Science, Culture and Integral Yoga

Code Drifts: Tethered to Mobility, Arthur and Marilouise Kroker

Rich — Sun, 09 Aug 2009 15:24:14 -0700

Riffing off the concept of evolutionary science known as "genetic drift" the Krokers use "code drift" to describe the evolution of the global genome and the technological destining of our species. In the scenario they theorize "code drift" is the evolutionary driver of the post-human body that is tethered to its digital mobility..

In this lecture they conclude with consideration of McLuhan and Teilhard whose prophetic vision of the exteriorizion of consciousness forewarned of a planetary bio-electric nervous system, that functions now as the cultural epigenesis of our post-human bodies . The Krokers claims the originating Nietzschean event of the eclipse of one human species form and the emergence of its networked successor has already occurred.

"Code drift is the spectral destiny of the story of technology. No necessary message, no final meaning, no definite goal: only a digital culture drifting in complex streams of social networking technologies filtered here and there with sudden changes in code frequencies, moving at the speed of random fluctuations, always seeking to make of the question of identity a sampling error, to connect with the broken energy flows of ruptures, conjurations, unintelligibility, bifurcations. When the Book of Genesis gives way to the Book of (Information) Genetics, we are suddenly exited into a culture of epigenesis with code drifts as its primary impulse, all the human anxiety of being tethered to mobility its primary affect, and the novel historical experience of literally being skinned by technology as the body is increasingly wrapped in the new nervous system that is the global data genome"

Techno-Capitalism and Post-Human Destinies - I

Debashish — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 19:03:33 -0700

Some relections on the continuing issue of techno-capitalism and post-human futures by Debashish Banerji. This is a first fragment highlighting Moishe Postone's commentaries on the late writings of Marx.

'Reflections on Machine Consciousness,' by William Irwin Thompson

Ron — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 20:57:32 -0700

I've taken the liberty of typing in all of Chapter 4 of my copy of this important book, because it powerfully addresses one of the main themes of SCIY, the manifold relationships between science, culture, and consciousness. (ron)

"It is a paradox of the work of Artificial Intelligence that in order to grant consciousness to machines, the engineers first labor to subtract it from humans, as they work to foist upon philosophers a caricature of consciousness in the digital switches of weights and gates in neural nets. As the caricature goes into public circulation with the help of the media, it becomes an acceptable counterfeit currency, and the humanistic philosopher of mind soon finds himself replaced by the robotics scientist. ...

"Both the mechanists and the mystics say that we are now at a great bifurcation in human evolution. The mechanists like Ray Kurzweil, Danny Hillis, and Hans Moravec prophesy that we are at the end of the human era, and that 'nanobots' are about to be embedded in our bodies until our antique organs of flesh are entirely surrounded by a new silicon noosphere of networked computers. Like ancient mitochondria or chloroplasts surrounded by the gigantic eukaryotic cells, we are about to be engulfed in the next evolutionary stage. So the mechanists see noetic technologies surrounding human culture and consciousness and compressing it into an endosymbiont in a larger and swifter and more elegant evolutionary vehicle. ...

"Mystics flip this literalism over to see technology as a system of externalized metaphors that derive from pre-existing ontological modes at play and at large in the universe... For the mystic — be she Cabbalist or Sufi — an angel is a 'Celestial Intelligence' — a form of cosmic noetic organization that does not require a detour through animal evolution. So when Kurzweil claims that by 2030 implanted nanobots in the bloodstream will enable humans to turn off to the outside world to attune to a virtual reality, the mystic would recognize a literalist rendering of the process of meditation. Kurzweil's vision of the world in 2030 reminds me of Borges's 'Library of Babel'. 'I suspect that the human species — the unique species — is about to be extinguished, but the Library will endure: illuminated, solitary, useless, incorruptible, secret'. [2] And here we need to be sensitive to the full force of Borges's use of the word 'Babel'. ... "

Techno-Capitalism and Post-Human Destinies - II

Debashish — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 19:04:11 -0700

This is a fragment constituting a continuation of Debashish Banerji's reflections on Techno-Capitalism as the epistemic regime of modernity and posible post-human futures at the eschatological cusp of history. Here the alignment of Marx and Hegel with the Enlightenment vision/teleology is contemplated and questions asked regarding a comparative alignment with the Neo-Vedantic teleology (if it can be called that) of Sri Aurobindo.

Stronger Hurricanes Result of Global Warming? (NYT/Nature)

Ron — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 09:13:39 -0700

A new study finds that the strongest of hurricanes and typhoons have become even stronger over the last two and a half decades...

“I think we do see a climate signal here,” said James B. Elsner, a professor of geography at Florida State University who is the lead author of the paper, being published in Thursday’s issue of the journal Nature.

The study, which also found that more typical, less powerful tropical storms had not become stronger over the 26-year period studied, is consistent with other researchers’ hurricane models, Dr. Elsner said.

With oceans expected to continue warming, “one would expect more 4s and 5s,” he said of Category 4 and Category 5 hurricanes, those with maximum sustained winds of at least 131 miles per hour. ...

"Once By The Pacific" by Robert Frost

Ron — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 22:46:12 -0700

Once by The Pacific

by Robert Frost

The shattered water made a misty din.

Great waves looked over others coming in,

And thought of doing something to the shore

That water never did to land before.

The clouds were low and hairy in the skies,

Like locks blown forward in the gleam of eyes.

You could not tell, and yet it looked as if

The shore was lucky in being backed by cliff,

The cliff in being backed by continent;

It looked as if a night of dark intent

Was coming, and not only a night, an age.

Someone had better be prepared for rage.

There would be more than ocean-water broken

Before God's last Put out the Light was spoken.

FkLiterature Network » Robert Frost » Once By The Pacific

Born Again Ideology: religion, technology and terrorism (u tube) A. Kroker

Rich — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 18:53:10 -0700

We, the inhabitants of post-Enlightenment society might have thought that the current cultural horizon was exhausted by fateful struggles between modernism, postmodernism and posthumanism, but it turns out that the past will not be denied. Out of the ashes of the Book of Revelation emerges a form of faith-based politics which is, in every political sense, the ascendant historical tendency in American public life. Here, putting on the policy garments of the "culture of life" movement, there waging bitter political combat against the heresy of "same-sex marriage," now opposed to scientific claims concerning stem cell research, allying itself actively with the crusading spirit of American imperialist adventures, dominating the media with faith-based cultural perspectives, the New Protestant Ethic easily sweeps aside secular discourses in the interests of a vision of culture, society and politics which is as cosmological in its theological sweep as it is eschatological in its historical ambitions.

Understood metaphysically, it may well be that the insurgency represented by faith-based politics is the representative politicalform of what Heidegger's Nietzsche described as the age of "completed nihilism." In this interpretation, power in its mature (nihilistic) phase -- sick of itself, possessing no definitive goal, exhausted with the historical burden of remaining an active will, always sliding inexorably towards the nothingness of the will-less will -- desperately seeks out a sustaining purpose, an inspiring goal, a historical mission. Into the ethical vacuum at the disappearing center of nihilistic power flows a strong historical monism -- the New Protestant Ethic -- that will not be suppressed. To power's empty formalism, to liberal humanism's (emotionally) ineffective proceduralist ethics, to the empire's cybernetic equations written in violence and in blood across the landscape of imperial wars, the New Protestant Ethic provides a singular historical purpose -- the crusading spirit of evangelical Christianity which is reconstructionist, resurgent, and reanimated -- backed up by the semiotic purity of the foundational texts of the Old Testament. To those who would discount faith-based politics as only the most recent instance of the politics of cultural backlash, it should be noted that this fateful, and entirely original, entwinement of (fundamentalist) religion and (imperial) war technologies in the American mind may well be in the order of a great overturning. With faith-based politics, we are witness to something entirely unexpected, and for that reason, deeply ominous -- an ethical reconciliation between religion and technology in which the apocalyptic visions of the Old Testament will be future-coded in the power languages of empire politics and networked capitalism. What is now only in its preparatory rhetorical stages as the "culture of life" movement may soon emerge full-blown as the essential life-principle of American, and by imperialist extension world, culture. Arthur Kroker

James Howard Kunstler: April 28, 2008 - A Collective Psychic Bubble

Ron — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 16:00:34 -0700

...This has been a pretty remarkable month, actually, with all the problems of "The Long Emergency" accelerating impressively. Oil is now testing the $120 mark, the airline industry is imploding (largely over fuel costs), the housing scene has reached a degree of collapse unseen since the 1930s, food shortages have strayed out of the Third World and begun to affect Japan and the USA, bats are dying of a mysterious disease in the Northeast, and the Arctic sea ice is shrinking away to nothing.

We're in a strange collective psychic bubble. We'd like to forget about all these troubling rumors of hardship and bad weather and just get on with the daily task of making a living and paying for stuff and enjoying our customary entertainments. The comforting ceremonies of everyday life seem to continue. The freeways are still full of cars. Nancy Grace comes on TV dependably at 8 p.m. and is there deploring the latest pervert arrest. The baseball season has ramped up and the teams are criss-crossing the nation in their chartered airplanes. The stock market is actually going up -- what's wrong with that?

But there's an equally eerie vibe out there that things are seriously out-of-whack. We're on the edge of something. We're at the entrance of a dark passage where some of the ceremonies of daily life meet resistance. You go to the WalMart and five of your six credit cards are refused. Uh oh. It begins to dawn on you that you're spending a quarter of your take-home pay filling up the gas-tank every week. There's no dial tone when you pick up the telephone. How could all the supermarkets in town be out of rice? The local hospital just declared bankruptcy. The neighbors down the street auctioned off all their furniture in the driveway last week. Why does the cat pick up so many ticks these days? ...

Carbon Dioxide & Methane Rise Sharply In 2007

Ron — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 12:04:02 -0700

Last year [2007] alone global levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide, the primary driver of global climate change, increased by 0.6 percent, or 19 billion tons... Additionally methane rose by 27 million tons after nearly a decade with little or no increase. -- Methane is 25 times more potent as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, but there’s far less of it in the atmosphere—about 1,800 parts per billion. When related climate affects are taken into account, methane’s overall climate impact is nearly half that of carbon dioxide.

Rapidly growing industrialization in Asia and rising wetland emissions in the Arctic and tropics are the most likely causes of the recent methane increase. said scientist Ed Dlugokencky from NOAA’s Earth System Research Laboratory. -- ”We’re on the lookout for the first sign of a methane release from thawing Arctic permafrost,” said Dlugokencky. “It’s too soon to tell whether last year’s spike in emissions includes the start of such a trend.”

Permafrost, or permanently frozen ground, contains vast stores of carbon. Scientists are concerned that as the Arctic continues to warm and permafrost thaws, carbon could seep into the atmosphere in the form of methane, possibly fueling a cycle of carbon release and temperature rise. ...

Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder in Adults Recognition and Management

rakesh — Sat, 19 Apr 2008 16:04:59 -0700

Attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is considered the most common psychiatric disorder experienced during childhood. Some references indicate an incidence as high as 10% of American school-age children. Most references, however, place the incidence in this age group at around 2%–5%. Approximately 80% of children with ADHD continue to have symptoms of the condition as adolescents, and more than 60% of children experience symptoms as adults. If these estimates are correct, between 2 and 5 million adults who had ADHD as a child continue to be affected by the condition. Many adults with ADHD have not been diagnosed as such.

• "The Final Empire: The Collapse of Civilization and the Seed of the Future," by SCIY Editor Wm. H. Kotke

Ron — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 13:51:51 -0700

I just received an email from SCIY Editor Wm. H. Kotke announcing the publication of the first reprint of his underground classic: "The Final Empire: The Collapse of Civilization and the Seed of the Future," first published in 1993. I just downloaded the E-book version (for just $6.95) and after a quick scan through its 600+ pages, I'm convinced this is a significant read for those SCIY readers concerned about Earth's sustainability crisis. As an Amazon reviewer said:

"This is an incredibly well documented and prophetic book. Prophetic in the sense that when I first read it over ten years ago, I was skeptical of many predictions. They have all turned out to come true. This book is indigenous and inspiring in the sense that it offers practical earth friendly strategies that affirm the possibility that man is part OF nature, not apart FROM it. Well written! Real history and facts, vitally relevant, and hence empowering! Good medicine for all earthlings. A powerful gift! Thanks Bill!" ...

