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.

Future Bodies: The Technological Future of Human Evolution (CNN Futures summit)

Rich — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 18:35:47 -0700

a technological optimistic look at future bodies in which human flesh is seamlessly inserted into machine...

The Political Economy of Peer Production by Michel Bauwens (C Theory)

Rich — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 11:58:35 -0700

Not since Marx identified the manufacturing plants of Manchester as the blueprint for the new capitalist society has there been a deeper transformation of the fundamentals of our social life. As political, economic, and social systems transform themselves into distributed networks, a new human dynamic is emerging: peer to peer (P2P). As P2P gives rise to the emergence of a third mode of production, a third mode of governance, and a third mode of property, it is poised to overhaul our political economy in unprecedented ways. This essay aims to develop a conceptual framework ('P2P theory') capable of explaining these new social processes...

Investor: Clean Tech Is Only Hope for the Collapsing Economy

Ron — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 02:00:00 -0700

As the mortgage and financial crisis continues to notch more victims, the question on many economists' minds is not whether a recession will happen, but how deep it will get and how long it will last. But one prominent voice thinks the high-flying finance industry isn't going to bounce back -- and that we'll need to look elsewhere to set the U.S. economy back on firm footing.

Eric Janszen is an angel investor and founder of the contrarian market website iTulip.com, which The New York Times credited with "accurately predicting that the [internet] bubble would pop." Now Janszen believes the American economy needs a fundamental restructuring away from its foundations in finance, insurance and real estate. His prescription: a new bubble based on green technologies. In a widely discussed Harper's article in February, "The Next Bubble: Priming the Markets for Tomorrow's Crash," Janszen argued that clean tech is the only sector that could create enough "fictitious value" to replace the losses from the housing bubble, if only temporarily. ...

Only Greentech Can Save U.S. Economy, Says Über-Investor

Ron — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 02:00:00 -0700

...We need another wealth-generating economic bubble. And that, said Novogratz, must come -- can only come -- from new energy sources and green technology.

"As the price of oil goes up, there's got to be a green revolution. I think of what will be the next driver of the American economy, and it's green energy. That's a huge growth opportunity. It's not about the pollution. It's about the energy. Gas will go to $10 a gallon," he said. ...

Virtual Panopticon: China's Surveillance Society and American Corporations by Naomi Klein (Rolling Stone)

Rich — Tue, 20 May 2008 12:50:36 -0700

China's All-Seeing Eye
With the help of U.S. defense contractors, China is building the prototype for a high-tech police state. It is ready for export.

In all of these cases, U.S. multinationals have offered the same defense: Cooperating with draconian demands to turn in customers and censor material is, unfortunately, the price of doing business in China. Some, like Google, have argued that despite having to limit access to the Internet, they are contributing to an overall increase of freedom in China. It's a story that glosses over the much larger scandal of what is actually taking place: Western investors stampeding into the country, possibly in violation of the law, with the sole purpose of helping the Communist Party spend billions of dollars building Police State 2.0. This isn't an unfortunate cost of doing business in China: It's the goal of doing business in China. "Come help us spy!" the Chinese government has said to the world. And the world's leading technology companies are eagerly answering the call.

As The New York Times recently reported, aiding and abetting Beijing has become an investment boom for U.S. companies. Honeywell is working with Chinese police to "set up an elaborate computer monitoring system to analyze feeds from indoor and outdoor cameras in one of Beijing's most populated districts." General Electric is providing Beijing police with a security system that controls "thousands of video cameras simultaneously, and automatically alerts them to suspicious or fast-moving objects, like people running." IBM, meanwhile, is installing its "Smart Surveillance System" in the capital, another system for linking video cameras and scanning for trouble, while United Technologies is in Guangzhou, helping to customize a "2,000-camera network in a single large neighborhood, the first step toward a citywide network of 250,000 cameras to be installed before the Asian Games in 2010." By next year, the Chinese internal-security market will be worth an estimated $33 billion — around the same amount Congress has allocated for reconstructing Iraq...

• "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!" ...

Shift Scenario: Averting Extinction, by Jim Fournier

Ron — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 00:43:26 -0700

It may be possible for the global system to undergo a change in state, a fundamental shift from one of increasingly intractable interrelated crises to one characterized by mutually reinforcing synergetic solutions.

The global situation has become like a Gordian knot wherein it appears that all attempts to solve any one crisis in isolation only makes others worse. We face myriad crises, all aspects of an unprecedented breakdown in many global systems that is already coming to a head and will become acute within a decade or less. Spiraling debt, the impending end of abundant oil, global warming, overpopulation, mass extinction and a general acceleration of change verging on chaotic instability can all be seen as part of a pattern of converging indicators at a unique moment in history. Many of these trends (enumerated in more detail below) are still accelerating and are apparently characterized by logarithmic curves...

However, there is another plausible scenario. At a critical point, key trend lines could shift from curving one way, representing ever accelerating but increasingly unstable change, and cross over to begin to curve the other way, representing deceleration toward a state of greater stability. Mathematically, this phenomenon would be described as an S-curve; the point where the curvature changes from facing one way to facing the other is called the "point of inflection". ...

Amory Lovins: Winning the Oil Endgame

Rich — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 10:22:23 -0700

Well just when I was getting real depressed about peak oil and peak everything my son Ravi takes me to the Seattle Green Festival where Amory Lovins gives a great talk about how to make everything right. Here is an executive summary of the the strategy called winning the oil endgame

Global Voices: alternative global journalism at its best

Rich — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 20:24:15 -0700

Global Voices is a great blog of comprehensive alternative journalism for world wide news. Funded by the non-profit Harvard Law School Berkman Center for Internet and Society, they have assembled a systematic method for procuring first hand information about world events that the multinational mass media sources miss. I believe it is on the cutting edge of global alternative journalism. rc

Superfluids could create a 'universe in a bucket'

Ron — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 02:00:00 -0800

IT'S an ambitious task, recreating the universe in a bucket. But if it is successful, the experiment could help solve the twin puzzles of why we're made of matter rather than antimatter and where the huge magnetic fields that span galaxies come from.

At last month's Cosmology Meets Condensed Matter conference in London, it emerged that space-time could be simulated in the lab using weird substances known as "superfluids", which flow without resistance and can even climb up the walls of jars. Intriguingly, the equations governing the particles inside superfluids are similar to those that represent the early universe, says Ray Rivers at Imperial College London. "We hope that we can use these to check things in the lab that frankly we don't have any hope of seeing through astrophysical observations." ...

NASA to beam Beatles' song 'Across the Universe' to deep space on Feb.4,2008

Ron — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 02:00:00 -0800

...at 7 p.m. Eastern time on Monday, Feb. 4...NASA will be celebrating the 50th anniversary of its first space mission — the launch of the Explorer 1 satellite — by using the system of huge antennas that usually listen for inbound signals from space to send one outbound instead: the Beatles’ song “Across the Universe,” which as it happens was mostly recorded exactly 40 years earlier, on Feb. 4, 1968.

Reception will be best in the general direction of Polaris, 431 lightyears away, which is where NASA is aiming the signal. (That would be the North Star to us laymen.) But it ought to be audible in plenty of places on Earth as well, at least by imitation: NASA is encouraging space fans and Beatle fans alike to play the song themselves at the same time.

NASA’s press release includes some perfectly in-character comments from Sir Paul McCartney (”Amazing! Well done, NASA! Send my love to the aliens. All the best, Paul.”) and from Yoko Ono, widow of John Lennon, the song’s main author (”I see that this is the beginning of the new age in which we will communicate with billions of planets across the universe.”). ...

Toyota Will Offer a Plug-In Hybrid Vehicle by 2010

Ron — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 02:00:00 -0800

The chief executive of the Toyota Motor Corporation said Monday that he is pushing his company’s engineers to develop a plug-in hybrid-electric vehicle with a lithium-ion battery before 2010, raising the stakes in a race with General Motors...

Mr. Watanabe said he welcomed a competition with G.M., which plans to introduce its own lithium-ion hybrid, the Chevrolet Volt, around 2010. -- He said the contest would help reduce the “negative aspects” of automobiles, and ultimately help the environment.

“To compete against each other” in such a battle “is something to be congratulated,” Mr. Watanabe said through an interpreter. “We dont want to be the loser in that competition, of course.” ...

