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Friday, January 30, 2004
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 David C. Korten writes: This ability to recognize ourselves as observers of the behavior of ourselves and others was a critical step in the evolution of the human consciousness. We are now in the midst of taking what may prove to be another bold step in the evolution of consciousness of comparable significance: an awakening of cultural consciousness that allows us to see our cultural beliefs as social constructs that at best can never be more than mere approximations of a more complex reality. Elizabet Sahtouris explains: "When we look at human history to see what a people's worldview was in a different time and a different place, we see that worldviews have evolved along with the visible aspects of culture, and that there is a very powerful relationship between the worldviews that people hold and the kind of society they construct — an inseparable relationship, that is, between the way people believe their world is and the things they do to one another and that world. In practice, our worldview is our script for the play of life, assigning each of us our role within it. Until the last half century before the new millennium, it did not occur to people that they could have anything to do with creating their worldview. All through history, people thought the way they saw the world was the way the world really was — in other words, they saw their worldview as the true worldview and all others as mistaken and therefore false." ... Every culture captures some elements of a deeper truth, but each represents only one of many possible ways of interpreting the data generated by the human senses. Although most cultures adapt over time in response to changing circumstances, the process of adaptation is generally gradual and largely unconscious. Since cultures are by their nature self-limiting, any established cultural worldview can lead to serious misinterpretations of sensory data when rapidly changing circumstances render it obsolete — as now demonstrated so dramatically by the case of the dominant global culture fostered by the suicide economy. The circumstances of humanity are now changing far too rapidly for the conventional, largely unconscious processes of cultural regeneration and adaptation to suffice. Consequently, these must now become conscious, self-aware process open to the possibilities suggested by the stories of many cultures and subject to continuous testing for their relevance to rapidly changing human circumstances. This is key to taking the step to a new level of human function that an awakening of cultural consciousness makes possible. (01/30/04)
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 Eric S. Raymond writes: In this article, I anatomize a successful open-source project, fetchmail, that was run as a deliberate test of some surprising theories about software engineering suggested by the history of Linux. I discuss these theories in terms of two fundamentally different development styles, the "cathedral" model of most of the commercial world versus the "bazaar" model of the Linux world. I show that these models derive from opposing assumptions about the nature of the software-debugging task. I then make a sustained argument from the Linux experience for the proposition that "Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow", suggest productive analogies with other self-correcting systems of selfish agents, and conclude with some exploration of the implications of this insight for the future of software. (01/30/04)
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 BBC Nature -- Scientists in Australia have warned that fish piracy is damaging the Southern Ocean to such an extent that time is running out to save it. Illegal fishermen, primarily on the hunt for the prized Patagonian toothfish (Dissostichus eleginoides), are wiping out both fish stocks and bird species that live in the ocean. Species numbers are said to have dropped so acutely that Australia has called for global help to tackle the pirates. "It is probably the last chance for us to get it right," Dr Adel Pile, of Sydney University, told BBC World Service's One Planet programme. "The Southern ocean, this continuous mass of water, is really important, and [is] regulating globally things like our climate - El Nino starts in the Southern Ocean. "If we mess around with the ecosystem enough that we can throw it out of balance, it's not just going to be limited to those of us who live in the Southern Hemisphere - it's going to have global ramifications." Scientists say they know more about the surface of Mars than they do about the Southern Ocean. Australia recently deployed an armed surveillance ship to protect fish stocks, but campaigners already fear the Patagonian toothfish has been hunted to near extinction. Known as the "white gold" of Antarctica, the toothfish's flaky flesh is a delicacy in Japan and the US, and the strong demand for it in these countries has fuelled the illegal trade. Indeed, there are fears that many fish pirates operate with the corrupt support of governments in many countries. As a result, Australia's fisheries minister Ian McDonald has said a unified international response is only way to combat the pirates. (01/30/04)
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 BBC Science -- Scientists working on efforts to understand the Earth's centre have made a surprising discovery: the iron core is actually much simpler than they had assumed. Researchers at the US Lawrence Livermore Laboratory who have been studying how the enormous pressure inside the planet affects the iron believe there is only one form of atomic structure to the metal. For the past 20 years, it has been assumed there were at least two. The scientists are hopeful that by cracking the structure of the core, they can understand better the temperature and pressure there. They have already established the core starts to melt at a lower pressure than previously thought. Their work has recently been published in the journal Nature. "It makes the picture a whole lot simpler," Dr Neil Holmes, one of the scientists who worked on the project, told BBC World Service's Science In Action programme. "It allows us further to focus our efforts... determining the temperature and the other properties of iron." The Earth's core is important because it generates the planet's electromagnetic field - which seems to be weakening. This is already having consequences in space, creating glitches in satellites that rely on the field to protect them from solar and other space radiation. Furthermore, scientists are keen to find out if the Earth's magnetic poles are about to "flip" - with magnetic North becoming South, and vice versa. It has happened many times before in Earth history. Dr Holmes said the key to the experiment was recreating conditions that were as close as possible to those that really existed at the centre of the planet. "We have a large gun which is 20 metres long, which fires flat, iron-faced projectiles into an iron target, making a shockwave," he said. "That shockwave only lasts for less than a millionth of a second, but during that time we can make conditions that are up to and even exceeding the pressures at the centre of the Earth." Specifically, what the scientists have found is that the iron adopts a crystalline structure, like a diamond, in the Earth's core. (01/30/04)
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 BBC Science -- Scientists have created a new form of matter, which they say could lead to new ways of transmitting electricity. The fermionic condensate is a cloud of cold potassium atoms forced into a state where they behave strangely. The new matter is the sixth known form of matter after solids, liquids, gases, plasma and a Bose-Einstein condensate, created only in 1995. "What we've done is create this new exotic form of matter," says Deborah Jin of the University of Colorado. To make the condensate the researchers cooled potassium gas to a billionth of a degree above absolute zero - the temperature at which matter stops moving. They confined the gas in a vacuum chamber and used magnetic fields and laser light to manipulate the potassium atoms into pairing up and forming the fermionic condensate. Jin pointed out that her team worked with a supercooled gas, which provides little opportunity for everyday application. But the way the potassium atoms acted suggested there should be a way to turn it into a room-temperature solid. (01/30/04)
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6:29:54 AM 
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2004
Timothy Wilken.
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