Supercooled Ice Breakthrough in Michigan

Ron — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 14:22:20 -0700

I recently received an email from my wife's sister, who was forwarded the remarkable images below by a friend living in Michigan. I'm of course wondering if this might be yet another unanticipated effect of global climate change?

Her friend made the following comment:

"Michigan has had the coldest winter in decades. Water expands to freeze, and at Macinaw City the water in Lake Huron below the surface ice was supercooled. It expanded to break through the surface ice and froze into this incredible wave. -- I've seen pictures of this wave phenomena in Antarctica, but in Michigan? Yes, it's been quite a winter..."

or Guernica Iraq!

Rich — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 19:40:00 -0700

Picasso captured an intense scene reflecting the deeply unjust suffering, agony and despair experienced by the people of Guernica. And in doing so he produced one of the most iconic, powerful and affecting pieces of anti-war artwork ever put to canvas. It is little surprise then that a reproduction of the painting, which hangs outside the entrance to the UN Security Council, was covered while Colin Powell was attempting to sell the Iraq War to the world.

The people of Iraq are suffering what amounts to the similar unjust brutality inflicted on the people of Guernica Iraq, except it's practically on a daily basis. A more accurate comparison would be to imagine having the London Tube and Bus bombings everyday. And have them happen so often that they become a predictable daily occurrence and part of life."

Guernica was the product of a fascist Spanish-German alliance between Franco and Hitler, and the corportist sponsors of the Luftwaffe. The following collage of images come to us trough the efforts of the Anglo-American alliance of Blair and Bush and through the courtesy of Boeing, Haliburton, Blackwater et al....

Arlington Institute Report on Global Demographic Shifts

Ron — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 13:48:23 -0700

...the emergence of a new demographic trend has largely been ignored. Today, worldwide fertility rates are at an all time low, and in the decades following 2050 the global population is actually expected to stabilize and possibly decrease. The two factors driving this new pattern are the emergence of women’s rights on a global scale and the expectation among parents that all their children will survive to maturity.

Fertility rates, the best indicators of long term population changes, refer to the average number of children a woman will have. In order for a given population to replace itself, its fertility rate must be at 2.1 or higher. Graph 1[2] illustrates the decline of fertility rates that has occurred in the last fifty years, and shows projections for the next fifty years. ...

Military Hopes to Bring Down [Potentially Dangerous] Satellite

Ron — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 16:39:18 -0800

The Pentagon counted down Wednesday toward an unprecedented effort to shoot down a dying and potentially deadly U.S. spy satellite, using a souped-up missile fired from a ship in the Pacific.

The timing was tricky. For the best chance to succeed, the military awaited a combination of favorable factors: steady seas around the Navy cruiser that would fire the missile, optimum positioning of the satellite as it passed in polar orbit and the readiness of an array of space- and ground-based sensors to help cue the missile and track the results.

The operation was so extraordinary, with such intense international publicity and political ramifications, that Defense Secretary Robert Gates — not a military commander — was to make the final decision to pull the trigger.

The government organized hazardous materials teams, under the code name "Burnt Frost," to be flown to the site of any dangerous or otherwise sensitive debris that might land in the United States or elsewhere. ...

[Most] Biofuels Deemed a Greenhouse Threat

Ron — Sun, 10 Feb 2008 02:00:00 -0800

Almost all biofuels used today cause more greenhouse gas emissions than conventional fuels if the full emissions costs of producing these “green” fuels are taken into account, two studies published Thursday have concluded...

Together the two studies offer sweeping conclusions: It does not matter if it is rain forest or scrubland that is cleared, the greenhouse gas contribution is significant. More important, they discovered that, taken globally, the production of almost all biofuels resulted, directly or indirectly, intentionally or not, in new lands being cleared, either for food or fuel.

“When you take this into account, most of the biofuel that people are using or planning to use would probably increase greenhouse gasses substantially,” said Timothy Searchinger, lead author of one of the studies and a researcher in environment and economics at Princeton University. “Previously there’s been an accounting error: land use change has been left out of prior analysis.” ...

World food stocks dwindling rapidly, UN warns

Ron — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 02:00:00 -0800

In an "unforeseen and unprecedented" shift, the world food supply is dwindling rapidly and food prices are soaring to historic levels, the top food and agriculture official of the United Nations warned Monday. -- The changes created "a very serious risk that fewer people will be able to get food," particularly in the developing world, said Jacques Diouf, head of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization.

The agency's food price index rose by more than 40 percent this year, compared with 9 percent the year before - a rate that was already unacceptable, he said. New figures show that the total cost of foodstuffs imported by the neediest countries rose 25 percent, to $107 million, in the last year.

At the same time, reserves of cereals are severely depleted, FAO records show. World wheat stores declined 11 percent this year, to the lowest level since 1980. That corresponds to 12 weeks of the world's total consumption - much less than the average of 18 weeks consumption in storage during the period 2000-2005. There are only 8 weeks of corn left, down from 11 weeks in the earlier period.

Prices of wheat and oilseeds are at record highs, Diouf said Monday. Wheat prices have risen by $130 per ton, or 52 percent, since a year ago. U.S. wheat futures broke $10 a bushel for the first time Monday, the agricultural equivalent of $100 a barrel oil. ...

Remember This: 350 Parts Per Million

Ron — Sat, 19 Jan 2008 02:00:00 -0800

It happened at an academic conclave in San Francisco. A NASA scientist named James Hansen offered a simple, straightforward and mind-blowing bottom line for the planet: 350, as in parts per million carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. It's a number that may make what happened in Washington and Bali seem quaint and nearly irrelevant. It's the number that may define our future...

We're already at 383 parts per million, and it's knocking the planet off kilter in substantial ways. So, what does that mean?...

It means, Hansen says, that we've gone too far. "The evidence indicates we've aimed too high -- that the safe upper limit for atmospheric CO2is no more than 350 ppm," he said after his presentation. Hansen has reams of paleo-climatic data to support his statements (as do other scientists who presented papers at the American Geophysical Union conference in San Francisco this month)...

[Hansen says] the weaning has to happen now, and everywhere. No more passing the buck. The gentle measures bandied about at Bali, themselves way too much for the Bush administration, don't come close. Hansen called for an immediate ban on new coal-fired power plants that don't capture carbon, the phaseout of old coal-fired generators, and a tax on carbon high enough to make sure that we leave tar sands and oil shale in the ground. To use the medical analogy, we're not talking statins to drop your cholesterol; we're talking huge changes in every aspect of your daily life. ...

'Tipping Points' in Global Climate Change: Latest report from AGU SF Mtg. of Dec.07

Ron — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 14:28:02 -0800

This recent report, from the session on 'Tipping Points' at the important Dec.07 American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco, illustrates the complexity of current technical discussions about the validity of the increasingly disruptive climate change scenarios being projected by various Climate Change computer models. The bottom line is that our models may be seriously underestimating the rapidly of the coming changes, as indicated in the previously posted article re the melting of arctic sea ice. ~rj

...In Hansen's talk, he did try to clarify what he meant by a tipping point. His notion of this has less to do with what mathematicians understand as "bifurcations," and more to do with a kind of inertia in the climate system. He means things like having passed a threshold of CO2 which, given warming in the pipeline and the lifetime of CO2, commits a certain discrete event — e.g. loss of perennial sea ice or the Amazon rainforest– to occurring even if we were to later reduce emissions to zero. He tried to distinguish between reversible and irreversible tipping points...

...where things get interesting is where you try to explain a magnitude of signal this big in terms of basic physics. This is important because there is a perception that GCM's vastly underestimate the amplitude of the response to total solar luminosity, leading to a perception that there is some "missing physics" (whether it be exotic amplification of a stratospheric response, or something like clouds and cosmic rays)...

But — the take-home point is that at this point the study of solar cycle response very strongly supports the notion that there is no need to invoke any mysterious or exotic missing physics (like cosmic ray modulation of clouds) in order to represent the response of climate to solar variability. If some models underestimate the response, this is likely to have more to do with errors in the vertical mixing of heat than any missing fundamental physics. ...

Could Arctic summers be ice-free 'by 2013' !?

Ron — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 12:32:36 -0800

Scientists in the US have presented one of the most dramatic forecasts yet for the disappearance of Arctic sea ice. -- Their latest modelling studies indicate northern polar waters could be ice-free in summers within just 5-6 years.

Professor Wieslaw Maslowski told an American Geophysical Union meeting that previous projections had underestimated the processes now driving ice loss.

Summer melting this year reduced the ice cover to 4.13 million sq km, the smallest ever extent in modern times. -- Remarkably, this stunning low point was not even incorporated into the model runs of Professor Maslowski and his team, which used data sets from 1979 to 2004 to constrain their future projections.

"Our projection of 2013 for the removal of ice in summer is not accounting for the last two minima, in 2005 and 2007," the researcher from the Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, California, explained to the BBC. -- "So given that fact, you can argue that may be our projection of 2013 is already too conservative." ...

Google now using "behavioral targeting" for its ads placements

Ron — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 11:38:31 -0800

...Google, however, has been very reluctant to use all this data in its advertising business. One reason is that it has other information that solves its main problem: picking the right ads to show on each page. It uses what people are searching for on its search site and the content of other pages on which ads appear (including, of course, the content of messages displayed in Gmail).

But as Google gets bigger it is tiptoeing into using more data for targeting. It tries to determine the location of users in order to show ads of local businesses. It also gets some personal information about users from partner sites on which it displays ads — like MySpace — to help it choose ads.

And Google has now started dipping its little toe into the pool that Madison Avenue calls behavioral targeting. That approach is based on the idea that the best way to pick an ad to show you now is to look at your online activity from a few hours or days ago. The classic example is showing car dealer ads to someone who searched for minivans yesterday. ...

Forecast of Major Financial Disruption

Ron — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 16:25:18 -0800

...The actual solvency of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation is relatively indecipherable due to the fact that their treasury management processes (and the risks of their own investment strategies) are not uniformly disclosed with sufficient transparency. The FDIC was set up for isolated problems with a few bad banks but is NOT prepared to “insure” the system in an industry-wide crisis. The actual liquidity reserve of the “insurance” that Americans view as their safety net is 1/100th the actual exposure of outstanding deposits. The actual coverage ratio for the Bank Insurance Fund (BIF) fell below 1.25% in 2002, the same year that less stable credit practices were adopted by America’s leading banks.

The funny part is that the Federal Government will be on holiday when all of this happens. There will be no one to put freeze actions and moratoria on actions. The only way you stop the cataclysm is to put together civil actions on deposit withdrawals.

As I discussed previously, the Chinese currency wild-card may become relevant far sooner than expected. An effort by China to convert its $1.4 trillion U.S. Treasury holdings into euros is not viable for many reasons – not the least of which is the European Central Bank’s inability to absorb such an event. As China continues its rush away from supporting U.S. Treasuries and as Middle Eastern investors are buying them up in more diversified holdings, a new “currency exchange” is unfolding. Realizing that they cannot liquidate their holdings, it appears that the Chinese are currently using their U.S. Treasury holdings as collateral for euro denominated purchases and long term infrastructure transactions. In other words, they may be “liquidating” their holdings as collateral and, in so doing, effectively migrating to non-dollar value without ever having to officially dump their current Treasury holdings. ...

Blue Brain Project Moves Onto Whole Brain, Really?

Ron — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 14:40:11 -0800

"An ambitious project to create an accurate computer model of the brain has reached an impressive milestone," writes today's Technology Review. "Scientists in Switzerland working with IBM researchers have shown that their computer simulation of the neocortical column, arguably the most complex part of a mammal's brain, appears (emphasis added) to behave like its biological counterpart. By demonstrating that their simulation is realistic, the researchers say, these results suggest that an entire mammal brain could be completely modeled within three years, and a human brain within the next decade..."

The article goes onto to share the response of Christof Koch from Caltech who calls the 10 year target of modeling the human brain "ridiculous." Despite the fantastic progress to date I agree with Christof on this. ...

Dr. James Martin receives 2007 Guardian Award from Lifeboat Foundation

Kim — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 14:14:41 -0700

The Lifeboat Foundation Guardian Award is annually bestowed upon a respected scientist or public figure who has warned of a future fraught with dangers and encouraged measures to prevent them. This year's recipient is Dr. James Martin. The award is in recognition of the achievements of his Future of Humanity Institute in studying global catastrophic risks and impacts of future technologies. ...

