fill out two profiles. The first profile is for your role as a giftor. Your giftor profile is the list of the types of help you would like to give to other members of the synergic help tensegrity. The second profile is for your role as a giftee. Your giftee profile is the list of the types of help you would like to receive as gifts from other members of the synergic help tensegrity. A third profile will develop as Giftor-Giftee members use the synergic help exchange. This is the personal history of each member’s giving and receiving. This profile is transparent. It can be seen by all members who are particpants in good standing. It shows all the gifts you have given, all the gifts you have received, and any comments made by other members of the synergic exchange tensegrity that you have interacted with in relation to the exchanging of help. Every exchange generates a Giftor’s comment rating the Giftee, and a Giftee’s comment rating the Giftor. Now once a new member has completed their Giftor and Giftee registration and entered all their data into the data base, the computer sorts and matches gifts of help with needs for help. ... Synergic Economist Wayne F. Perg, Ph. D writes: My concept and understanding of the GIFTegrity is one of a radical move away from trade-oriented or materialistic sort of exchange. In the GIFTegrity there is no accounting, there are no prices, there is no barter (no tit for tat), and there is no medium of exchange! For me, it is the road to a post-monetary, post-barter economy. Barter and monetary economies both tie together giving and receiving. One cannot be done in the absence of the other. It is this "tying together" that is the ultimate source of "dead resources" and unemployment. The GIFTegrity frees giving from receiving and receiving from giving and will, as it is implemented, bring all resources to life and eliminate unemployment. The GIFTegrity does this by creating transparency, i.e., by creating good information on the SEPARATE giving and receiving actions of all members of the gifting tensegrity. Because there is no trading, only gifts given with no requirment of payment, there are no market prices and no accounting of trades. What there is is an open exchange of information on needs and resources available to fill those needs and ongoing individual negotiations around actions that will meet those needs. I see the GIFTegrity bringing the exchange relationships of a living organism to human society. As Elizabet Sahtouris has pointed out, the heart does not hold an auction for the supply of oxygenated blood and it does not withhold blood from those organs who are currently unable to pay. (01/26/04)
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 Arthur Noll writes: Money and markets are not the only illusionary way of looking at the world that has destroyed civilizations, the more basic cause of the trouble is human nature, which grabs hold of these illusionary ways of thought because it feels good to them. There are many ways to see the world wrong, money and markets is one of the most insidious, because it looks rational on the surface. No one on the surface of things is expecting mystical beliefs to come true to satisfy the sustainable working of markets, what is mystical about trading this bit of paper for that product? It is tangible, involves real things. But when you look a little deeper, magical expectations are exactly what you find. Markets inherently drive towards infinite growth, infinite substitutions, the expectation of this coming true requires magic. Is there no better system than money? I thought about this for years and came up with nothing. All the advantages you talk about, yes, I've gone over them repeatedly and came up with nothing better, yet the flaws of the system drove me back to keep looking. And I found it, found it right in front of my eyes and yet had not seen it. I've written of it before, I'll repeat it again. We can organize and work as a single body works. Does your stomach demand payment before it sends it's work to the small intestine? Does the small intestine hold out for cash or credit before nutrients go into the bloodstream? No, a thousand times no. Stuff is simply freely passed around. The brain must make calculations of Energy Returned On Energy Invested (EROEI), considering the problems of the whole body, coodinating it's movements, to get the stuff in the first place. If the brain is smart, it may also consider whether that EROEI is sustainable. Society can operate the same way. We figure the EROEI of the actions of that society, and the sustainability of that EROEI, and within those limits, resources are as freely passed around within the group as they are passed around in the body. If a part of your body doesn't work right anymore, has a negative EROEI, you may consider very seriously cutting it off. The same can happen to people in this society. Done in this way, the disadvantages of barter are gone, and the advantages of money are also gone. You do not worry about getting what you need for what you have made on a specific exchange, the problem with barter. You simply take what you need from where it is made, and give what you made to whoever wants it. Even without considering the long term problems of the market, money is a far more cumbersome system compared to this, think again of my example of the various organs demanding payment. Your body would work like a herky jerk puppet if it worked at all, on such a system. And I think current society has that same herky jerky quality to it. There has not been a better system in human consciousness before, but now I give you one. The "body society" should be able to grow to be much smoother in it's immediate actions as well as having advantages for making plans for the long term. Evaluation of resources and the actions of people making up the body of society can be done without the distortions of and problems of barter, money or mysticism, they can be done on the basis of EROEI for the whole group and the sustainability of that EROEI. (01/26/04)