Nanosolar begins large-scale printing of revolutionary non-silicon 'nano-ink' PV

Ron — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 14:57:59 -0800

Imagine a solar panel without the panel. Just a coating, thin as a layer of paint, that takes light and converts it to electricity. From there, you can picture roof shingles with solar cells built inside and window coatings that seem to suck power from the air. Consider solar-powered buildings stretching not just across sunny Southern California, but through China and India and Kenya as well, because even in those countries, going solar will be cheaper than burning coal. That’s the promise of thin-film solar cells: solar power that’s ubiquitous because it’s cheap... Silicon Valley–based Nanosolar [has] created the manufacturing technology that could make that promise a reality... With backing from Google’s founders and $20 million from the U.S. Department of Energy, Nanosolar’s first commercial cells rolled off the presses this year.

Traditional solar cells require silicon, and silicon is an expensive commodity... even the cheapest solar panels cost about $3 per watt of energy... To compete with coal, that figure has to shrink to just $1 per watt. Nanosolar’s cells use no silicon, and the company’s manufacturing process allows it to create cells that are as efficient as most commercial cells for as little as 30 cents a watt.

“You’re talking about printing rolls of the stuff—printing it on the roofs of 18-wheeler trailers, printing it on garages, printing it wherever you want it,” says Dan Kammen, founding director of the Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory at the University of California at Berkeley. “It really is quite a big deal in terms of altering the way we think about solar and in inherently altering the economics of solar.” ...

Hitching a Ride on the Infinite Subway (Dr. Stan Grof's 'holotropic' research)

Ron — Sat, 29 Dec 2007 14:35:50 -0800

Here's another excerpt from Michael Talbot's fascinating book The Holographic Universe. I continue to recommend this book.

...Other experiences included the accessing of racial and collective memories. Individuals of Slavic origin experienced what it was like to participate in the conquests of Genghis Khan's Mongolian hordes, to dance in trance with the Kalahari bushmen, to undergo the initiation rites of the Australian aborigines, and to die as sacrificial victims of the Aztecs. And again the descriptions frequently contained obscure historical facts and a degree of knowledge that was often completely at odds with the patient's education, race, and previous exposure to the subject. For instance, one uneducated patient gave a richly detailed account of the techniques involved in the Egyptian practice of embalming and mummification, including the form and meaning of various amulets and sepulchral boxes, a list of the materials used in the fixing of the mummy cloth, the size and shape of the mummy bandages, and other esoteric facets of Egyptian funeral services. Other individuals tuned into the cultures of the Far East and not only gave impressive descriptions of what it was like to have a Japanese, Chinese, or Tibetan psyche, but also related various Taoist or Buddhist teachings.

In fact, there did not seem to be any limit to what Grof's LSD subjects could tap into. They seemed capable of knowing what it was like to be every animal, and even plant, on the tree of evolution. They could experience what it was like to be a blood cell, an atom, a thermonuclear process inside the sun, the consciousness of the entire planet, and even the consciousness of the entire cosmos. More than that, they displayed the ability to transcend space and time, and occasionally they related uncannily accurate precognitive information. In an even stranger vein they sometimes encountered nonhuman intelligences during their cerebral travels, discarnate beings, spirit guides from "higher planes of consciousness," and other suprahuman entities...

Perhaps Grof's most remarkable discovery is that the same phenomena reported by individuals who have taken LSD can also be experienced without resorting to drugs of any kind...The Grofs call their technique holotropic therapy and use only rapid and controlled breathing, evocative music, and massage and body work, to induce altered states of consciousness. To date, thousands of individuals have attended their workshops and report experiences that are every bit as spectacular and emotionally profound as those described by subjects of Grof's previous work on LSD...

'Entheogen: Awakening the Divine Within', a new feature length documentary

Ron — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 22:41:25 -0800

Entheogen: Awakening the Divine Within is a feature length documentary which invites the viewer to rediscover an enchanted cosmos in the modern world by awakening to the divine within. The film examines the re-emergence of archaic techniques of ecstasy in the modern world by weaving a synthesis of ecological and evolutionary awareness, electronic dance culture, and the current pharmacological re-evaluation of entheogenic compounds.

Within a narrative framework that imagines consciousness itself to be evolving, Entheogen documents the emergence of techno-shamanism in the post-modern world that frames the following questions: How can a renewal of ancient initiatory rites of passage alleviate our ecological crisis? What do trance dancing and festivals celebrating unbridled artistic expression speak to in our collective psyche? How do we re-invent ourselves in a disenchanted world from which God has long ago withdrawn? Entheogen invites the viewer to consider that the answers to these questions lie within the consciousness of each and every human being, and are accessible if only we give ourselves permission to awaken to the divine within. ...

Surfer dude stuns physicists with theory of everything

Ron — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 17:31:14 -0800
I think this may be an important development. My intuition tells me that Lisi is really on to something here, that we'll be hearing lots more about this, and if his predictions are verified when Large Hadron Collider comes online next year, physics will never be the same. ~ rj
An impoverished surfer has drawn up a new theory of the universe, seen by some as the Holy Grail of physics, which has received rave reviews from scientists. - Garrett Lisi, 39, has a doctorate but no university affiliation and spends most of the year surfing in Hawaii, where he has also been a hiking guide and bridge builder (when he slept in a jungle yurt)...

Lisi's inspiration lies in the most elegant and intricate shape known to mathematics, called E8 - a complex, eight-dimensional mathematical pattern with 248 points first found in 1887, but only fully understood by mathematicians this year after workings, that, if written out in tiny print, would cover an area the size of Manhattan. ...

Electricity Revives Bali Coral Reefs

Ron — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 12:30:52 -0800
Just a few years ago, the lush coral reefs off Indonesia's Bali island were dying out, bleached by rising temperatures, blasted by dynamite fishing, and poisoned by cyanide.

Now they are coming back, thanks to an unlikely remedy: electricity. ...

Nobel Laureate George Smoot puts prize winnings into new cosmology center at UC Berkeley

Ron — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 13:44:02 -0800
Berkeley -- When University of California, Berkeley, astrophysicist George Smoot received the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics a year ago, his dreams for spending his $700,000 share of the prize ran far beyond purchasing a sporty car or a new home.

Instead, he wanted to create a lasting center where he and other scientists - in particular, young postdoctoral researchers - could tackle cosmic questions whose solutions would be worthy of future Nobel Prizes.

That dream, the Berkeley Center for Cosmological Physics (http://bccp.lbl.gov/), has now become reality, with a $500,000 endowment gift from Smoot and additional gifts totaling $8.1 million. These gifts include $1.5 million from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation and $5.5 million in private gifts and other support for endowed chairs at the center and for postdoctoral and graduate student support. UC Berkeley physics professor Saul Perlmutter, who, like Smoot, is also a researcher at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), has also contributed to the center, using a portion of his 2007 Gruber Cosmology Prize to seed a fund for future research that, with the addition of other funds, will total approximately $600,000. ...

Smoot, the center's director, and UC Berkeley plan to raise at least $4 or 5 million in endowment on top of this $8.1 million to ensure an ongoing center with resident postdoctoral fellows and scholars at UC Berkeley and Berkeley Lab, an active visitors program, educational outreach to K-12 science teachers and several collaborative international workshops on cosmology each year. ...

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. ...

Steve Jobs hailed by Fortune Magazine as most powerful person in business

Ron — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 23:11:11 -0800
#1.Steve Jobs
Chairman and CEO, Apple

During the first two decades of his remarkable 30-year career, the Apple Inc. founder twice altered the direction of the computer industry. In 1977 the Apple II kicked off the PC era, and the graphical user interface launched by Macintosh in 1984 has been aped by every other computer since. Along the way Jobs conceived of "desktop publishing," gave the world the laser printer, and pioneered personal computer networks. As a side gig he bankrolled Pixar, which fostered the development of the technology and a brand-new business model for creating computer-animated feature films.

Since returning to Apple in 1997, he has changed the dynamics of consumer electronics with the iPod, and persuaded the music industry, the television networks, and Hollywood to distribute their wares with the iTunes Music Store. With his hugely successful Apple Stores, he gave the big-box boys a lesson in high-margin, high-touch retailing. And this year, at the height of his creative and promotional powers, Jobs orchestrated Apple's entry into the cellular telephone business with the iPhone. ...

What I'm optimistic about (and not), by Ray Kurzweil

Ron — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 19:34:01 -0800
Optimism exists on a continuum in between confidence and hope. Let me take these in order.