Tainted Science Studies

Ron — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 23:24:49 -0700

We all make mistakes and, if you believe medical scholar John Ioannidis, scientists make more than their fair share. By his calculations, most published research findings are wrong. -- Dr. Ioannidis is an epidemiologist who studies research methods at the University of Ioannina School of Medicine in Greece and Tufts University in Medford, Mass. In a series of influential analytical reports, he has documented how, in thousands of peer-reviewed research papers published every year, there may be so much less than meets the eye.

These flawed findings, for the most part, stem not from fraud or formal misconduct, but from more mundane misbehavior: miscalculation, poor study design or self-serving data analysis. "There is an increasing concern that in modern research, false findings may be the majority or even the vast majority of published research claims," Dr. Ioannidis said. "A new claim about a research finding is more likely to be false than true."

The hotter the field of research the more likely its published findings should be viewed skeptically, he determined. ...

Pollution pouring into nation's waters far beyond legal limits

Ron — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 12:48:50 -0700

More than half of all industrial and municipal facilities across the country dumped more sewage and other pollutants into the nation's waterways than allowed under the Clean Water Act, according to a report released Thursday by an environmental group.

California was among the 10 states with the highest percentage of facilities leaking more pollutants into waterways than their Clean Water Act permits allow, according to data from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency obtained by the environmental group, U.S. PIRG. -- California also had the dubious distinction of having the most large-scale violations - or "exceedances" - of Clean Water Act permits of any state. The large-scale violations are those that exceed the permitted level by at least 500 percent.

Environmentalists said the figures show that industrial plants and municipal wastewater facilities continue to flout the law because of insufficient policing by federal regulators. -- "The bottom line is the Bush administration isn't doing enough enforcement of the Clean Water Act," said Christy Leavitt, clean water advocate for U.S. PIRG, a federation of state Public Interest Research Groups. ...

Al Gore, UN Climate Panel Share 2007 Nobel Peace Prize

Ron — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 12:18:49 -0700

Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) today won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for their efforts to publicize and understand human-caused global warming. -- The Norwegian Nobel Committee this morning announced that the former U.S. vice president and the United Nations' climate panel will equally share the prestigious award for "their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change."

Gore and the IPCC were chosen from a list of 181 candidates to split the prize, worth 10 million Swedish kronors (about 1.5 million U.S. dollars). -- The award committee, based in Oslo, Norway, said their decision was intended to bring into sharper focus the actions "necessary to protect the world's future climate and thereby to reduce the threat to the security of mankind.

"Action is necessary now, before climate change moves beyond man's control," the committee added. ...

Virtual worlds catching on in workplace

Ron — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 10:40:46 -0700

... Advocates say virtual worlds offer new ways for people to collaborate and foster workplace interaction in an age of dispersed employees. Companies can also save on travel time and cut down on the greenhouse gases fueling global warming...

Most corporations have yet to take the first few steps. Even consumer sites such as Second Life that have attracted a lot of press attention see relatively low traffic... just 340,000 unique visitors from the United States in August, a relatively small number compared with other big-name Internet sites. ...

"In virtual worlds, we notice people mingle like they do in real life," said Hughes. "The pre-event mingle gets to be very important."

Sun Microsystems has a project it began in January entitled MPK20, a name that refers to the first virtual building. It's an addition to 19 real buildings at Sun's Menlo Park campus. MPK20 has about seven rooms and is being used by its developers for team meetings. Other small groups will be invited starting in November. -- In the "team room," workers post documents they are working on and can speak to one another. Nicole Yankelovich, principal investigator, said the benefit is the serendipitous social interaction employees in different locations can share. On any given day, more than 50 percent of Sun's personnel work remotely, and employees say they miss person-to-person exchange, Yankelovich said. After virtual meetings, small groups form spontaneously to continue discussions. ...

Arctic ice shrinks to record low

Ron — Sun, 07 Oct 2007 23:12:56 -0700

Arctic sea ice shrank this year to its smallest area of coverage since satellite measurements began some 30 years ago. The record low is a result of long-term climate change combined with particular weather conditions during 2007, say US scientists. -- The remarkable decline made international headlines in September when European and US space agencies announced that the ice-clogged North-West Passage had completely opened for the first time, allowing vessels to sail from the Atlantic to the Pacific.

Scientists at the US National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) have revealed satellite measurements showing the full extent of summer melt during 2007. Ice is now starting to reform in the Arctic as winter approaches.

"We've got the final numbers now for this September, and it's a really dramatic record low," says Walt Meier, a member of the team studying the ice. "It didn't just break the record, it shattered the record. This year just obliterated everything else." ...

Air Force investigates mistaken transport of nuclear warheads

Ron — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 14:09:35 -0700

A B-52 with six armed nuclear missiles flew over the U.S. for 3-1/2 hours..

Confirming an article first published in Army Times on September 5 ("B-52 mistakenly flies with nukes aboard," Michael Hoffman, September 5, 2007), the U.S. Air Force has admitted that on August 30, 2007, a B-52 bomber took off from Minot AFB in North Dakota loaded with six nuclear weapons – Advanced Cruise Missiles designed to be launched from B-52 bombers - and landed three and a half hours later at Barksdale AFB in Louisiana. ...

TAI Alert! - Global Financial Meltdown?

Ron — Wed, 15 Aug 2007 07:56:14 -0700

TAI Alert! By John L. Petersen. -- It appears that we may be at the beginning of a major, historical disruption of the world’s financial system. Here’s what it looks like from here...

At the beginning of the sub-prime disintegration analysts discounted the potential impact of the trend, reminding all that would listen that sub-prime mortgages represented only some 4% of the total mortgages (or something like that). It was impossible that those failures would really be significant.

What they all missed was the systems nature of the problem. Narrowly focused on a few fund meltdowns they didn’t take into consideration the interconnections and dependencies of a number of tightly coupled variables that make up the system. I’m certainly not an economist or financial analyst, but I’d guess that it is fundamentally a non-linear system, subject to vagaries that are not deterministic and predictable . . . it therefore it is predictable that the system could (or would) exhibit significant shifts in behavior passing certain unanticipated tipping points.

There are quite a few dependent variables in this system. Personal credit card debt and the Basel II accords mandating international banking changes, as well as hedge funds, and China are important players. Here’s something about hedge funds from my friends at the Asymmetric Threats Contingency Alliance in London. ...

What Caused the Great American Extinction?

Ron — Tue, 31 Jul 2007 11:00:00 -0700

Scientists have been arguing for years about what caused the die-off of both North American culture and many large animals near the end of the last ice age, about 13,000 years ago. Did hunters wipe out the mammoths, saber-toothed tigers, and giant sloths? Or did a huge drop in temperature freeze out both the animals and their hunters?

Neither, says Luann Becker, a geochemist at the University of California at Santa Barbara. Becker, along with two dozen–odd scientists, is studying a thin 12,900-year-old geologic layer across North America that she believes holds the legacy of a major extraterrestrial impact roughly half the size of the one that killed the dinosaurs. -- After reviewing evidence of the blast—magnetic dust, trapped extraterrestrial gas, glasslike carbon full of tiny diamonds from the heat, and a layer of iridium from outer space—the geologists concluded that the North American fireball was a whopper. Specifically, they suggest that a three-mile-wide comet moving at 135,000 miles an hour blew up over Canada with the force of a million nuclear bombs.

Mammoths didn’t stand a chance, says Northern Arizona University space scientist Ted Bunch: “If the fires and the shock wave didn’t get them, there was a nuclear winter that blocked out the sun and made eating difficult.” The heat may have also melted vast stretches of retreating glaciers, kicking off a cold spell by slowing ocean currents. ...

Jumbo Squid Invade California Coast

Ron — Mon, 30 Jul 2007 10:00:00 -0700

...over the last few years, millions of jumbo squid—often called red devils, or Humboldt squid—have taken up permanent residence off the coasts of California in the Northern Hemisphere and Chile in the Southern. Sightings have been reported as far north as Alaska, where wolves gnaw on the washed-up carcasses.

Humans may indeed be causing the boom in jumbo squid but by a separate mechanism, according to Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) scientist Bruce Robison, lead author of the PNAS paper. “We think one of the main drivers behind the population expansion is the overfishing of tuna,” he says. The decrease in tuna leaves more food for squid, which typically share the same diet, and also saves juvenile squid—a favorite meal of large tuna—from predation. Unfortunately for fishermen, jumbo squid—which eat 1-2 pounds and grow up to a full inch per day—are now tearing into stocks of valuable hake, rockfish, and anchovies. ...

Second Life: An alternate universe

Ron — Fri, 27 Jul 2007 11:30:28 -0700

It's 1 a.m., and the "Dublin" nightclub is packed. Women in trendy ball gowns and men in miniskirts dance to Bon Jovi. Simon Stevens spins his wheelchair across the room, then leaps up and starts dancing, a move he can execute only here in Second Life, a 3-D virtual world that Stevens roams on his PC screen, using an avatar - a graphic rendering of himself, liberated from his cerebral palsy. "I flourish in Second Life," says the 33-year-old, who heads a disability-consulting firm called Enable Enterprises, out of his home in England. "It's no game - it's a serious tool." Rhonda Lillie and Paul Hawkins live thousands of miles apart - she in California, he in Wales - and until this week, had never met face to face. But they've been dating for more than two years - in Second Life. The detachment of meeting through their avatars allowed them to open up to one another in a way they might never have done in the real world. "We felt like we could go in and really be ourselves," Lillie says.

Anshe Chung is a virtual land baroness with a real-life fortune. The woman behind the Anshe avatar is Ailin Graef, a former language teacher living near Frankfurt, Germany. Three years ago she started buying and developing virtual land in Second Life to see whether its virtual economy could sustain a real life. Turns out it can: Chung became Second Life's first millionaire in 2006. Her business, Anshe Chung Studios, with a staff of 60, buys virtual property and builds homes or other structures that it rents or sells to other denizens of Second Life. ...

Loose dikes spur China flood fears as hundreds die

Ron — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 13:01:19 -0700

More results of global warming? - ron

Torrential rain has wrought havoc across large parts of China this summer, most recently in the southwest and the east, killing more than 500 people and causing billions of dollars in damage.

An elderly woman feeds her ducks on a boat, which is her temporary home after the village was flooded, in Fengyang County, east China's Anhui province July 21, 2007.

... In southwestern Chongqing, residents were coping with the aftermath of the worst rainstorm in more than a century. ... Chongqing and Sichuan were suffering their worst drought in over 100 years this time last year ...

ENVIRONMENT-JAPAN: Quake Devastates Nuclear Power Plans

Ron — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 09:19:19 -0700

TOKYO, Jul 18 (IPS) - Reports of radiation leakages at a nuclear power plant, following the Niigata earthquake on Monday, have raised widespread public alarm and dealt a devastating blow to the government’s plans to boost the nuclear power industry, both domestically and abroad.

''The problems now being reported from the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa nuclear plant are deeply alarming. They prove that Japan is not prepared for a nuclear power disaster especially during an earthquake and can never be,’’ Prof. Hiroaki Koide, nuclear safety specialist at Kyoto University, told IPS.

The quake left nine people dead, more than 1,000 injured and forced thousands out of their homes and into makeshift shelters. -- Reports trickling out in the aftermath of the 6.8 Richter temblor show that at least 50 adverse events had occurred in the area that had, till now, been considered as a site least likely to be affected by an earthquake. But the epicentre of the quake was less than 10 km away. ...

Clues to Rising Seas Are Hidden in Polar Ice

Ron — Sun, 15 Jul 2007 00:09:00 -0700

Few consequences of global warming pose as severe a threat to human society as sea-level rise. But scientists have yet to figure out how to predict it. -- And not knowing what to expect, policymakers and others are hamstrung in considering how to try to prevent it or prepare for it. ...

To calculate sea-level rise, the key thing researchers need to understand is the behavior of the major ice sheets that cover Greenland and Antarctica. The disintegration of one would dramatically raise the ocean. But while computer models now yield an increasingly sophisticated understanding of how a warming atmosphere would behave, such models have yet to fully encapsulate the complex processes that regulate ice sheet behavior.