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 BBC Health -- As the global obesity epidemic spreads, and the UK's Food Standards Agency prepares to debate the increasing number of overweight children, all eyes are fixed firmly on expanding waistlines. But should we be looking elsewhere in the body for the real secrets behind this considerable health threat? Scientists at the Universities of Edinburgh and Newcastle-upon-Tyne are about to embark on one of the biggest studies of its kind into the role the brain plays in making people fat. It is a multi-million pound five-year project, the results of which could be crucial to the battle against weight-related illnesses like diabetes and heart diseases. The theory behind it is that many people fail to lose weight, not because they cannot stop eating, but because the brain will not let them do so. Previous studies have shown that once a person gains extra weight, the brain 're-programmes' itself to accept this as normal. Any subsequent attempts to reduce the weight are then interpreted as a threat to the body's survival. As a result, the brain automatically slows the body's metabolic rate to reduce the burning of calories. Scientists involved in the study hope to find out exactly how the brain does this but think they already know why - evolution. "Back in man's hunter-gatherer days, or even in Britain in the Middle Ages, starvation was common," says Professor Jonathan Seckl, an expert in molecular medicine at Edinburgh University. "So the body learned to turn off its metabolism and go into survival mode so it could live through the famine. Now when somebody is obese and they try to lose weight, they immediately feel hungry and the body reacts as if they were a five stone weakling. It tells the brain 'I am being starved' and starts to retain calories like crazy." (01/26/04)
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 BBC Nature -- Efforts to help endangered albatrosses are being boosted through collaboration between birdlovers and a big bookmaker. The scheme, the Ladbrokes.com Big Bird Race, invites punters to bet on a group of albatrosses on a 6,000-mile flight. Money raised as the birds migrate from Tasmania to South Africa is going to help seabird conservation projects. The UK's Conservation Foundation, which thought up the idea, is working with Tasmanian scientists to learn about the birds' migration route by tagging them. The group consists of 18 juvenile Tasmanian shy albatrosses, a reclusive species which nests on three islands off Tasmania - Pedra Blanca, Albatross Island, and Mewstone. The electronic tags will allow scientists to track their progress on the five-month flight, which is expected to start around the end of March. Ladbrokes will be offering a variety of bets on the "race" between the birds, with punters able to follow their progress online via satellite. The company says: "Any income generated from the bets will be fed directly back into seabird conservation." It will make nothing from the event, but hopes the publicity will be enough of a reward. (01/26/04)
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 BBC Science -- The Mars rover Opportunity appears to have landed in a small crater, the US space agency says after looking at the pictures the vehicle has returned. The images suggest the shallow crater is about 20 metres (66 feet) across. Nasa researchers believe the location is ideal to study the local rocks and soil and allows them to see what is beneath the surface without digging. "We have scored a 300-million-mile interplanetary hole in one," enthused lead scientist Dr Steve Squyres. Opportunity touched down on the Martian surface at 0505 GMT on Sunday, at Meridiani Planum, which is near the Martian equator and is thought to be rich in a mineral called grey haematite. The mineral is usually formed on Earth in the presence of water. The rover is a twin of the Spirit vehicle which landed on the planet on 4 January. ... The first pictures of Opportunity's landing site show an environment dominated by smooth, dark soil - but there is also a rocky outcrop nearby. The landscape is quite unlike the boulder-strewn site of Spirit's Gusev Crater location 10,600 kilometres (6,600 miles) away on the other side of Mars. Scientists had hoped for a specific landing site where they could examine both the surface layer that is rich in haematite and an underlying geological feature of light-coloured layered rock. The small crater appears to have exposures of both, with soil that could be the haematite unit and an exposed outcropping of the lighter rock layer. "If it got any better, I couldn't stand it," said Dr Doug Ming, a rover science team member. (01/26/04)
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6:05:44 AM 
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© TrustMark
2004
Timothy Wilken.
Last update:
2/2/2004; 6:15:32 AM.
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