I am confident that the acceleration and expanding purview of information technology will solve within twenty years the problems that now preoccupy us. -- Consider energy. We are awash in energy (10,000 times more than required to meet all our needs falls on Earth) but we are not very good at capturing it. That will change with the full nanotechnology-based assembly of macro objects at the nano scale, controlled by massively parallel information processes, which will be feasible within twenty years. Even though our energy needs are projected to triple within that time, we'll capture that .0003 of the sunlight needed to meet our energy needs with no use of fossil fuels, using extremely inexpensive, highly efficient, lightweight, nano-engineered solar panels, and we'll store the energy in highly distributed (and therefore safe) nanotechnology-based fuel cells. Solar power is now providing 1 part in 1,000 of our needs, but that percentage is doubling every two years, which means multiplying by 1,000 in twenty years.

Almost all the discussions I've seen about energy and its consequences (such as global warming) fail to consider the ability of future nanotechnology-based solutions to solve this problem. This development will be motivated not just by concern for the environment but also by the $2 trillion we spend annually on energy. This is already a major area of venture funding.

Consider health. As of just recently, we have the tools to reprogram biology. This is also at an early stage but is progressing through the same exponential growth of information technology, which we see in every aspect of biological progress. The amount of genetic data we have sequenced has doubled every year, and the price per base pair has come down commensurately. The first genome cost a billion dollars. The National Institutes of Health is now starting a project to collect a million genomes at $1,000 apiece. We can turn genes off with RNA interference, add new genes (to adults) with new reliable forms of gene therapy, and turn on and off proteins and enzymes at critical stages of disease progression. We are gaining the means to model, simulate, and reprogram disease and aging processes as information processes. In ten years, these technologies will be 1,000 times more powerful than they are today, and it will be a very different world, in terms of our ability to turn off disease and aging. ...

OLPC "Give One Get One" Video

Ron — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 00:05:18 -0800
I recommend viewing this short 30-second video about the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) "Give One Get One" project. See the previous article posted to SCIY for more details about this very worthy project. ~ ronjon

US Sales of OLPC "Give 1 Get 1 Program" begins today! - Highly recommended!

Ron — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 17:05:19 -0800

One learning child. One connected child. One laptop at a time.
Between November 12 and November 26, OLPC is offering a Give One Get One program in the United States and Canada. During this time, you can donate the revolutionary XO laptop to a child in a developing nation, and also receive one for the child in your life in recognition of your contribution. ...

Kim and I just placed our order for this. Not only is $200 of it tax deductible, but T-Mobile is also giving you one year of complimentary HotSpot WiFi access with your order, more than a $350 value! I highly recommend this amazing, state of the art computer. ~ ronjon

Eco Machines: Biomimicry in wastewater treatment

Ron — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 13:46:15 -0800
I can vouch for John Todd's research. I knew him back in the 70's and was impressed then with the quality of his work. His "Eco Machines" are the outcome of 30 years of research and trial and error experimentation. ~ ronjon

Social responsibility, sustainability, and 'natural capitalism' are becoming new models for governments and corporations in the 21st century...

The ECO Machine - a wastewater treatment system that naturally treats sewage and industrial waste to re-use quality. An important consideration as fresh water becomes one of the most important commodities in the new millennium...ECO Machines bring advanced wastewater treatment technology, and unsurpassed aesthetic, economic, and environmental advantages to companies, communities, and resorts both at home and internationally.

ECO Machines accelerate nature's own water purification process. Unlike chemical-based systems, ECO Machines incorporate helpful bacteria, fungi, plants, snails, clams, and fish that thrive by breaking down and digesting organic pollutants, pollutants that normally deprive the water of oxygen. This clean, simple approach efficiently transforms high-strength industrial wastewater and sewage into water clean enough to be recycled for reuse. ...

The Universe in a Single Atom, by His Holiness the Dalai Lama

Ron — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 23:56:17 -0700
I'm reading this book now and am quite impressed by it. Highly recommended!

~ ronjon

I have often wondered about the interface of key Buddhist concepts and major scientific ideas. This book is the result of that long period of thinking and of the intellectual journey of a Buddhist monk from Tibet into the world of bubble chambers, particle accelerators, and fMRI. ...

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. ...

What If Cold Fusion Is Real?

Ron — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 11:59:36 -0700
In his preface to an earlier SCIY article, RYD commented:

"There is something sweet and endearing with the human touch in these pieces. Could not that human touch become reassuring that, there is hope for us when we engage ourselves in our daily activities with a sense of commitment and conviction, the qualities that can elevate us? ..."

Imo, the following article also has some of that quality. Although it's nearly 10 years old, ongoing experiments are reopening the possibility that so-called cold fusion really does exist. I'll reference some of these recent results in a reply to this article. ~ ronjon

"It was the most notorious scientific experiment in recent memory - in 1989, the two men who claimed to have discovered the energy of the future were condemned as imposters and exiled by their peers. Can it possibly make sense to reopen the cold fusion investigation? A surprising number of researchers already have. ..."

Can a skyscraper be ecological? - The Singapore Editt Tower

Ron — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 10:30:46 -0700
...it is evident that this site is an urban “zero culture” site and is essentially a devastated ecosystem with little of its original top soil, flora and fauna remaining. The design approach is to re-habilitate this with organic mass to enable ecological succession to take place and to balance the existent inorganicness of this urban site. -- The unique design feature of this scheme is in the well-planted facades and vegetated-terraces which have green areas that approximate the gross useable-areas of the rest of the building. -- The vegetation areas are designed to be continous and to ramp upwards from the ground plane to the uppermost floor in a linked landscaped ramp...

A crucial urban design issue in skyscraper design is poor spatial continuity between street-level activities with those spaces at the upper-floors of the city’s high-rise towers. This is due to the physical compartmentation of floors (inherent in the skyscraper typology)... In creating ‘vertical places’, our design brings ‘street-life’ to the building’s upper-parts through wide landscaped-ramps upwards from street-level. Ramps are lined with street-activities: (stalls, shops, cafes, performance spaces, viewing-decks etc.), up to the first 6 floors.

Ramps create a continuous spatial flow from public to less public, as a “vertical extension of the street” thereby eliminating the problematic stratification of floors inherent in all tall buildings typology. High-level bridge-linkages are added to connect to neighbouring buildings for greater urban-connectivity. ...

William McDonough: The wisdom of designing Cradle to Cradle

Ron — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 15:33:04 -0700
Here's another provocative TED video. McDonough shares some of his most inspiring work, including the world's largest green roof (at the Ford plant in Dearborn, Michigan), and the sustainable cities he's designing in China. -- This blip is 20 minutes.

Stewart Brand TED Video: Why squatter cities are a good thing

Ron — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 14:48:52 -0700
I highly recommend watching this 3-minute video blip of Stewart Brand's TED talk. (See also SB's 1-hr. "City Planet" talk at Google.) ~ ronjon

The Global Consciousness Project (EGG)

Ron — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 13:35:21 -0700
The Global Consciousness Project, also called the EGG Project, is an international, multidisciplinary collaboration of scientists, engineers, artists and others. This website introduces methods, technology, and empirical results under the "Scientific Work" menu below, and gives background, interpretations, and implications under "Aesthetic View".

We have been collecting data from a global network of random event generators since August, 1998. The network has grown to about 65 host sites around the world running random colors per egg per sec custom software that reads the output of physical random number generators and records a 200-bit trial sum once every second, continuously over months and years. The data are transmitted over the internet to a server in Princeton, NJ, USA, where they are archived for later analysis. Individual data create a random tapestry of color. The dot below indicates their global coherence.

Our purpose is to examine subtle correlations that reflect the presence and activity of consciousness in the world. We have learned that when millions of us share intentions and emotions the GCP/EGG network shows correlations. We can interpret this as evidence for participation in a growing global consciousness. It suggests we have the capability and responsibility for conscious evolution. ...

Nobel Prize money benefits Palo Alto nonprofit Gore founded

Ron — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 14:44:03 -0700
The group that founder Al Gore once praised as the planet's "PR agent" became $750,000 richer after the former vice president announced Friday that his Nobel Prize winnings would be given to the Alliance for Climate Protection.

The money is a financial boost that could help the year-old organization assume an even larger role in the campaign to fight global warming and its potentially catastrophic impacts.