"The question is: Can we predict sea level? And the answer is no," said David Holland, who directs New York University's Center for Atmosphere Ocean Science. Holland, an oceanographer, added that this may mean researchers will just have to watch the oceans to see what happens: "We may observe the change much more than we ever predict it."

Fooled by visions of the future

Ron — Sat, 23 Jun 2007 14:32:24 -0700

Thanks to RYD for referring us to this article.
_____________
SINCE THE 1960s, politicians and pundits have predicted the imminent arrival of a digital utopia in which robots would do the washing up and we would live in peace and harmony in an electronically-connected global village, thanks to the Net. -- So why are the utopian visions of 40 years ago strangely similar to the ones we hold today? Because business and political leaders have consistently pushed a carefully orchestrated fantasy of the future to distract us from the present, says Richard Barbrook, who explores the subject in Imaginary Futures — From Thinking Machines to the Global Village.

Mr. Barbrook, a senior lecturer in politics at the University of Westminster, U.K., has been researching this topic for more than four years. What he wants is to show how ideology is used to warp time. "In other words," he says, "how we're told that the importance of a new technology lies not in what it can do in the here and now, but what the more advanced models might be able to do one day." He is particularly interested in exposing the "nonsense of technological determinism," which he describes as "the theory that someone builds a machine, the machine sprouts legs and runs around the world changing it." -- Mr. Barbrook believes we can trace today's deterministic views of technology to the Cold War; when the Soviet Union and the United States dedicated huge resources to demonstrating which empire better represented progress and modernity. During that period, the U.S. repackaged the space rockets, atomic reactors, and computer mainframes it was developing in the pursuit of atomic Armageddon into prototypes of better things to come.

"Nasa's spaceships would evolve into luxurious interplanetary passenger liners," says Mr. Barbrook. "General Electric's nuclear fission reactors would become fusion plants providing limitless energy for all. IBM's computers were prototypes of artificial intelligence." Soon, the implication went, loyal obedient robots would be at humanity's beck and call. ...

China may now lead U.S. in greenhouse gases

Ron — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 15:07:48 -0700

Thanks to Rakesh for suggesting this article:

BEIJING — It was only three months ago that international energy officials revised a prediction that China would surpass the United States as the world's largest producer of greenhouse gases by 2009 or 2010. It could happen, they warned, as early as the end of this year. -- That may have been conservative.

China's emissions of carbon dioxide, the most significant greenhouse gas, already have exceeded those of the United States, according to a report released this week by the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency. -- The study estimated that the surging demand for power from China's rapidly expanding economy caused carbon dioxide emissions to rise by 9% in 2006. That increase, coupled with a slight decline in the United States, meant that China's emissions for the year surpassed those of the U.S. by 8%, the Dutch report said. ...

China's emissions have outpaced predictions because the economy has grown faster than expected. With construction booming, China produces an estimated 44% of the world's cement, Olivier said. And with its factories' fuel needs rising, China has been completing construction of coal-fired power plants at a rate of about two a week. -- In the next eight years, the International Energy Agency estimates, China will build as many power plants as exist today in all of the European Union countries. Birol said the West needs to find incentives to help China invest in cleaner forms of energy than coal, because when coal plants come on line, they generally last decades. ...

Disappearing Common Birds Send Environmental Wake-up Call

Ron — Fri, 15 Jun 2007 14:00:01 -0700

...A new analysis by the National Audubon Society reveals that populations of some of America’s most familiar and beloved birds have taken a nosedive over the past forty years, with some down as much as 80 percent. The dramatic declines are attributed to the loss of grasslands, healthy forests and wetlands, and other critical habitats from multiple environmental threats such as sprawl, energy development, and the spread of industrialized agriculture.

The study notes that these threats are now compounded by new and broader problems including the escalating effects of global warming. In concert, they paint a challenging picture for the future of many common species and send a serious warning about our increasing toll on local habitats and the environment itself.

“These are not rare or exotic birds we’re talking about—these are the birds that visit our feeders and congregate at nearby lakes and seashores and yet they are disappearing day by day,” said Audubon Chairperson and former EPA Administrator, Carol Browner. “Their decline tells us we have serious work to do, from protecting local habitats to addressing the huge threats from global warming.” ...

“We are in a race to save humanity,” by Ervin Laszlo

Ron — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 22:34:01 -0700

"...Today, we are facing two crises, one in the biosphere and the other in human consciousness. If we are going to cope with the challenges facing the biosphere, there must be a new human consciousness. It must recognize we are as much part of this planet as the birds and trees, and evolve in response to that. Once we feel this, we will automatically try to preserve our planet.

Another way to reach this is that we must sense our unity, we must feel connected, both to each other and to the biosphere. ... To my mind, there is an almost miraculous acceleration of this new consciousness, which I sometimes refer to as planetary consciousness. Even in biological terms, I’m sure that the genetic code of the children born today is different from ours. As living systems are open, as there is always an energy interchange between them and their environment, the new generation’s DNA must have been modified by the crisis we are living through, perhaps making them more able to adapt and survive. ...

But still we need to buy time; to delay the coming of the ‘chaos point’ regarding the biosphere until this new consciousness has fully established itself. If the crisis happened today, we would be as unprepared for it as we were for the tsunami. -- This is where places like Auroville can play a vital role. For as this new consciousness spreads by what the scientists term ‘adaptive resonance, wherever you have a higher concentration of people who sense and act upon their unity, it can be picked up by receptive people anywhere. This is why those who are engaged in living and developing this planetary consciousness bear a tremendous responsibility for the evolution of all humanity. ...

The BP-Berkeley Energy BioScience Institute

Ron — Tue, 29 May 2007 15:00:00 -0700

The ‘climate change sceptics' refer to a very small band of critics that are generally not scientists engaging in serious scientific debates, but concentrate their efforts in targeting the media. They have received significant funding from coal and oil companies including ExxonMobil, and are connected to public relations firms that have set up industry-funded lobby groups to “reposition global warming as theory (not fact)”, as stated in a leaked memo.

On February 1, 2007, the University of California at Berkeley (UCB) administration announced an agreement between a consortium led by UC B and BP (or British Petroleum before rebranding) to fund an Energy Biosciences Institute (EBI) for biofuels and ‘synthetic biology' research to the tune of $500 million over the next ten years ...

Cancer Risks from Mobile Phone Microwaves Confirmed

Ron — Mon, 28 May 2007 15:36:40 -0700

...Evidence linking weak electromagnetic radiation (EMR) to leukaemia and other cancers has been fast accumulating in recent years... Such ‘non-thermal' effects of EMR – due to levels well below that sufficient to bring about any heating - have been observed even before World War II...

During the cold war period, a four-fold excess of cancer cases was diagnosed among the staff of the American Embassy in Moscow that had been secretly irradiated with microwaves at well below the threshold set in current guidelines. The US State Department study on this episode was described in a paper published in 1997. This was among the earliest evidence for non-thermal effects of microwaves, and many studies are now confirming the high cancer risks of people exposed to microwaves from mobile phone base stations and transmitters around the world. Microwaves are no different from EMRs in the lower frequency range in that respect; except that microwaves may be even more potent in promoting cancer and other illnesses ...

China suspends new maglev train project due to EM radiation health concerns

Ron — Mon, 28 May 2007 11:37:01 -0700

BEIJING (AFX) - China has suspended the planned construction of a high-speed magnetic levitation train linking the eastern cities of Shanghai and Hangzhou due to health concerns, the official Xinhua news agency has reported.

Citing unnamed Shanghai officials, Xinhua said the project has been suspended following petitions from residents living along the proposed route worried about possible health problems from the maglev's high powered magnets.

A question of whether the project can eventually recover the more than 40 bln yuan invested in it also casts a shadow over its feasibility, Xinhua said. -- It's now 'hard to say' if the train will be built at all, Xinhua quoted Wang Qingyun, the official in charge of transportation at the National Development and Reform Commission, as saying. ...

Fish virus hits Great Lakes

Ron — Sat, 26 May 2007 15:53:34 -0700

A highly contagious and deadly disease that has plagued fish in the Great Lakes for at least two years is ravaging that lake system and has spread to fish in other freshwater lakes and rivers in the region, prompting officials to issue emergency rules and strengthen existing regulations to slow its march. -- The virus, viral hemorrhagic septicemia virus (VHSV), is not native to the Great Lakes region, so it's hard to predict how damaging it will be to the area's fish, said Rod Getchell, who studies fish diseases at Cornell University's aquatic animal health program. "It's [infecting] naïve hosts, and it's a pathogen that's in a new environment,' he told The Scientist. "That's the scary part. We don't know what kind of effect it's going to have on populations.'

Many fish species die soon after being infected with VHSV, but the disease seems particularly virulent in the Great Lakes, where it has killed several hundred tons of fish over the past two years in Ohio, New York, and Michigan, according to USDA statistics. -- The virus has already spread to the Saint Lawrence River, and managers fear that the disease could make its way into the Mississippi River drainage system. ...

Spy Chips: Be(a)ware of how your belongings could track you

Ron — Wed, 23 May 2007 19:28:19 -0700

While it may occasionally occur to workers that their [employee ID and access] badges can squeal on their movements, there's one place they probably don't expect to find an RFID reader: the bathroom. But a company called Woodward Laboratories has found a way to embed a tag reader into a product they call the "iHygiene Perfect Pump." It's a liquid soap dispenser that doubles as an employee badge reader and monitoring device. To unsuspecting employees, the device appears to be a perfectly normal soap dispenser. But hidden within its sleek plastic exterior is an electronic spy that captures the ID badge number of the person standing at the sink...The handwashing surveillance system requires employees to wear RFID-enabled badges, but soon employees' actual uniforms could report on them instead. The nation's top two uniform rental companies, CIntas (which clothes workers at Starbucks, Disney, Sears, and Wal-Mart) and Ameripride (with clients like Ooutback Steakhouse, 3M, and Cherolet) have quietly begun slipping spychips into employee uniforms to keep track of washing and rental logistics. The tags come encased in sealed plastic disks that can withstand years of commercial laundering, yet still beam out their unique ID numbers whenever they come within range of a reader device. ...

Digital Maoism by Jaron Lanier (edge)

Rich — Sun, 20 May 2007 20:17:24 -0700

His problem is not with the unfolding experiment of the Wikipedia itself, but "the way the Wikipedia has come to be regarded and used; how it's been elevated to such importance so quickly. And that is part of the larger pattern of the appeal of a new online collectivism that is nothing less than a resurgence of the idea that the collective is all-wise, that it is desirable to have influence concentrated in a bottleneck that can channel the collective with the most verity and force. This is different from representative democracy, or meritocracy. This idea has had dreadful consequences when thrust upon us from the extreme Right or the extreme Left in various historical periods. The fact that it's now being re-introduced today by prominent technologists and futurists, people who in many cases I know and like, doesn't make it any less dangerous".

Pathogens Causing HoneyBee Deaths?

Ron — Tue, 01 May 2007 21:26:30 -0700

... a team of scientists recently identified a virus and a parasite that might be the cause of the recent and sudden collapse of honeybee colonies throughout the United States and Europe. The team, from Edgewood Chemical Biological Center and University of California San Francisco, used a new technology, the Integrated Virus Detection System (IVDS), which was designed for military use to rapidly screen samples for pathogens. This technology revealed the presence of a viral and a parasitic pathogen that may be contributing to the honeybee loss.

During the previous year, bee keepers and other experts have observed tremendous declines in honeybee populations -- often entire colonies disappear suddenly and without warning, a situation referred to as "collapse" so scientists refer this phenomenon as "Colony Collapse Disorder" or CCD. Thus far, approximately 50 percent of bee hives have collapsed in this manner. As a result, experts fear that this loss of honeybees will have an enormous horticultural and economic impact around the world, leaving important food crops such as fruits, vegetables, and almonds unpollinated, so they are working hard to find the cause of this mysterious syndrome, and this cutting-edge technology might have provided them with an answer. ...

Is China Slowly Poisoning the World?

Ron — Sun, 29 Apr 2007 15:35:09 -0700

...So then what exactly is causing the recent spate of pet illnesses and deaths? As a scientist I must initially conclude that there is not enough data to come to a firm conclusion. However, that does not mean that we cannot make well educated assumptions. Because melamine is not particularly toxic and is not known to cause kidney failure, it is logical to assume that there are other contaminants in pet food in addition to the melamine.