The alliance is a kind of think tank-in-action whose major goals include publicizing the effects of global warming and turning citizens into climate change activists. Through this summer's Live Earth concerts and a follow-up campaign, the alliance has persuaded tens of thousands of Americans to pledge to lobby Washington on global warming. ...

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. ...

Inauguration Day for Alien Signal-Hunting Telescope

Ron — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 21:48:38 -0700
Today, in the remote northeast corner of California, technology innovator and Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen will hit the big red button... The famous technologist will be inaugurating the initial 42 antennas of his namesake, the Allen Telescope Array (ATA) – the first major radio telescope designed from the pedestal up to efficiently (which is to say, rapidly) chew its way through long lists of stars in a search for alien signals. Within two decades, it will increase the number of stellar systems examined for artificial emissions by a thousand-fold. The ATA will shift SETI into third gear...

But the true excitement is yet to come. It's hard to imagine that such a modest collection of small metal contrivances, pinned to the earth, and each no bigger than a delivery truck, could somehow reveal the activities of unknown, unseen beings on a planet a thousand trillion miles away... And perhaps someday soon, that discovery will be made. ...

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. ...

Laptop With a Mission Widens Its Audience, by David Pogue, NYT

Ron — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 18:52:50 -0700

Wearing a new hat in Galadima, a hamlet in Abuja, Nigeria [photo added by ronjon]

In November, you’ll be able to buy a new laptop that’s spillproof, rainproof, dustproof and drop-proof. It’s fanless, it’s silent and it weighs 3.2 pounds. One battery charge will power six hours of heavy activity, or 24 hours of reading. The laptop has a built-in video camera, microphone, memory-card slot, graphics tablet, game-pad controllers and a screen that rotates into a tablet configuration.

And this laptop will cost $200... It’s an effort by One Laptop Per Child (laptop.org) to develop a very low-cost, high-potential, extremely rugged computer for the two billion educationally underserved children in poor countries...

OLPC slightly turned its strategy when it decided to offer the machine for sale to the public in the industrialized world — for a period of two weeks, in November. The program is called “Give 1, Get 1,” and it works like this. You pay $400 (www.xogiving.org). One XO laptop (and a tax deduction) comes to you by Christmas, and a second is sent to a student in a poor country. ...

Imagine Peace Tower, an artistic vision by Yoko Ono, dedicated to John Lennon

Ron — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 16:23:19 -0700

The new IMAGINE PEACE TOWER in Iceland

I dedicate this light tower to John Lennon
my love for you is forever

Yoko Ono
Videy Island, Reykjavik, Iceland
October 9th 2007

Off to Burning Man for the next 10 days

Ron — Fri, 24 Aug 2007 11:11:56 -0700

Burning Man 2006 satellite view. (~ 40,000 participants)

Well, I'm off to Burning Man 2007 tomorrow (Saturday) and will be pretty much out of touch with SCIY (no phones or Internet access out there on the remote playa). Rumors are that this year's festival will be the biggest in its 18 years, even more than the record 40,000 last year. This is truly a remarkable experience when you realize that all the infrastructure for a self-contained international city is literally created by volunteers out of nothing in a few days on a barren, hot, lifeless desert site. It's fully populated for a week, and then completely dismantled, in accordance with the U.S. Bureau of Land Management regulations for use of the site, with no evidence of it having been there, not even a flake of glitter! ...

Entheon Village at Burning Man

Ron — Sat, 18 Aug 2007 14:59:26 -0700

Entheon, meaning “a place to discover the spirit within,” is an effort to promote sustainable cultural re-evolution that heals relationships between the people of the earth and our planet. The mission of Entheon is to demonstrate a future in which sustainability, ecological responsibility, environmental stewardship, and meditative and mystical consciousness are a welcomed and integrated part of society, and where art, spirituality and creativity is central to that vision.

[The] Entheon [camp at Burning Man 2007] will be a grounded gathering place offering an intellectual, therapeutic, artistic and creative cornucopia of interactive opportunities. Lectures, workshops, renewable energy demonstrations, visionary art, zen meditation in a zendo, holotropic breathwork sessions, and performance come together in the spirit of celebration to co-create our shared vision of global healing and a broader awareness of ecological responsibility. ...

Cellulose & nanotubes combine to create cheap, flexible & paper-thin batteries

Ron — Tue, 14 Aug 2007 16:22:48 -0700
ELECTRICITY-storage devices are getting more flexible, in a literal sense as well as in their design. This week sees the unveiling of the most robust but flexible battery ever. Pulickel Ajayan and his colleagues at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York made it by mixing carbon nanotubes (cylindrical, electrically conductive molecules made of carbon atoms) with cellulose, the stuff of paper. The result, which they report in this week’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is an energy store that is cheap, flexible and paper-thin. ...

Bio-dynamised water from Auroville to hit Indian market

Ron — Sun, 12 Aug 2007 11:17:50 -0700
Bio-dynamised water, believed to cure various ailments including diabetes and heart problems, is set to hit Indian markets with a research centre at Auroville township near here commercially launching the equipment to produce it.

Aqua Dyn, the centre that has developed commercially viable equipment to carry out the "bio-dynamising" technique developed in France in the early 20th century, has been selling the processed water within the township for the past five years...

"Bio-dynamised water helps remove toxins from the body and has proven properties to heal diseases, including arthritis, diabetes, skin cancer and heart ailments," he said. ...

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. ...

Primrose School of Pondicherry: An experiment in integral education

Ron — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 13:14:42 -0700

Primrose School, inaugurated in June 1999 in the former French colony of Pondicherry, is a pioneering effort in India to utilise Dr. Glenn Doman’s teaching methods as the basis for a full program of pre-school, primary and secondary education.

The Mother's Service Society, Pondicherry, has been in the field of social development for a quarter of a century now and has been recognised as a "Scientific and Cultural Research Institution" by the Central Government for three decades. The Society has longed believed that new methods of education can transform India into a leading knowledge society and fulfill Sri Aurobindo's dream of India becoming the Jagat guru of the world. Primrose School was founded for this purpose, and after discovering the wonderful educational insights of Dr. Glenn Doman, they have taken them and creatively adapted them to suit Indian conditions.

Most of us believe that geniuses are a very rare breed and only a few children are born with that potential. The truth is, many children have the potential of developing genius. Every child has far more potential than comes to the surface under normal circumstances. The secret is to create conditions that enable the child to discover and express their full potential.

Dr. Doman has shown decisively that young children have an incredible capacity for learning. They can learn to read multiple languages with ease at a very young age, even before entering school. They can imbibe a wide range of general knowledge just as a form of recreation. Children can learn at least twice as fast as they normally do in traditional schools without homework, cramming or strain of any type. ... -- The Mother's Service Society believes that this method could revolutionalise education in India. ...

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC): Beyond the standard model

Ron — Sat, 21 Jul 2007 01:00:00 -0700

19 Oct 2006. Detail of the sensor from the first half tracker inner barrel (TIB).

... Particle physics stands on the brink of a new era. Research using the LHC will make the first exploration of physics in the TeV energy range. There are good reasons to hope that the LHC will find new physics beyond the standard model, but no guarantees. The most one can say for now is that the LHC has the potential to revolutionize particle physics, and that in a few years' time we should know what course this revolution will take. Will there be a Higgs boson, or not? Will space reveal new properties at small distances, such as extra dimensions or supersymmetry? Will experiments at the LHC cast light on some fundamental cosmological questions, such as the origin of matter or the nature of dark matter? Whatever the answers to these questions might be or whatever surprises the LHC might spring, it will surely set the agenda for the next steps in particle physics.

Backward Research Goes Forward

Ron — Fri, 20 Jul 2007 12:05:35 -0700
University of Washington physicist (and science-fiction author) John Cramer is moving forward with his experiment in backward causality, thanks in part to tens of thousands of dollars in contributions sent in by his fans. Although Cramer emphasizes that his lab is looking at “nonlocal quantum communication” rather than backward time travel per se, the gadgetry he’s assembling could settle a controversy surrounding a seemingly faster-than-light effect that Albert Einstein thought was downright spooky.

Boiled down to its basics, the experiment involves splitting laser light into two beams, so that characteristics of one beam are reflected in the other beam as well. That's an example of what physicists call quantum entanglement. Specifically, Cramer has been planning to fiddle with one of the entangled laser beams such that it takes on the property of waves or particles. If one beam behaves like particles, the entangled photons of light in the other beam should behave like particles, too.