Obviously, Chinese farmers, chemical producers, and food additive distributors have no compunction against putting harmful or even toxic compounds into products that are to be consumed by either animals or humans. China has a history recently of putting business interests far ahead of human interests. Manufacturers in China have few restrictions on how they operate and whether or not they are permitted to pollute the air and water. Cancer rates have soared in many parts of China that have become industrialized. It has been noted by Western journalists that the smog is so thick in some Chinese cities in that you can stare at the sun without worry because it looks like a dim orange ball in the sky.

Another assumption that we can make based on what is known about toxicology is that it is not uncommon for two mildly toxic compounds to have a cumulative effect that is far more toxic than either compound alone. As such, it seems quite likely that other chemical contaminants originating in China, which have not yet been identified, are also present in Chinese food products. Melamine would almost certainly put a strain on the kidneys because it contains a great deal of nitrogen, and one of the major functions of the kidneys is to clear excess nitrogen from the body in the form of urea (present at high levels in the urine). If Chinese farmers and food product distributors have been putting other toxic compounds into their products for similar, nefarious reasons as they have been using melamine, then it seems quite possible that two or more mildly toxic compounds are having a synergistic effect in causing kidney damage, and eventually failure. ...

What is happening to the bees? (NYT)

Ron — Thu, 26 Apr 2007 04:32:20 -0700

More than a quarter of the country’s 2.4 million bee colonies have been lost — tens of billions of bees, according to an estimate from the Apiary Inspectors of America, a national group that tracks beekeeping. So far, no one can say what is causing the bees to become disoriented and fail to return to their hives.

As with any great mystery, a number of theories have been posed, and many seem to researchers to be more science fiction than science. People have blamed genetically modified crops, cellular phone towers and high-voltage transmission lines for the disappearances. ...

Climate change a a “serious national security threat”

Ron — Mon, 16 Apr 2007 11:00:00 -0700

Sweltering flight deck crews couldn’t launch Navy jets for extended periods of time. U.S. ground troops would find themselves splitting time between humanitarian relief operations and fighting insurgents bent on winning over desperate third-world peoples. Low-lying logistics hub Diego Garcia would be swallowed up by the Indian Ocean.

Global warming isn’t often thought of as a matter of interest for the U.S. military. But it should be, an advisory board of 11 retired flag officers concluded in a report issued Monday under the auspices of the Center for Naval Analyses, a non-profit national security analysis group. Climate change is happening, the blue-ribbon panel concluded, and is a “serious national security threat.” ...

Postmodernism and the Birth of the Author in Philip K. Dick's Valis

Ron — Thu, 12 Apr 2007 10:28:16 -0700

...If we define the topic as the relation between the reader's, the character's, and the author's willingness to believe, then the matter is very different in Valis. In Valis the text does not offer the reader the incredible as already labeled incredible — zany or horrifying, extreme or bizarre. The incredible is offered as ordinary, as reportage. Is not this the frisson worked by this novel? Anyone reading a novel such as Ubik has to accept that the novel offers something visionary and phantasmagoric. Whether one then emphasizes the novel's treatment of the deliquescence of commodity in late capitalism, or, with George Slusser, one then emphasizes its rendition of ``historicity'' in relation to an open, Emersonian event horizon, one has to pay attention to that explicit inventiveness which constitutes the shimmering portal... through which any reader gains entrance to that novel and others like it. Valis is different. ...

Many of Dick's values are strongly liberal and humanist. He values the little guy who dissents, resists, and persists, if necessary, alone; he values the single humble act, the individual saved..., the broken pot fixed, the embrace of two strangers in the dark and rain-spattered forecourt of a gas station... And liberal values, and hopes, are subjected to intense torsion, or distortion, in Dick's novels. [Fredrick] Jameson has traced this in Dr. Bloodmoney, whose bizarre cast's weird actions he sees as Dick's response to a threatened "leftist" belief that good and evil in history can be attached to individuals. Dick values that which is unassimilated — unassimilated into the mechanical and collective, into an oppressive society, into a single godhead, into entropy; but the urgency of assertion and defense of that value leads him to break all traditional definitions of the human individual. Liberal humanism, passed through this sieve, emerges as intuition of the potential value in androids, gods, animals, robots: anywhere and wherever life asserts a distinctness, rather than threatening it. The issue must be fraught with danger: vindication of the human, if it is to be achieved, will only be effective if the human has been profoundly jeopardized. ...

The Club of Rome, System Dynamics & Limits to Growth

Ron — Wed, 11 Apr 2007 12:31:40 -0700

Part of my grad school study was with the System Dynamics computer simulation group under Prof. Jay W. Forrester at MIT. Working with the Club of Rome sponsored "Limits to Growth" global modeling project awakened me to the complex "world problematique" rushing tsunami-like out of humanity's future. This realization led to my ongoing concern with sustainability issues, which in turn was part of my motivation for co-founding SCIY. -- I'm happy to see that the Club of Rome continues with its important work. ~ ron

The Club of Rome’s mission is to act as a global catalyst of change that is free of any political, ideological or business interest.

The Club of Rome contributes to the solution of what it calls the world problematique, the complex set of the most crucial problems – political, social, economic, technological, environmental, psychological and cultural - facing humanity.

It does so taking a global, long term and interdisciplinary perspective aware of the increasing interdependence of nations and the globalisation of problems that pose predicaments beyond the capacity of individual countries. ...

Philip K. Dick's Divine Interference, by Eric Davis

Ron — Tue, 10 Apr 2007 11:30:17 -0700

...Unlike most religious seers, Dick did not approach his visions with anything like certitude. Dick distrusted reification of any sort (his novels constantly wage war against the process that turns people and ideas into things), and so he refused to solidify his experiences into a belief system. ...Dick approached his theophany (or "in-breaking of God") as artistic material, reworking it in his writings with an artist's commitment to irony, craft, and a political bite. Even in his private journals, he constantly liquefies his revelations, writing with a modern thinker's sense of the tentativeness of speculative thought.

... Dick's Black Iron Prison imaginatively captured the "disciplinary apparatus" of power analyzed by historian Michel Foucault. Demonstrating that prisons, mental institutions, schools, and military establishments all share similar organizations of space and time, Foucault argued that a "technology of power" was distributed throughout social space, enmeshing human subjects at every turn. Foucault argued that liberal social reforms are only cosmetic brush-ups of an underlying mechanism of control. As Dick put it, "The Empire never ended."

"...today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups... unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. [10]"

As Jean Baudrillard has argued into the ground, simulation rather than representation has become the defining characteristic of cultural signs and artifacts in our time. ... The technological simulacrum creates its own reality, which Baudrillard calls the "hyperreal," a kind of ersatz parody of Plato's ideal world of forms. For example, when you download a printer driver from the Internet or record a CD onto digital tape, you do not "copy" the information so much as replicate a hyperreal object.

... As an exhausted rationalist, Baudrillard simply abandoned himself to a morbid celebration of the pixel apocalypse, giving up any notion of resistance or transformation while ignoring the messy realities that gum up the works of all such grand intellectual scenarios. But Dick never gave up his commitment to the "authentically human," the "viable, elastic organism which can bounce back, absorb, and deal with the new." He also recognized that simulacra lie deep in our souls, and that we are not so far from the spiritual paradigms of the ancient world, with their camouflage spirits, talking images, and automata gods. And so Dick redeployed the gnostic struggle for authenticity and freedom within the hard-sell universe of simulation. The world is a prison not because of its materiality—which was the opinion of the ancient Gnostics—but because of the hidden orders of power and control it houses: the various corporate, political, and ideological archons herding us into increasingly compelling synthetic worlds. ...

'The Great Turning' by David Korten

Ron — Tue, 10 Apr 2007 09:25:08 -0700

In The Great Turning, Korten argues that corporate consolidation of power is merely a contemporary manifestation of what he calls “Empire”: the organization of society by hierarchies of domination grounded in violent chauvinisms of race, gender, religion, nationality, language, and class. The result has been the same for 5,000 years, fortune for the few and misery for the many. Increasingly destructive of children, family, community, and nature, the way of Empire is leading to environmental and social collapse.

The Great Turning makes the case that we humans are a choicemaking species that at this defining moment faces both the opportunity and the imperative to choose our future as a conscious collective act. We can no longer deny the need nor delay our response. A mounting perfect economic storm is fast approaching. A convergence of climate change, peak oil, and the financial instability inherent in an unbalanced global trading system will bring an unraveling of the corporate-led global economy and a dramatic restructuring of every aspect of modern life.

Thanks to Mario Santonm for recommending this book. ...

Permanent drought predicted for Southwest (LA Times)

Ron — Sat, 07 Apr 2007 13:37:34 -0700

The driest periods of the last century — the Dust Bowl of the 1930s and the droughts of the 1950s — may become the norm in the Southwest United States within decades because of global warming, according to a study released Thursday. The research suggests that the transformation may already be underway. Much of the region has been in a severe drought since 2000, which the study's analysis of computer climate models shows as the beginning of a long dry period.

The study, published online in the journal Science, predicted a permanent drought by 2050 throughout the Southwest — one of the fastest-growing regions in the nation. -- The data tell "a story which is pretty darn scary and very strong," said Jonathan Overpeck, a climate researcher at the University of Arizona who was not involved in the study. ...

Interview w. Dr. Darin Barney, author of "Prometheus Wired"

Ron — Wed, 21 Mar 2007 14:33:07 -0700

Rich Carlson asked me to post this article for him. ~ ron

...Dr. Barney recently lectured at Mount Allison as a part of the Democratic Audit series, which is coming out in book form one of these days. Of the lectures in the series that I attended, Barney was the only speaker to explicitly and rigourously question the influence of corporate interests on democratic processes (something that, one would think, would be necessarily central to any "democratic audit" taking place in the last 200 years). Specifically, Barney elaborated on the corporate stranglehold of development of communications infrastructure policy and regulation in Canada. -- Dr. Barney answered my questions via email. What follows is an unedited transcript; an edited version with an extended introduction is forthcoming. - Dru Oja Jay

Dr. Barney: Still, I think it is important to think not only in terms of how we design or use these technologies, but also in terms of how social practices are designed by, and how we are, in a sense, used by, these technologies. Technological mythology leads us to believe that technologies arise, as if by magic, to address pre-existing needs and to provide solutions to pre-existing problems. In reality, technologies tend to create more needs than they address, and to manufacture the very problems they stand ready to solve. I think of cellular telephony in this regard. Was the ability to engage in phone conversation while riding the bus really a pressing social need prior to the arrival of the cellular phone, or did our perception of that as a need arise after this technology became widely available? Was the fact that everybody wasn't always accessible, everywhere, via personal communication technology a problem before the mobile phone, or did constant accessibility become an expectation in light of the domestication of mobile phones and e-mail? Theorists of technology used to call this "reverse adaptation," and it is, I think, a social dynamic that is widespread in the age of proliferating digital technology. ...

Al Gore's Personal Online Journal

Ron — Tue, 20 Mar 2007 15:39:36 -0700

2007-03-20: A House committee released documents showing hundreds of cases where a White House official edited climate reports to play up uncertainty of a human role in global warming or play down evidence of such a role.

2007-03-20: Rep. John Dingell once dismissed global warming as a "theory." Lately, the Democratic lawmaker from Michigan has had a change of heart. His conversion underscores the changed atmosphere on Capitol Hill.

2007-03-20: Leading US financial investors joined some of the country's larges companies and urged Capitol Hill to follow Europe by setting mandatory targets to reduce US carbon emissions. ...

Everything You Know About AIDS is Wrong

Ron — Fri, 09 Mar 2007 14:36:22 -0800

...Oster argues that health is an investment. If you’re expecting to live a good, long time, you might be more inclined to make health investments than if you expect to die soon. If your life expectancy is only 40-50 years due to environmental factors, you might be more willing to take this 3% risk than a gay man in America who otherwise expects to live almost 80 years.

To test this effect, Oster looked at sexual behavior rates in countries that had high, low and medium levels of malaria. In countries with low malaria, there’s a very strong correlation between prevalence of AIDS and change in behavior - in countries with high malaria, there’s no correlation, or in fact, an opposite effect. There’s a similar correlation with maternal health and child mortality. This suggests that if you want to combat AIDS, you also need to deal with malaria, internal air quality and maternal health. ...