So what happens when the beams go their separate ways, and you conduct a wave-vs.-particle measurement on one beam? When someone else checks the other beam, the same measurement should yield the same result. In fact, you could visualize using the wave-vs.-particle toggle as a means for communicating information, sort of like Morse code. Theoretically, you could check one beam to receive a message instantaneously from whoever is fiddling with the other beam - even if you're separated from the receiver by millions of light-years. ...

TED: Inspired talks by he world's greatest thinkers and doers

Ron — Fri, 20 Jul 2007 10:35:39 -0700
Thanks to yatanti for recommending this site:

TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from those three worlds. Since then its scope has become ever broader. -- The annual conference now brings together the world's most fascinating thinkers and doers, who are challenged to give the talk of their lives (in 18 minutes).

This site makes the best talks and performances from TED available to the public, for free. More than 100 talks from our archive are now available, with more added each week. These videos are released under a Creative Commons license, so they can be freely shared and reposted...

We believe passionately in the power of ideas to change attitudes, lives and ultimately, the world. So we're building here a clearinghouse that offers free knowledge and inspiration from the world's most inspired thinkers, and also a community of curious souls to engage with ideas and each other. Over time, you'll see us add talks and performances from other events, and solicit submissions from you, as well. ...

iTunes U: the campus that never sleeps

Ron — Sun, 01 Jul 2007 11:50:17 -0700
iTunes U is a free service hosted by Apple that allows instructors, administrators, and affiliates to manage, distribute, and control access to educational audio and video content for students within a college or university using Apple's iTunes Store infrastructure. This page provides information to help you create and manage content, set up and design pages, set access, get help from other iTunes U users, and more. ...

Just like the iTunes Store, the popularity of iTunes U has exploded. Already, more than half of the nation’s top 500 schools use it to distribute their digital content to students — or to the world. Any school can open all or part of its site to the public, from alumni to parents to anyone with a love of learning. iTunes U is transforming the way people learn on campus, off campus, and where there’s no campus at all. ...

“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. ...

NPEG - NanoPatterned Epitaxial Graphene

Ron — Fri, 25 May 2007 11:43:20 -0700
Thanks to Dr. David Klousie for referral to this article:

There has been much excitement in recent years over the properties of carbon nanotubes. Carbon nanotubes are essentially a single sheet of graphite (graphene) rolled up to form a tube. Nanotubes are found metallic or semiconducting depending on the orientation of the rolling up. Metallic nanotubes display quantized ballistic conduction at room temperature, that is there is essentially no scattering for electrons propagating along the tube on micrometer length, while a resistance is present a each metal-nanotube interface with a theoretical minimum value of 6kOhm. The electronic band gap of the the semiconducting nanotubes varies approximately as the inverse of the nanotube diameter and their conductance can be controlled by applying an electrostatic gate. Simple nanonotube transistors and interconnected logic gates have been demonstrated.

These exceptional properties makes carbon nanotubes an attractive material candidate for applications in electronics where the limitations of conventional Si-based devices is foreseen to impede the exponential growth in computing power. However nanotube-based electronics faces challenges for large scale integration with the questions of metallic vs. semiconductiong nanotube selection, positionning and the metal-nanotube high quantum resistance contact. ...

Einstein researchers' discover 'radiation-eating' fungi

Ron — Thu, 24 May 2007 11:25:00 -0700
Thanks to Dr. David Klousie for referral to this article.

Scientists have long assumed that fungi exist mainly to decompose matter into chemicals that other organisms can then use. But researchers at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University have found evidence that fungi possess a previously undiscovered talent with profound implications: the ability to use radioactivity as an energy source for making food and spurring their growth.

"The fungal kingdom comprises more species than any other plant or animal kingdom, so finding that they're making food in addition to breaking it down means that Earth's energetics, in particular the amount of radiation energy being converted to biological energy, may need to be recalculated," says Dr. Arturo Casadevall, chair of microbiology & immunology at Einstein and senior author of the study ...

Researchers Create New Form of Matter: 'Polariton Superfluid'

Ron — Mon, 21 May 2007 13:28:25 -0700
Physicists at the University of Pittsburgh have demonstrated a new form of matter that melds the characteristics of lasers with those of the world's best electrical conductors - superconductors. -- The work introduces a new method of moving energy from one point to another as well as a low-energy means of producing a light beam like that from a laser. -- Using specially designed optical structures with nanometer-thick layers which allow polaritons to move freely inside the solid, Snoke and his colleagues captured the polaritons in the form of a superfluid. In superfluids and in their solid counterparts, superconductors, matter consolidates to act as a single energy wave rather than as individual particles.

In superconductors, this allows for the perfect flow of electricity. In the new state of matter demonstrated at Pitt -- which can be called a polariton superfluid -- the wave behavior leads to a pure light beam similar to that from a laser but is much more energy efficient. -- Traditional superfluids and superconductors require extremely low temperatures, approximately negative 280 and negative 450 degrees Fahrenheit for a superconductor and superfluid, respectively. The polariton superfluid is more stable at higher temperatures, and may be capable of being demonstrated at room temperature in the near future. -- Snoke's polariton trap was devised with a technique similar to that used for superfluids made of atoms in a gaseous state known as the Bose-Einstein condensate. ...

Producing hydrogen with water and a little metal

Ron — Sun, 20 May 2007 03:03:35 -0700
Purdue University professor Jerry Woodall has discovered a way to make hydrogen out of a reaction of water and an alloy of aluminum and gallium. The production technique eliminates the need to store hydrogen, he said. Mixing water and pellets made up of the alloy in a tank can produce fuel for a small engine, or conceivably a car.

The process, along with other recent hydrogen developments, could work to dispel some of the criticism of hydrogen as a fuel source in the coming decades. Although it's the most abundant element in the universe, producing hydrogen for commercial applications is expensive and generates greenhouse gases. Prototype hydrogen-fuel-cell cars also run close to a million dollars. Proponents, including some researchers at national labs, believe that if cheap, nonpolluting production methods can be achieved, hydrogen power might make its way into some types of motors. ...

Bush Orders First Federal Regulation of Greenhouse Gases

Ron — Mon, 14 May 2007 19:12:56 -0700
After resisting the regulation of greenhouse gases since he took office in 2001, President George W. Bush today signed an Executive Order directing four federal agencies to develop regulations limiting greenhouse gas emissions from new mobile sources. Greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide emitted by the combustion of fossil fuels, contribute to global climate change. -- The President directed the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, EPA, the Department of Transportation, the Department of Energy, and the Department of Agriculture to work together "to protect the environment with respect to greenhouse gas emissions from motor vehicles, nonroad vehicles, and nonroad engines, in a manner consistent with sound science, analysis of benefits and costs, public safety, and economic growth," the Executive Order states.

On Capitol Hill, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi said, "The President's announcement today is one more in a long series of pronouncements claiming to reduce our dependence on foreign oil. Yet after six years of failed energy policies that have favored Big Oil, the American people are still left with record gas prices and record dependence on foreign oil." "It appears that the President wants to run out the clock to the end of his term without addressing our energy needs, because the executive order will do nothing to promote energy independence. Instead," Pelosi said, "it is clearly designed to bog down the Environmental Protection Agency in a bureaucratic interagency process that will ensure that no steps are taken to regulate greenhouse gases from motor vehicles. Here in the House, we are working to develop legislation that will reduce energy dependence and global warming emissions; we will introduce a package of initiatives that will make this July 4th Energy Independence Day." ...

Eco-Restore.com: Water Vortexing Systems

Ron — Fri, 11 May 2007 18:19:30 -0700
...Based on ideas by Viktor Schauberger regarding water as a “living substance”, the team... has developed a simple and easy way to enhance the quality of Water. Installation of these pipes [is] just before the exit point in existing plumbing, such as a faucet or shower head. This pipe is gradually formed by a process in which a machine makes a series of indentations in the form of a spiral down the length of a pipe. Inside the pipe a scale-like surface is created to support the rhythmic flow of the water. In this way the water is directed to fold into itself allowing suction forces and whirling to occur. An outstanding energetic quality is produced by the pipes on the water. The pipes are tested randomly by the manufacturer to a point of 10 bars of pressure. ...

World'sNest: Sustainable Living, Solar Architecture

Ron — Mon, 07 May 2007 15:21:31 -0700
This one's a little too fancy for my tastes, but they seem to have the $ to experiment with and demo some pretty cutting edge sustainability technologies.