How to Think Differently About Climate: Imagine not just radical change, but transformation

Ron — Fri, 09 Mar 2007 14:24:40 -0800

...So, climate negative. Any plan which doesn't measure itself against that bar is no plan at all. To get a sense of how difficult our task will be, take a look at the boldness and complexity of Energy [R]evolution, a blueprint for reducing global CO2 by 50% worldwide by 2050.

Cutting our CO2 in half, the authors say, will take major breakthroughs in solar, wind, geothermal, bioenergy, hydropower, and advanced fossil fuel technologies. It will take behavioral changes. It will take policy shifts, changing the way we tax energy and pollution and incentivize innovation and investment to level the playing field. And it will take proceeding on different paths in different places. It will be, in short, a massive undertaking.

Now imagine that as a half step, and one that will come too late. Imagine not just radical change, but transformation. ...

Foreword to James Gardner's "The Intelligent Universe," by Ray Kurzweil

Ron — Mon, 26 Feb 2007 14:26:01 -0800

Ray Kurzweil wrote this article as the introduction to James Gardner's new book, "The Intelligent Universe: AI, ET, and the Emerging Mind of the Cosmos." It's a good summary of Ray's latest thinking. Though its very techno-optimistic view is contrary to the post-modern skeptical flavor often presented on SCIY, I've been following Ray's thinking for years and continue to be impressed with his erudite scholarship. -- In any case, I believe it's an important function of SCIY to present viewpoints that are contrary to our own; to be skeptical of our own skepticism.

... It is remarkable to me that almost all of the discussions of cosmology fail to mention the role of intelligence. In the common cosmological view, intelligence is just a bit of froth, something interesting that happens on the sidelines of the great cosmic story. But in the standard view, whether the universe winds up or down, ends up in fire (a great crunch and new Big Bang), or ice (an ever-expanding and ultimately dead universe), or something in-between, depends only on measures of dark matter, dark energy, and other parameters we have yet to discover. That the story of the universe is a story yet to be written by the intelligence it will spawn is almost never mentioned. This book will help to change the common "unintelligent" view.

So what will we do when our intelligence is in the range of a google (10^100) cps? One thing we may do is to engineer new universes. Similarly, our universe may be the creation of some superintelligences in another universe. In this case, there was an intelligent designer of our universe--that designer would be the evolved intelligence of some other universe that created ours. Perhaps our universe is a science fair experiment of a student in another universe. (Reading the news of the day, you might get the impression that this erstwhile adolescent superintelligence who designed our universe is not going to get a very good grade on his or her project.)

But the evolution of intelligence here on Earth is actually going very well. All of the vagaries (and tragedies) of human history, such as two world wars, the cold war, the great depression, and other notable events, did not make even the slightest dent in the ongoing exponential progressions I previously mentioned. ...

Cyber officials: Chinese hackers attack 'anything and everything'

Ron — Tue, 20 Feb 2007 14:52:45 -0800

NORFOLK, Va. -- At the Naval Network Warfare Command here, U.S. cyber defenders track and investigate hundreds of suspicious events each day. But the predominant threat comes from Chinese hackers, who are constantly waging all-out warfare against Defense Department networks, Netwarcom officials said. - Attacks coming from China, probably with government support, far outstrip other attackers in terms of volume, proficiency and sophistication, said a senior Netwarcom official, who spoke to reporters on background Feb 12. The conflict has reached the level of a campaign-style, force-on-force engagement, he said.

“They will exploit anything and everything,” the senior official said, referring to the Chinese hackers’ strategy. And although it is impossible to confirm the involvement of China’s government, the attacks are so deliberate, “it’s hard to believe it’s not government-driven,” the official said. - The motives of Chinese hackers run the gamut, including technology theft, intelligence gathering, exfiltration, research on DOD operations and the creation of dormant presences in DOD networks for future action, the official said. ...

Meeting the Asteroid Impact Threat: Astronauts call for new UN Agency

Ron — Fri, 16 Feb 2007 23:11:11 -0800

The next known close encounter with an asteroid will occur, somewhat ominously, on Friday the 13th of April 2029. Then, Near-Earth Object 99942--also known as Apophis (Greek for "The Demon of Darkness")--is expected to miss the planet by a mere 30,000 kilometers. The real sweating begins soon after, when astronomers must determine whether Earth's gravity has steered Apophis onto a course for impact seven years later. ...

Mystery Ailment Strikes Honeybees

Ron — Sun, 11 Feb 2007 23:55:35 -0800

A mysterious illness is killing tens of thousands of honeybee colonies across the country, threatening honey production, the livelihood of beekeepers and possibly crops that need bees for pollination.

Researchers are scrambling to find the cause of the ailment, called Colony Collapse Disorder.

Reports of unusual colony deaths have come from at least 22 states. Some affected commercial beekeepers _ who often keep thousands of colonies _ have reported losing more than 50 percent of their bees. ...

Metaphysical implications of the quantum 'Zero Point Field'

Ron — Wed, 07 Feb 2007 14:38:19 -0800

This is Part 1 of a series of quoted passages from the book The Field: the Quest for the Secret Force of the Universe, by science journalist Lynn McTaggart. It’s an excellent non-technical explanation about the metaphysical implications of modern quantum theory, especially what’s called the ‘Zero Point Field.’ I hope this can provide a useful vocabulary for our ongoing dialogues re possible relationships between science and spirituality. I’ll say more in future comments to these articles. ~ ron

...The notion of an electromagnetic field is simply a convenient abstraction invented by scientists (and represented by lines of 'force', indicated by direction and shape) to try to make sense of the seemingly remarkable actions of electricity and magnetism and their ability to influence objects at a distance — and, technically, into infinity — with no detectable substance or matter in between. Simply put, a field is a region of influence. As one pair of researchers aptly described it: 'Every time you use your toaster, the fields around it perturb charged particles in the farthest galaxies ever so slightly.' ... In the quantum world, quantum fields are not mediated by forces but by exchange of energy, which is constantly redistributed in a dynamic pattern. This constant exchange is an intrinsic property of particles, so that even 'real' particles are nothing more than a little knot of energy which briefly emerges and disappears back into the underlying field. According to quantum field theory, the individual entity is transient and insubstantial. Particles cannot be separated from the empty space around them. Einstein himself recognized that matter itself was 'extremely intense' — a disturbance, in a sense, of perfect randomness — and that the only fundamental reality was the underlying entity — the field itself. ...

The Zero Point Field is a repository of all fields and all ground energy states and all virtual particles — a field of fields. ...

The existence of the Zero Point Field implied that all matter in the universe was interconnected by waves, which are spread out through time and space and can carry on to infinity, tying one part of the universe to every other part. The idea of the Zero Point Field might just offer a scientific explanation for many metaphysical notions, such as the Chinese belief in the life force, or qi, described in ancient texts as something akin to an energy field. It even echoed the Old Testament's account of God's first dictum: 'Let there be light', out of which matter was created. ... If all subatomic matter in the world is interacting constantly with this ambient ground-state energy field, the subatomic waves of the Zero Point Field are constantly imprinting a record of the shape of everything. As the harbinger and imprinter of all wavelengths and all frequencies, the Zero Point Field is a kind of shadow of the universe for all time, a mirror image and record of everything that ever was. In a sense, the vacuum is the beginning and the end of everything in the universe. ... If that were true, it meant every part of the universe could be in touch with every other part instantaneously. ...

... If matter wasn't stable, but an essential element in an underlying ambient, random sea of energy ... then it should be possible to use this as a blank matrix on which coherent patterns could be written, particularly as the Zero Point Field had imprinted everything that ever happened in the world through wave interference encoding. This kind of information might account for coherent particle and field structures. But there might also be an ascending ladder of other possible information structures, perhaps coherent fields around living organisms, or maybe this acts a a non-biochemical 'memory' in the universe. It might even be possible to organize these fluctuations somehow through an act of will. ... this represented nothing less than a unifying concept of the universe, which showed that everything was in some sort of connection and balance with the rest of the cosmos. The universe's very currency might be learned information, as imprinted upon this fluid, mutable field of information. The Zero Point Field demonstrated that the real currency of the universe — the very reason for its stability — is an exchange of energy. If we were all connected through the Zero Point Field, then it just might be possible to tap into this vast reservoir of energy information and extract information from it. With such a vast energy bank to be harnessed, virtually anything was possible — that is, if human beings had some sort of quantum structure allowing them access to it. But there was the stumbling block. That would require that our bodies operated according to the laws of the quantum world. ...

UN Science Panel Calls Global Warming "Unequivocal"

Ron — Mon, 05 Feb 2007 17:54:03 -0800

PARIS, Feb. 2 — In a grim and powerful assessment of the future of the planet, the leading international network of climate scientists has concluded for the first time that global warming is “unequivocal” and that human activity is the main driver, “very likely” causing most of the rise in temperatures since 1950. — They said the world was in for centuries of climbing temperatures, rising seas and shifting weather patterns — unavoidable results of the buildup of heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere.

But their report, released here on Friday by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said warming and its harmful consequences could be substantially blunted by prompt action. ...

Clean air or TV: Where will Asia find more energy?

Ron — Wed, 31 Jan 2007 14:50:41 -0800

A toxic purple haze of diesel exhaust hangs over the rice and jute fields here in northeastern India, and bird songs are frequently drowned out by the chug-a-chug-a-chug of diesel generators. — Across the developing world, cheap diesel generators from China have become a favorite way to provide electricity. — They power everything from irrigation pumps to television sets, allowing growing numbers of rural villages in many poor countries to grow more crops and connect to the wider world. — But as the demand increases for the electricity that makes those advances possible, it is often being met through the dirtiest, most inefficient means, creating pollution in many remote areas that used to have pristine air and negligible emissions of carbon dioxide and other global warming gases...

Another popular approach being tried in India and elsewhere -- using solar energy to recharge lanterns by day -- has run into difficulty even as diesel prices would seem to make it more competitive. — The problem is that prices for photovoltaic panels for solar energy have surged as governments in industrialized countries, especially Germany, have encouraged greater use of renewable energy, said Hemant Lamba, the coordinator of Aurore, a renewable energy service company in Auroville, India. — "It's harder to do any solar energy projects in India," he said. ...

The human role in climate change (Boston Review)

Ron — Tue, 30 Jan 2007 23:50:01 -0800

This is one of the best summaries of the science of climate change and global warming forecasting I've seen. It's by Kerry Emanuel, a professor of meteorology at MIT, who was recognized in 2006 by Time magazine as "one of the world’s 100 most influential people." Highly recommended.

...The evolution of the scientific debate about anthropogenic climate change illustrates both the value of skepticism and the pitfalls of partisanship... general awareness of the issue dates to a National Academy of Sciences report in 1979 that warned that doubling CO2 content might lead to a three-to-eight-degree increase in global average temperature. Then, in 1988, James Hansen, the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, set off a firestorm of controversy by testifying before Congress that he was virtually certain that a global-warming signal had emerged from the background climate variability... Most scientists were deeply skeptical of Hansen’s claims; I certainly was...

At roughly this time, radical environmental groups and a handful of scientists influenced by them leapt into the fray with rather obvious ulterior motives. This jump-started the politicization of the issue, and conservative groups, financed by auto makers and big oil, responded with counterattacks... A very small number of climate scientists adopted dogmatic positions and in so doing lost credibility among the vast majority who remained committed to an unbiased search for answers... On the right, the search began for negative feedbacks that would counter increasing greenhouse gases: imaginative ideas emerged, but they have largely failed the acid test of comparison to observations. But as the dogmatists grew increasingly alienated from the scientific mainstream, they were embraced by political groups and journalists, who thrust them into the limelight. This produced a gross distortion in the public perception of the scientific debate. Ever eager for the drama of competing dogmas, the media largely ignored mainstream scientists whose hesitations did not make good copy. As the global-warming signal continues to emerge, this soap opera is kept alive by a dwindling number of deniers constantly tapped for interviews by journalists who pretend to look for balance...

Regulating Nanotechnology and Designing the NGOs of the Future (WC)

Ron — Mon, 29 Jan 2007 16:49:08 -0800

...If, in fact, full-blown nanotechnology erupts into our lives in 20 years, instead of 50, the results are likely to be as disruptive as the first century of the Industrial Revolution, but compressed into a much shorter time period. And, given that it might, it is the duty of those of us who would prefer an unimaginable future to an unthinkable one to take seriously the responsibility of handling nanotechnology carefully.