Angel's Nest and Worlds Nest, the sustainable energy demonstration showcase in Taos, New Mexico, built by Robert Plarr and Victoria Peters, incorporates wind and solar power, a renewable hydrogen fueling station, and integrated greenhouses in a unique closed loop, grid-independent energy and water replenishment cycle. ...

Changes in lifestyle can slow warming, UN scientists say

Ron — Sun, 06 May 2007 16:00:00 -0700
The worst effects of global warming can be blunted if average people make lifestyle changes that conserve energy and if the world's nations show the political will to address the problem, a panel of international scientists said Friday.

The technology to slow climate change exists in the form of renewable-energy sources like solar, wind and hydroelectric power and making cars, homes and factories more energy efficient, but governments must adopt policies that encourage people and businesses to embrace them, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said. -- At the same time, the scientists said businesses could be encouraged to quit generating carbon dioxide, which contributes to global warming, with the establishment of carbon taxes equal to $100 per ton of carbon dioxide put into the atmosphere.

The panel also called for better management of the world's forests, the loss of which through deforestation could deprive the planet of a vital "sink" for absorbing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that contributes to rising temperatures. -- Failure to take action, the panel warned, could result in dire consequences for future generations.

Global warming fight is affordable, says new UN report

Ron — Fri, 04 May 2007 15:13:29 -0700
Finally, good news about global warming: It's possible to virtually choke off emissions of greenhouse gases that scientists say are heating up the planet without also breaking the bank.

That's the key message in a report released May 4 by the UN-backed Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The 38-page document, summarizing a larger tome of more than 1,000 pages, focuses on ways to curb greenhouse-gas emissions, mainly carbon dioxide, and on the economic effects that different approaches to cutting emissions could have.

Increased energy efficiency, wider use of renewable energy sources, shifts in land use and farming practices, and wider use of nuclear energy – among other measures – could substantially reduce the risk of feeling the worst effects of global warming outlined in two previous IPCC volumes released earlier this year. ...

Environmentalists push for renewable energy at UN IPCC in Bangkok

Ron — Thu, 03 May 2007 14:55:19 -0700
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the U.N. network of 2,000 scientists that has produced two landmark reports on global warming this year, was working on a third study — this one on mitigation measures — for release on Friday. -- A draft of the report features a lengthy list of possible solutions: improved energy efficiency like hybrid vehicles, renewable sources such as solar- and hydropower, cleaner-burning coal and biofuels, reforestation and even nuclear energy — an option the United States is pushing to give greater emphasis in the final document.

But not all the proposals are equal, environmentalists argue, saying some — such as nuclear power — are dangerous, while technologies such as renewable energy sources are not given proper emphasis. ... The green lobby is a varied group, but the lion's share of them insist concern over global warming should not lead to increased reliance on nuclear energy. ...

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. ...

The Missing News of the Missing Methane

Ron — Fri, 27 Apr 2007 20:43:05 -0700
You may perhaps recall a lot of attention paid to methane from plants back in January 2006. A team of scientists (mostly from the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics) reported in Nature that they had found evidence that plants release huge amounts of the gas--perhaps accounting for ten to thirty percent of all the methane found in the atmosphere. ...

Fast-forward eighteen months. A group of Dutch researchers put the Max Planck team's conclusions to the test by tracing radioactive carbon isotopes through plants. Their conclusion: "There is no evidence for substantial aerobic methane emission by terrestrial plants." ...

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. ...

Sociable Darwinism: Evolution for Everyone (NYT Book Review)

Ron — Mon, 09 Apr 2007 15:06:09 -0700
The conflict between being well behaved, being good, not gulping down more than your share, and being selfish enough to get your fair share, “is eternal and encompasses virtually all species on earth,” [the author] writes, and it likely occurs on any other planet that supports life, too, “because it is predicted at such a fundamental level by evolutionary theory.” How do higher patterns of cooperative behavior emerge from aggregates of small, selfish units? With carrots, sticks and ceaseless surveillance. In the human body, for example, nascent tumor cells arise on a shockingly regular basis, each determined to replicate without bound; again and again, immune cells attack the malignancies, destroying the outlaw cells and themselves in the process. The larger body survives to breed, and hence spawn a legacy far sturdier than any tumor mass could manage. ...

Cheap, 'safe' drug kills most cancers

Ron — Thu, 05 Apr 2007 20:11:54 -0700
It sounds almost too good to be true: a cheap and simple drug that kills almost all cancers by switching off their "immortality". The drug, dichloroacetate (DCA), has already been used for years to treat rare metabolic disorders and so is known to be relatively safe.

It also has no patent, meaning it could be manufactured for a fraction of the cost of newly developed drugs.

Evangelos Michelakis of the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, and his colleagues tested DCA on human cells cultured outside the body and found that it killed lung, breast and brain cancer cells, but not healthy cells. Tumours in rats deliberately infected with human cancer also shrank drastically when they were fed DCA-laced water for several weeks. ...

ISEC: The International society for Ecology & Culture

Ron — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 11:47:52 -0700
I got to know the remarkable Helena Norberg-Hodge, the Founder of ISEC, back in the 70's, when she was setting up the Ladakh Project, for which she shared the 1986 Right Livelihood Award, otherwise known as the 'Alternative Nobel Prize.' –- Her selfless, Buddhist commitment to protecting the indigenous peoples of the Tibetan high plateau from Western commercial development deeply impressed me. I'll always remember her inspiring photos of the unique and glowing faces of the Ladakh people who hadn't yet been exposed to Western culture. Knowing Helena, I can unreservedly attest to the quality and integrity of ISEC. ... ~ ron

Forty Initiatives that are changing our world (Resurgence Mag.)

Ron — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 11:12:56 -0700
This informative list of annotated links compiled by Resurgence Magazine includes interesting initiatives in the areas of Activism, Agricultural Development, Ecology, Economics, Education & Community, the Internet, Political & Corporate, Publishing, and Scientific Principles. The few I’ve had a chance to check out so far look like they’re indeed doing important work; e.g., ISEC (the International society for Ecology & Culture), which I’ll post more info about in my next article. — Recommended.

'In Our Own Image: Humanity's Quest for Divinity via Technology,' by Debashis Chowdhury

Ron — Sat, 24 Mar 2007 13:43:28 -0700
This looks like an interesting book. ~ ron

Once in a few billion years, the conditions are right for life to transcend itself into a higher level of existence. Having spent more than a billion years in the form of single walled bacteria-like (Prokaryotic) cells, a happy set of circumstances happened about 1.5 Billion years ago that gave rise to Eukaryotic cells with a well defined cell nucleus. Those were heady times, and the Eukaryotic cells then went on to create all multi-cellular creatures, including plants and animals including humans. The experience of what it meant to live life changed completely!...

The exciting times are back again! In this very century, mankind will invent the technologies that will give us capabilities we have thus far associated only with Divinity. What is lacking now is a level of wisdom, and unity of purpose amongst us humans. If we can develop this transcendental wisdom, and inculcate a joint sense of identity and purpose as humanity, ours is the opportunity to transform our collective existence into a vastly more powerful presence. ...

Dream Farm 2 - Story So Far: Its conceptual underpinnings and update with a potential site in mind

Ron — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 18:47:40 -0700
Dr. Mae-Wan Ho: "Many people have asked what exactly is Dream Farm 2. There are several answers. First of all, Dream Farm 2 is a model of an integrated, ‘zero-emission’, ‘zero-waste’ highly productive farm that maximises the use of renewable energies and turns ‘wastes’ into food and energy resources, thereby completely obviating the need for fossil fuels. It is our answer to the energy crisis and climate change, and more. It is a microcosm of a different way of being and becoming in the world, and in that respect, nothing short of a social revolution.

In a way, I have dedicated the past 20 years to developing the idea, and trying to live up to it. -- The challenge now is to make Dream Farm 2 a reality, to put flesh on the bare bones of the diagram, so we can start building the best when the site is agreed. Watch this space. ..."

Resurgence Magazine: Promoting creativity, ecology, spirituality and frugality

Ron — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 18:38:04 -0700
...Resurgence publish[es] articles that are on the cutting edge of current thinking, promoting creativity, ecology, spirituality and frugality.

While the corporate world advocates "free trade" Resurgence questions trade without responsibility and money without morality. While our governments define the "national interest" and its politicians pursue power at all costs, Resurgence argues for politics with principles. While technology invades our lives in the name of speed and efficiency, Resurgence advocates science with a soul.