But it's also important to remember that we have a huge advantage that our ancestors lacked as they struggled with the first Industrial Revolution: we have a history of technology, and we understand that what technologies are adopted and how they are used is a matter of societal choice. We have the power to imagine, to anticipate and ultimately to steer the development of nanotechnology. ...

Rise in carbon levels fuels fears of runaway warming (Guardian/The Hindu)

Ron — Sun, 21 Jan 2007 15:07:13 -0800

Thanks to RY Deshpande for referring this new article from the Guardian, via The Hindu.

CARBON DIOXIDE is accumulating in the atmosphere much faster than scientists expected, raising fears that humankind may have less time to tackle climate change than previously thought. — New figures from dozens of measuring stations across the world reveal that concentrations of CO2, the main greenhouse gas, rose at record levels during 2006 — the fourth year in the last five to show a sharp increase.

At its most far-reaching, the finding could indicate that global temperatures are making forests, soils, and oceans less able to absorb CO2 — a shift that would make it harder to tackle global warming. ...

Google plots e-books coup

Ron — Sun, 21 Jan 2007 12:52:31 -0800

GOOGLE and some of the world’s top publishers are working on plans that they hope could do for books what Apple’s iPod has done for music.

The internet search giant is working on a system that would allow readers to download entire books to their computers in a format that they could read on screen or on mobile devices such as a Blackberry. — With 380m people using Google each month, the move would give a significant boost to the development of e-books and have a big impact on the publishing industry and book retailers. ...

Environmental governance (The Hindu)

Ron — Sat, 20 Jan 2007 18:54:06 -0800

Another interesting article from 'The Hindu,' courtesy of RY Deshpande.

Robert Angus Smith, a Scottish chemist coined the term "acid rain" as far back as 1870 to describe the quality of the rain which was affected by sulphur dioxide (SO2) released from coal burnt in factories. Yet it has taken more than a century for countries to grapple with the effects of gaseous emissions. After years of denial by the Thatcher Government in the U.K. and the Reagan administration in the U.S., both these countries as well as most countries of Europe (including the East Block) and Canada made a concerted effort by 1993 to roll back SO2 emissions by as much as 30 per cent compared to the 1980 baseline. Their record on oxides of nitrogen (NOx) is not so dramatic, since vehicles, which are a major source of NOx, are constantly increasing. Western Europe and U.S. have stabilised NOx emissions, while Russia and Eastern Europe have been less successful. ...

Welcome to world peace (Christian Science Monitor)

Ron — Fri, 19 Jan 2007 02:20:49 -0800

World peace was not supposed to look like this. It was supposed to be more - well, more peaceful. But a remarkable global phenomenon is being obscured by headlines about bombs and conflict in the Middle East. The ancient scourge of war has disappeared, at least in the sense of one government's army doing battle with another. — Last week marked 1,000 consecutive days with no wars between nations anywhere in the world, since the night in November 2003 when India and Pakistan instituted a cease-fire. This is the longest episode of interstate peace in more than half a century.

Other sorts of conflicts still rage around the world, but these are not wars of government against government. In this summer's bloodletting in Israel and Lebanon, for example, the Lebanese government took no military action to defend its territory, even as some of its bases came under fire. In Iraq, no government in the world has sent troops to support the insurgency. The interstate phase of the war for Iraq ended more than three years ago, when the United States and its allies removed Saddam Hussein's government. Despite the brutality in Darfur and elsewhere, even civil wars have become rarer. After rising steadily for half a century, the number of civil conflicts dropped by a third or more in the late 1990s. The world is far more peaceful than a dozen years ago, when slaughters in Rwanda and the Balkans led to gloomy predictions of rampant civil war. ...

Stephen Hawking warns re "catastrophic dangers of climate change"

Ron — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 17:46:40 -0800

Professor Hawking said that we stand on the precipice of a second nuclear age and a period of exceptional climate change, both of which could destroy the planet as we know it...

"As we stand at the brink of a second nuclear age and a period of unprecedented climate change, scientists have a special responsibility, once again, to inform the public and to advise leaders about the perils that humanity faces," Professor Hawking said. "As scientists, we understand the dangers of nuclear weapons and their devastating effects, and we are learning how human activities and technologies are affecting climate systems in ways that may forever change life on Earth. ...

The End Is Nearer, Say Atomic Scientists

Ron — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 13:21:43 -0800

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which 60 years ago began keeping tabs on humanity’s temporal distance from self-annihilation with the concept of a “Doomsday Clock,” apparently found things sufficiently dire to nudge the minute hand forward two clicks, indicating that we are now “five minutes to midnight” — or Doomsday.

The clock had last been adjusted in 2002, when it was moved from 9 minutes off to 7 minutes. The current position is the closest the group has put the planet to Doomsday since 1953, when the Soviets and the United States were first playing with their newfangled thermonuclear weaponry, and things looked mighty bleak indeed. ...

Second Life: The world's largest 3-D virtual world

Ron — Mon, 15 Jan 2007 13:46:08 -0800

Second Life is a 3-D virtual world entirely built and owned by its residents. Since opening to the public in 2003, it has grown explosively and today is inhabited by a total of 2,635,859 people from around the globe.

From the moment you enter the World you'll discover a vast digital continent, teeming with people, entertainment, experiences and opportunity. Once you've explored a bit, perhaps you'll find a perfect parcel of land to build your house or business. — You'll also be surrounded by the Creations of your fellow residents. Because residents retain the rights to their digital creations, they can buy, sell and trade with other residents. ...

Jaron's World: Morphing Messages

Ron — Mon, 15 Jan 2007 12:42:02 -0800

This is a followup on an earlier SCIY article about Jaron Lanier's work.

Was I serious when I suggested that people might someday become more like cephalopods (see Jaron's World, April 2006)? At the time I was thinking about the way some cephalopods, such as the mimic octopus, can appear to morph into different objects. I wondered whether people using computers could someday pull off the same trick (within virtual reality, presumably) and how that ability might expand the range of human expression. My guess is that being able to turn into whatever comes into your mind—or, more profoundly, to simulate a concept or way of being instead of just talking about it—will lead to a new kind of expression, which I call postsymbolic communication.

This may sound wildly speculative, but yes, I really was serious. In fact, I believe we are seeing early signs of the cephalopodization of our species right now. One arena in which the transformation is beginning is in massive online virtual worlds. Second Life is probably the best example. I serve as a technical advisor to Linden Lab, the company that administers Second Life, but really, most of what I have done is watch in delight and amazement as thousands of creative individuals have signed up, logged in, and built an entire virtual planet. ...

"Response to my critics," by Meera Nanda

Ron — Sun, 14 Jan 2007 22:11:11 -0800

"Prophets Facing Backward," my book under discussion here, claims that the cluster of social constructivist, feminist and postcolonial theories that deny any cognitive distinctions between warranted knowledge and collectively accepted beliefs ... have provided philosophical justifications for [a] kind of populist interpretive flexibility ...

Set against the backdrop of the rise of Hindu nationalism in India, the book argues that the relentless debunking the very idea of universally valid, bias-free facts has received in the hands of its many academic critics, has added to a culture of doublethink where truth has becomes infinitely malleable, open to all kinds of nativist, pseudo-scientific and faith-based interpretations.

Intellectuals, whose job it is to challenge such mystifications, I argue, have betrayed their calling by condemning the very possibility of impartial and universally valid truth that can cut through cultural and national boundaries. This betrayal has made it easier for the religious right to present itself as the defender of the tradition, dressed up as “alternative science”, which it claims has been unfairly rejected and willfully suppressed by the secular elite. The logic of deconstruction of modern science simultaneously provides the logic for the construction of “sacred sciences” by the resurgent religious-political movements that have sprung up among the Hindus, Christian and Muslims alike.

It is indeed high time for science studies to get engaged in the thorny issues raised by the attempt of religious extremists to take on the prestige of science for their objectively false and outdated cosmologies. It is gratifying to note that the debate I began in the "Prophets" has now been joined. My colleagues from science studies and postcolonial studies have done me the honor of critically engaging with the concerns I have raised regarding the political dangers of epistemic multiculturalism in this age of religious fundamentalisms. In this essay, I will respond at length to the issues my critics have raised in their readings of the "Prophets." ...

"Prophets Facing Backward," by Meera Nanda

Ron — Sat, 13 Jan 2007 21:26:26 -0800

The leading voices in science studies have argued that modern science reflects dominant social interests of Western society. Following this logic, postmodern scholars have urged postcolonial societies to develop their own "alternative sciences" as a step towards "mental decolonization". These ideas have found a warm welcome among Hindu nationalists who came to power in India in the early 1990s. In this passionate and highly original study, Indian-born author Meera Nanda reveals how these well-meaning but ultimately misguided ideas are enabling Hindu ideologues to propagate religious myths in the guise of science and secularism.

At the heart of Hindu supremacist ideology, Nanda argues, lies a postmodernist assumption: that each society has its own norms of reasonableness, logic, rules of evidence, and conception of truth, and that there is no non-arbitrary, culture-independent way to choose among these alternatives. What is being celebrated as "difference" by postmodernists, however, has more often than not been the source of mental bondage and authoritarianism in non-Western cultures. The "Vedic sciences" currently endorsed in Indian schools, colleges, and the mass media promotes the same elements of orthodox Hinduism that have for centuries deprived the vast majority of Indian people of their full humanity.

By denouncing science and secularization, the left was unwittingly contributing to what Nanda calls "reactionary modernism." ...

Prof. Suarez-Villa’s website on the rise of technocapitalism

Ron — Thu, 11 Jan 2007 16:06:32 -0800

Thanks to RY Deshpande for the reference to Prof. Suarez-Villa’s website on the rise of technocapitalism:

Technocapitalism is a new form of market capitalism that is rooted in technological invention and innovation. It can be considered an emerging era, now in its early stage, that is supported by such intangibles as creativity and knowledge.

Intangibles are at the core of technocapitalism. Creativity and knowledge are to technocapitalism what tangible raw materials, factory labor and capital were to industrial capitalism. During industrial capitalism, tangible resources acquired the greatest value, as factory production, repetitive labor and massive output ruled the day. In the emerging technocapitalist era, however, those material resources are becoming secondary in importance.

Intangibles are therefore vital for technocapitalism. Creativity and knowledge are the most valuable resources of this emerging new era. They, for example, already account for as much as three-quarters of the value of most products and services in existence, and that proportion is bound to increase over time. In contrast, the material resources that were most valuable for industrial capitalism are losing value relative to those intangibles in most every product or service.

New economic activities are emerging that are representative of technocapitalism. Biotechnology, nanotechnology, bioinformatics, software design, genomics, molecular computing and biorobotics, for example, are likely to be hallmarks of the twenty-first century, as electronics and aerospace were in the twentieth. This new ecology of activities and sectors is more reliant on creativity and knowledge than any of the old industries of industrial capitalism. ...

Rotten eggstinction: The Permian-Triassic mass extinction

Ron — Wed, 10 Jan 2007 14:01:50 -0800

What was the murder weapon for our planet’s biggest die-off? The Permian-Triassic extinction is the ultimate cold case, transpiring 250 million years ago. But some scientific sleuths have sketched out a scenario worthy of the trickiest mystery novel - involving a chain of volcanic eruptions, greenhouse-gas emissions, oxygen-deficient oceans, sulfur-loving bacteria and poisonous hydrogen sulfide, the compound that smells like rotten eggs. There are even those who would throw in an asteroid for good measure. The rotten-extinction theory gets a prime-time airing tonight on PBS’ “Nova ScienceNow.”

The event, which came at the transition between the Permian and Triassic geologic ages, ranks as the most severe of Earth's five mass extinctions (many people say we're in the midst of the sixth extinction). Based on the fossil record, more than 90 percent of marine species died out, along with about 70 percent of all land-based species. ...

Climate Change: No Time to Debate (6 NYT Letters)

Ron — Mon, 08 Jan 2007 15:21:21 -0800

RY Deshpande just sent the following email containing these 6 recent letters posted to the New York Times:

Re "Middle Stance Emerges in Debate Over Climate" (news article, Jan. 1):

1):Do we know for certain when and how much Greenland and the West Antarctic Ice Sheet will melt with global warming, and the exact amount the sea level will rise as a result? Or how intense heat waves, droughts, floods and storms will become?
The answer is no, it is not possible to make exact predictions about such complex systems.
But there is no uncertainty among the world's leading scientists that if we do not significantly reduce our current levels of burning fossil fuels, our world will experience profound changes, many of them irreversible, in its physical, chemical and biological composition.
And there is absolutely no question that these changes will severely threaten life, including human life, on this planet. It would be shamefully ignorant and morally inexcusable if we did not do everything in our power to prevent these changes from occurring.
Political leaders, policy makers and the public should not be misled by the few scientists who persistently emphasize the uncertainties of climate science, as if these uncertainties guaranteed that global warming consequences would not be catastrophic. ...

Quantum dots, programmable matter, and wellstone (Nanotechnology Now)

Ron — Thu, 04 Jan 2007 10:38:38 -0800

Here's an interesting interview with Will McCarthy, the author of the book "Hacking Matter..." featured in the previous article posted to SCIY. More god-like abilities coming our way. I hope we'll have evolved the consciousness to use these capabilities wisely by then.

"...A wellstone TV might look less like a moving picture and more like a window into a real, three-dimensional space. You could paste these all over the inside of your house, making it look (from the inside) as though you were living in Tahiti, or Antarctica, or on the red-hot surface of the planet Mercury...
"Matter becomes something akin to software - infinitely malleable and precisely obedient. In the future, manufacturing may join mathematics and software as an enterprise where true, literal perfection is not only possible but easy and quick. This makes the technology of programmable matter a huge enabler and catalyst for technology development in other areas...
"... with programmable matter at our command, we may find it trivial to construct much lighter and more capable spacecraft, even as we wallow in an energy glut of unprecedented proportion. Effectively, we'd all be multibillionaires, with the economic and industrial clout of entire twentieth-century nations at our command." ...

"Hacking Matter..." by Will McCarthy — Quantum dots and programmable matter.

Ron — Wed, 03 Jan 2007 19:00:33 -0800

In 1962, Sir Arthur C. Clarke, the author of the book "2001: A Space Odyssey," formulated what has become known as "Clarke's Third Law" of technological development:

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

This remarkable book previews a coming technology that truly does seem like magic: a world where our wishes will literally be able to command matter, an alchemy that works. The old adage "Be careful what you wish" may soon take on a whole new meaning. ...

Huge ice shelf breaks free in Canada's far north

Ron — Tue, 02 Jan 2007 09:10:31 -0800

A chunk of ice bigger than the area of Manhattan broke from an ice shelf in Canada's far north and could wreak havoc if it starts to float westward toward oil-drilling regions and shipping lanes next summer, a researcher said on Friday...
It was the largest such break in nearly three decades, casting an ice floe with an area of 66 square km (25 square miles) adrift in the Arctic Ocean, ...

The Challenge of Our Moment: A Roundtable Discussion with Don Beck, Brian Swimme, Peter Senge, & Andrew Cohen (WIE)

Ron — Mon, 25 Dec 2006 06:12:33 -0800

This seemed like an appropriate article to post in honor of Christmas Day. ~ ron

...if you've been following the evolutionary trajectory of What Is Enlightenment? over the past couple of years, you may have noticed that a new kind of thinking has indeed been finding its way onto more and more of our pages. Call it integral, second tier, holistic, or systemic, this new thinking is the hallmark of a growing wave of visionaries with the eyes to look beyond the surface turbulence and grapple with the multilayered complexities undergirding our global dilemmas. Challenging us to face the elaborate interwoven forces that are shaping our destiny for better or worse, these evangelists of higher-order thinking offer what many feel may be the best chance we have at meeting the demands of the years ahead.

So, in attempting to come to terms with our uncertain future, and particularly with the role that religion will play in it, for this issue we decided not just to speak with a number of these leading-edge thinkers but to bring them together and have them speak with each other. As firm believers in Plato's assertion that the highest form of knowledge is that which emerges in dialogue, we couldn't imagine what could give us a better chance of seeing the biggest possible picture than a roundtable discussion between some of today's brightest integral minds, who are each attempting, in their own way, to forge a more evolved course through our present and future world. ...

New Computer Model Says Arctic Summer Ice to Disappear by 2040

Ron — Tue, 12 Dec 2006 16:32:07 -0800

Summers in the Arctic Ocean may be ice-free by 2040—decades earlier than previously expected, according to a new study of the effects of global warming on sea ice. The scenario is predicted by computer models that assume greenhouse gas emissions will continue unabated. -- Gases such as carbon dioxide spewed into the atmosphere by coal-fired power plants and automobiles are considered major drivers of global warming. According to [the new] computer models, if the gases continue to build up in the atmosphere at the current rate, sea ice will steadily decline for decades and then abruptly disappear.

"There are tipping points in the system," said Bruno Tremblay, an assistant professor of atmospheric and ocean sciences at McGill University in Montreal, Canada.

"When we reach them, things accelerate in a nonlinear way." ...

Ocean warming hurts marine food chain

Ron — Thu, 07 Dec 2006 12:30:20 -0800

When the climate warms, there is a drop in the abundance of the ocean's phytoplankton, the tiny plants that feed krill, fish and whales, according to scientists who say new research offers the first clues to the future of marine life under global warming.
Ocean temperatures have generally risen over the last 50 years as the atmosphere warms. And now nine years of NASA satellite data published today in the journal Nature show that the growth rate and abundance of phytoplankton around the world decreases in warm ocean years and increases in cooler ocean years.
The findings are crucial because they show a consequence of the changing global climate at the most fundamental level. Scientists estimate that phytoplankton is responsible for about half of Earth's photosynthesis, a process that removes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and converts it into organic carbon and oxygen that feeds nearly every ocean ecosystem.
Fewer phytoplankton consume less carbon dioxide, aggravating a cycle that can lead to even more warming. ...

Build Your Own Universe? Start with a mini black hole, then add ...

Ron — Thu, 30 Nov 2006 23:39:39 -0800

One day (far off, no doubt), it may be possible to go into a laboratory on Earth, create a "seed" -- a device that could grow into a universe -- and then there would have to be a way to get that seed, on command, to safely expand into a separate, infinite, unexplorable but very real alternate universe... The seed could be a black hole. Not the big black holes that sit near the centers of so many galaxies, but a "mini black hole." ... They can, in theory, be very small. ...

"Ecology and Auroville’s Development Planning," by Rod Hemsell

Ron — Tue, 14 Nov 2006 15:05:11 -0800

... India’s current level of consumption (ecological footprint) is .8 gha (global hectares per capita) - already double India’s biocapacity of .4 gha, although it is significantly below humanity’s consumption level of 2.2 gha, which is 25% above the planet’s biocapacity of 1.18 gha. At India’s current level of exponential economic growth (7.5%) and population growth (1.7%), its economy will quadruple and its population will double by 2050. If Auroville doesn’t take this situation seriously and manifest a viable alternative infrastructure and economy that works, its real reason for existing, along with humanity’s as a whole, may never be realized. ...

Are millions of our children being damaged by industrial pollution?

Ron — Tue, 07 Nov 2006 22:59:57 -0800

Millions of children may have suffered brain damage as a result of industrial pollution, scientists will say today. -- American and Danish researchers describe a "silent pandemic" of disorders including autism, attention deficit syndrome, mental retardation and cerebral palsy caused by chemical pollution. ...

Belly Fat Of US Children Grew By Over 65% Since 1999

Ron — Mon, 06 Nov 2006 13:05:25 -0800

The tummies of US teens and children have 65% more fat than in 1999, say researchers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry. ... Belly fat is more dangerous for health than overall weight gain, there is a much closer link between visceral fat - the fat around your internal organs - and serious diseases. ...

189-nation climate change conference begins in Kenya

Ron — Mon, 06 Nov 2006 12:39:31 -0800

NAIROBI (Reuters) - Kenya urged a 189-nation climate change conference on Monday to do more to tackle global warming, which is threatening to undo recent successes in the fight against poverty. -- Kenyan drummers and dancers started the annual November 6-17 U.N. talks of 189 nations, which are also due to seek ways to overcome deep divisions about extending the main U.N. plan for curbing warming - the Kyoto Protocol - beyond 2012. ...

Global fisheries in peril

Ron — Sat, 04 Nov 2006 02:42:26 -0800

All of the world's fishing stocks will collapse before mid-century, devastating food supplies, if overfishing and other human impacts continue at their current pace, according to a global study to be published today by scientists in five countries. ...

Vaccine-Resistant Bird Flu Spreading in Asia

Ron — Wed, 01 Nov 2006 14:42:14 -0800

A new strain of vaccine-resistant H5N1 bird flu virus has emerged in China and is spreading through southeast Asia, Hong Kong researchers report. -- "The implications are that current control measures are ineffective with dealing with the evolutionary changes that H5N1 undergoes," warned Dr. Yi Guan, director of the State Key Laboratory of Emerging Diseases at the University of Hong Kong and lead author of a report in this week's issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. -- The new strain has become dominant throughout the region, replacing other variants of the virus, the report said. ...

Beyond the limits of our Western "doxa"? - Experiments with "time travel"

Ron — Sat, 28 Oct 2006 15:46:13 -0700

This article purports to be a truthful account of experiments in time travel (!) being undertaken at the esoteric research community called the Federation of Damanhur, located in the foothills of the Italian Alps in northern Italy, about 30 km. from Turin. I was sufficiently intriqued by reports like this to travel to Damanhur a few years ago, and subsequently live there for 6 months per year for three years. -- Since only advanced initiates are allowed to take part in or even witness these experiments, I can only say that I talked at length with the persons involved, credible professionals all, and they have personally attested to and expanded on their quoted experiences with great conviction. They appear to believe that they did in fact have the reported experiences. So, judge for yourself if you wish to admit this within your "doxa" of possibilites. ~ ron

...Gorilla and his colleagues went through months of complex preparations to enable them to achieve the necessary mastery over mind and body. Long sessions of hypnosis had instilled into them the complicated information needed to carry out the trips successfully, as well as the receptivity they would require for detailed recall of the environments in which they would find themselves. It is likely that even the most open-minded reader of this article will be tempted to dismiss its contents. The implications of the claims made by the members of the community of Damanhur, featured in the last issue of Kindred Spirit, that they have devised a system capable of propelling men and women across vast oceans of time, are staggering. ...

"Brave New World," by Aldous Huxley

Ron — Thu, 26 Oct 2006 15:07:16 -0700

This is it. The entire text of the classic book "Brave New World," by Aldous Huxley. It's worth reading, or even re-reading if it's been awhile. ~ ron

A SQUAT grey building of only thirty-four stories. Over the main entrance the words, CENTRAL LONDON HATCHERY AND CONDITIONING CENTRE, and, in a shield, the World State's motto, COMMUNITY, IDENTITY, STABILITY. -- The enormous room on the ground floor faced towards the north. Cold for all the summer beyond the panes, for all the tropical heat of the room itself, a harsh thin light glared through the windows, hungrily seeking some draped lay figure, some pallid shape of academic goose-flesh, but finding only the glass and nickel and bleakly shining porcelain of a laboratory. Wintriness responded to wintriness. The overalls of the workers were white, their hands gloved with a pale corpse-coloured rubber. The light was frozen, dead, a ghost. Only from the yellow barrels of the microscopes did it borrow a certain rich and living substance, lying along the polished tubes like butter, streak after luscious streak in long recession down the work tables. -- "And this," said the Director opening the door, "is the Fertilizing Room." ...

Global ecosystems 'face collapse' (BBC News)

Ron — Tue, 24 Oct 2006 15:44:50 -0700

I just received this sobering post from my friend Savitra (Alan Lithman), author of "An Evolutionary Agenda for the Third Millennium."

Current global consumption levels could result in a large-scale ecosystem collapse by the middle of the century, environmental group WWF has warned. ...

Global warming study predicts wild ride

Ron — Fri, 20 Oct 2006 13:19:28 -0700

The world - especially the Western United States, the Mediterranean region and Brazil - will likely suffer more extended droughts, heavy rainfalls and longer heat waves over the next century because of global warming, a new study forecasts. -- But the prediction of a future of nasty extreme weather also includes fewer freezes and a longer growing season. ...