But Resurgence not only offers a critique of the old paradigm, it gives working models for an emerging new paradigm. Resurgence is packed full of positive ideas about the theory and practice of good living: permaculture, community supported agriculture, local economics, ecological building, sacred architecture, art in the environment, small schools and deep ecology. ...

Quantum Jazz: “The meaning of life, the universe and everything,” by Dr. Mae-Wan Ho

Ron — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 18:24:45 -0700
Quantum jazz is the music of the organism dancing life into being, from the top of her head to her toes and fingertips, every single cell, molecule and atom taking part in a remarkable ensemble that spins and sways to rhythms from pico (10-12) seconds to minutes, hours, a day, a month, a year and longer, emitting light and sound waves from atomic dimensions of nanometres up to metres, spanning a musical range of 70 octaves (for that is the range of living activities). And each and every player, the tinniest molecule not withstanding, is improvising spontaneously and freely, yet keeping in tune and in step with the whole.

There is no conductor, no choreographer, the organism is creating and recreating herself afresh with each passing moment. Quantum coherent action is effortless action, effortless creation, the Taoist ideal of art and poetry, of life itself...

It’s about the physics of organisms in place of the physics of dead matter in mainstream biology and the world at large. It is why we are stuck in debates about the hazards of mobile phones and genetic engineering, or the benefits of complimentary medicine. There is nothing in mainstream biology that deals with wholeness or coherence, nothing that tells you how, because the whole body is interconnected, even very weak electromagnetic fields could be harmful or, if appropriately applied, beneficial. And because we fail to see nature as an interconnected whole, life appears entirely as a struggle for survival of the fittest, one against all and all against nature. We wage wars and exploit our planet to death. ...

'The Real Bioinformatics Revolution,' by Dr. Mae-Wan Ho

Ron — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 18:09:30 -0700
The idea of molecules communicating and exchanging energy by electromagnetic resonance fits in with accumulating evidence that cells and organisms are liquid crystalline, that all the molecules, including especially the 70 percent or water, are aligned and working coherently together [9, 12]. There is little or no free diffusion in such a system, as Fröhlich [14, 15] had pointed out earlier, and before that, cell physiologist Gilbert Ling [24, 25] ( Strong Medicine for Cell Biology , SiS 24) and biochemist/historian of Chinese science, Joseph Needham [26]. Instead, energy transfer - by molecular resonance or coherent excitations – probably has to occur through large distances, activating entire populations of similar molecules that are in different parts of the cell or different parts of the body, so long-range coordinating of function can happen instantaneously...

What is clearly emerging is the predominant electronic nature of the living matrix and living activities, which will require a complete rewrite of biochemistry and cell biology, if not also physiology and medicine. ...

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. ...

Powerful Ways to Save and Replace Oil, by Amory Lovins

Ron — Tue, 20 Mar 2007 22:45:16 -0700
The world uses a cubic mile of oil a year, costing almost $2 trillion. Oil and cars are the world's biggest and most entrenched industries. Yet an inexorable half-century transition beyond oil has begun, squeezing oil between efficient use and alternative supplies...

Fleet turnovers take time: putting the first half-million hybrid cars on the road took nearly a decade. Yet in 2007 20 new hybrid models will enter the American market, and operating efficiency will finally become entrenched as carmakers' top design priority, locking in oil savings for decades. Biofuels, too, will continue double-digit growth as Brazil's 2006 oil independence and Sweden's 2020 off-oil goal spur emulation. ...

Rocky Mountain Institute Helps Hawaii Update Its Energy Strategy

Ron — Tue, 20 Mar 2007 18:09:20 -0700
...Since the late 1960s, [Hawaii] has relied on oil to meet roughly 90 percent of its energy demand. The cost of this oil dependence translates to a higher overall cost of living, the nation's highest electricity prices, and very high gasoline prices. In September 2006, Hawaii's residential electricity revenues per kilowatt-hour ranged from 19.75 cents to 34 cents, with a statewide average of 24.24 cents compared to a national average of 10.92 cents. Overall, electricity costs were 21.51 cents per kilowatthour in Hawaii compared to the national average of 9.26 cents. Hawaii's gasoline prices consistently rank among the highest in the country. ...

Recognizing these vulnerabilities, the State crafted the first Hawaii Energy Strategy (HES) in 1995. The State's goal was to better understand the risks it faces due to its unique energy situation, and to propose recommendations for achieving its objectives of reduced oil dependence, lowered energy costs, increased environmental sustainability, and a diversified economic base. The strategy was updated in 2000 by Hawaii's Department of Business, Economic Development & Tourism (DBEDT). This year, DBEDT retained Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI) to help DBEDT craft HES 2007 and outline a strategy that will, among other things ...

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. ...

'GaiaEducation' Educators and Designers Gather in Thailand

Ron — Mon, 19 Mar 2007 15:51:45 -0700
Gaia Education Educators for a Sustainable Earth (the GEESE) flew from the 4 corners of the world into Thailand to meet in a beautiful, curvaceous mud building surrounded by lotus ponds and bamboo groves. Inspired by Ghandian ashrams where social change meets spiritual practice and working with the land, Wongsanit Ashram is a hub of sustainability and grassroots leadership training in South East Asia. Wongsanit is also an idyllic eco-settlement complete with organic gardens and traditional thatched and cob houses. This was a wonderful base to come together to discuss the Ecovillage Design Education (EDE). In keeping with the diversity of the group the Southerners revelled in the sultry, humid tropical days whilst Northerners were challenged by the heat! ...

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. ...

2007 TED Conference: Report #2

Ron — Fri, 09 Mar 2007 13:40:24 -0800
...The first prize winner for 2007 is James Nachtwey, a remarkable war photographer who’s been described as a “one man human rights watch”. He’s been extensively honored for his work, winning numerous prizes for his work covering some of the most difficult images in the world.

He apologizes for using notes - “after spending an entire career trying to be invisible” speaking before a group is an “out of body” experience. The truth is, his images are so powerful and moving, I found it very hard to even follow his voice for much of his talk. As he said, “I have been a witness - these pictures are my testimony.” ...

2007 TED Conference now underway: Report #1

Ron — Fri, 09 Mar 2007 13:27:04 -0800
The annual TED (Technology, Entertainment, & Design) conference in Monterey, CA, USA, brings together more than 1000 thought-leaders, movers and shakers for four days of learning, laughter and inspiration. -- The first TED in 1984 included the public unveiling of the Macintosh computer and the Sony compact disc, while mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot demonstrated how to map coastlines with his newly discovered fractals and AI guru Marvin Minsky outlined his powerful new model of the mind. Several influential members of the burgeoning 'digerati' community were also there, including Nicholas Negroponte and Stewart Brand.

Those who have spoken at TED include Bill Gates, Frank Gehry, Jane Goodall, Billy Graham, Herbie Hancock, Murray Gell-Mann, Larry Ellison. Yet often the real stars have been the unexpected: Li Lu, a key organizer of the Tiananmen Square student protest, Aimee Mullins, a Paralympics competitor who tried out a new pair of artificial legs on-stage, or Nathan Myrrhvold speaking not about Microsoft platforms, but about dinosaur sex. ...

"Born On A Blue Day: A Memoir" - Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant

Ron — Fri, 09 Mar 2007 03:33:42 -0800
Daniel Tammet is a high-functioning autistic savant. He can calculate huge sums in his head in seconds and instantaneously recognise prime numbers, but he finds emotions difficult to understand and has trouble telling left from right. One of fewer than fifty such people living worldwide, Daniel is unique in his ability to articulate his savant experience.

Daniel can also learn to speak a language fluently from scratch in a week. In the documentary "Brainman," he is challenged to learn a difficult new language - Icelandic - from scratch in just seven days, and then does a succesful interview in Reykjavik entirely in Icelandic. ...

Stephen Hawking to take a zero-gravity flight

Ron — Thu, 01 Mar 2007 15:18:35 -0800
On April 26, Dr. Hawking, surrounded by a medical entourage, is to take a zero-gravity ride out of Cape Canaveral on a so-called vomit comet, a padded aircraft that flies a roller-coaster trajectory to produce periods of weightlessness. He is getting his lift gratis, from the Zero Gravity Corporation, which has been flying thrill seekers on a special Boeing 727-200 since 2004 at $3,500 a trip.

Peter H. Diamandis, chief executive of Zero G, said that “the idea of giving the world’s expert on gravity the opportunity to experience zero gravity” was irresistible.

In some ways, this is only a prelude. Dr. Hawking announced on his 65th birthday, in January, that he hoped to take a longer, higher flight in 2009 on a space plane being developed by Richard Branson’s company Virgin Galactic, which seeks to take six passengers to an altitude of 70 miles. ...

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. ...

Nonalgorithmic Economics: The Evolution of Future Wealth, by Stuart A. Kaufmann

Ron — Thu, 22 Feb 2007 18:09:06 -0800
...We do not yet know what makes some systems more adaptable than others, but research on complexity has yielded some clues. Some of my own work on physical systems called spin glasses suggests that the level of central control over subsidiary parts of a system is an important consideration. Too much control freezes the system into limited configurations; too little causes it to wander aimlessly. Only systems that hover on the border between order and chaos exhibit the needed general stability and capacity to explore the universe of possible solutions to challenges.

The path to maximum prosperity will depend on finding ways to build economic systems in which new niches will generate spontaneously and abundantly. Such an approach to economics is indeed radical. It is based on the emergent behavior of systems rather than on the reductive study of them. It defies conventional mathematical treatments because it is not prestatable and is nonalgorithmic. Not surprisingly, most economists have so far resisted these ideas. Yet there can be little doubt that learning to apply these lessons from biology to technology will usher in a remarkable era of innovation and growth. ...

New Bird and Bat Species Found By Barcoding DNA

Ron — Sun, 18 Feb 2007 23:11:11 -0800
Scientists have developed a new technique for species identification - a DNA barcode. Similar to the barcodes that identify consumer products, species barcodes identify unique animals or plants. - Now, taking the use of DNA barcoding to a more complex level, an international team of scientists reports assembling a barcoded genetic portrait of bird life in the United States and Canada - the prelude to a genetic portrait of all animal life on Earth.

Based on DNA barcode identifiers, the scientists have discovered 15 new genetically distinct species, nearly indistinguishable to human eyes and ears and thus overlooked in centuries of bird studies. ...

'The Doctrine of the Subtle Worlds: Sri Aurobindo's Cosmology, Modern Science, and the Metaphysics of Alfred North Whitehead'

Ron — Thu, 15 Feb 2007 23:11:11 -0800
This is an unusually long article for SCIY. It's copyrighted by Eric M. Weiss, and was his dissertation for his Ph.D. at CIIS, the California Institute of Integral Studies, with a concentration in Philosophy, Cosmology and Consciousness. I'm taking the liberty of posting it here because, in my opinion, it's one of the most thorough and insightful treatments of the core concern of SCIY; the multiple & interpenetrating relationships between science, culture, and consciousness, placed within the contextual framework of Sri Aurobindo's Integral Yoga. - Warning: This is challenging material, but I believe working through it and contemplating its implications is well worth the effort. - My deepest appreciation goes to Dr. Eric Weiss for his extraordinary and groundbreaking work. ~ ron

...Here we are, at the dawn of the Twenty First Century, and I have awakened to find myself living in a science fiction novel. If this novel were to be written from the standpoint of the 23rd century, looking back to the beginning of the 21st, it might start something like this:

At that time, the certainties of science had faltered. The great charism of the men in white lab coats had faded. The bastions of materialism had crumbled from within, and the civilization that it had fostered was losing its way.

Meanwhile, three centuries of rapacious assault on the biosphere were, at last, showing decisive results. The globe was poisoned, people were sick, species were being slaughtered by the tens of thousands, global temperatures and global sea levels were both beginning to rise. A civilization was ending, and in its death throes, it was bringing to a close the Cenozoic Era. The Earth was preparing for a fresh creation.

Looking back, too, we can see that the promise of the new civilization had already begun to shine. The iron cage of the material world, in which the species had been trapped for centuries, was starting to dissolve. Here and there, the experiences of the subtle worlds were breaking through. A few intrepid explorers had seen the promise, and had just begun to glimpse the vast freedoms and the limitless horizons that we now enjoy, but the darkness was still thick and Kali was dancing wildly across the face of the globe. This is the story of those early pioneers…

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. ...

Biovillage approach represents the greening of development

Ron — Wed, 31 Jan 2007 14:14:15 -0800
Selvi Alagappan rises early each day to tend to her small patch of crossandra and jasmine flowers in the rural Indian village of Mangalam, in the Union of Pondicherry. These and the mushrooms she cultivates in a nearby shack bring in a monthly income that, while still below the poverty line, keeps her large family from going hungry. — Two years ago, however, starvation was very much a reality for Selvi and her family. But like many other participants of the Biovillage Project, a collaborative development programme described by its authors as "pro-nature, pro-women, pro-poor", Selvi was given the tools and technical assistance to increase her household income and get her back on her feet again.

The project is run by the M.S. Swaminathan Research Foundation, a local non-governmental organization in Chennai, with funding and technical assistance from the Government of India and international agencies including FAO, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD). The project began in 1992 with 42 participants in three villages. It now operates in 19 villages with a team of 24 project specialists. ...

Chennai Declaration: UN urged to help achieve hunger-free world

Ron — Wed, 31 Jan 2007 14:05:11 -0800
The United Nations (UN) has been recommended to set up a Statutory Body comprising G8 and G20 nations to provide political oversight to the global and national efforts to achieve the goal of a hunger-free world by 2015. — The recommendation was made in the Chennai Declaration that was adopted yesterday on the concluding day of the three-day international workshop on "Food Security: A Great Threat to Human Security" held at the MS Swaminathan Research Foundation (MSRRF) in Chennai in India.

"The goal should be eradication of hunger by 2015, and not halving the proportion or the number of the hungry in relation to any chosen base year," the declaration recommended. — It said all the member states of the UN should make the right to a balance diet, clean drinking water, environmental sanitation, primary health care and primary education a basic human right...

The programme will be completed today (Thursday) through visiting Biovillage and Auroville, a MSSRF project in Pondicherry. ...

Interview: Dr. Francis Collins, devout Christian & Head of the US' National Human Genome Research Institute

Ron — Wed, 31 Jan 2007 01:17:17 -0800
I started reading this interview with more than a little skepticism. ("Oh, this must be one of Bush's Christian fundamentalist appointees.") But as I read through it, I became increasingly impressed with the balanced perspective held by Dr. Collins. I'm posting it here because I think it provides an encouraging example of a possible rapprochement between scientists and people of faith.

The media often portray the religious right in the United States as antiscience. Is that a fair characterization?
I don't think it's fair to blame believers for getting defensive about attacks on the Bible when they see their whole belief system is under attack from some members of the scientific community who are using the platform of science to say, "We don't need God anymore, that was all superstition, and you guys should get over it." Believers then feel some requirement to respond, and this has led to an unfortunate escalation of charges and countercharges...

So what would you say to the scientists who are fervently opposed to religious thought and practice?
Is there any dogma more unsupported by the facts than from the scientist who stands up and says, "I know there is no God"? Science is woefully unsuited to ask the question of God in the first place. So give the religious folks a break. They are seeking the kind of spiritual truths that have always interested humankind but that science cannot really address. ...

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. ...

Viridian Note 00487: We Are Winning, by Bruce Sterling

Ron — Mon, 29 Jan 2007 16:09:18 -0800
...Genuine climate mayhem is underway. It is intensifying fast. People are going to die: of heat, of disease, freezing, starving, drowning and dying of thirst. Not in mere tens of thousands as they did in the Paris heatwave, but in hecatombs. We have a global climate crisis. A real one, not a futurist speculation. People are going to make agonizing sacrifices in increasingly frantic efforts to ameliorate that and redress that crisis. Then, next year, they will discover that the situation is vastly worse than then imagined, and the spillage of blood and treasure and sacred honor that they thought would surely help is a fraction of what was necessary.

The climate crisis is in its Neville Chamberlain phase right now. People still imagine that a concern with the climate is trendy, and that a judicious head-nod here will mean peace in our time. Those people are not merely mistaken, they are delusionary. They are nodding in disdain at the basic laws of physics. The human race has spent two industrious centuries unearthing the planetary dead and setting them aflame in the sky. There is hell to pay for an affront like that, and it's all ahead of us in this century. We are in in 2007 and we are about seven percent of the way into very, very deep and very, very hot water.

Nevertheless, the frog will jump from that hot water. We are winning. ...