Cyberjunk

At the bottom of each thread there is a pop-up menu that allows you to display different time periods worth of messages for that topic. I now set these as 'show all' when setting up a new forum but have not gone back and changed the old ones yet from the default 30 days or something like that.

Phil e-mailed me at the end of last year (my apologies for the delay in putting this up!) with info on his new novel:

 

isbn: 1876156228

 

Description: Set in Australia, it gives lots of ideas for a campaign or once-off runs "down under". NPC's are here too.

 

Check the site and new cover at http://www.tassie.net.au/~pweeks/wochen.html

 

Key concepts: war, beauty, Belle Epoque, the

necessity of keeping one's morale up in

difficult times

 

Attention Conservation Notice:  Could keep you

websurfing for months on end.

 

(((By the time we send out our next Viridian Note,

the United States may be at war.  This is a sad and ugly

historical period, so it's time for us Viridians

to mindfully contemplate pretty things.  

Such action is a moral necessity.

In the memorable words of Italo Calvino, in his

beautiful book INVISIBLE CITIES:

 

((("There are two ways to escape the suffering.

The first is easy for many: accept the Inferno

and become such a part of it that you can no

longer see it. The second is risky and demands

constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn

to recognize who and what, in the midst of the

Inferno, are not Inferno, then make them endure,

give them space."

 

(((In this Note we Viridians are vigilantly

giving considerate space and time

to things that are Not-Inferno. If you see one that

you fancy, by all means help make it endure.)))

 

************************************

 

(((Okay, yes, that Australian observatory we mentioned

horribly caught fire.  But they SAVED THE DATA!)))

 

"Valuable data collected by the Mt. Stromlo Observatory in Canberra,

Australia were not lost in a firestorm that destroyed the facility

thanks to a 'comprehensive data recovery plan.' Data from the

telescopes had been being sent to a StorageTek 9310 Powderhorn library

at the Canberra campus of the Australian National University (ANU);

administrative and research data had been being backed up regularly

and stored at two separate remote locations."

http://www.zdnet.com.au/newstec....,00.htm

 

(((Beautiful open-source web-art toys.)))

http://www.levitated.net/daily/index.html

 

(((London's Design Museum.  Stay all day.)))

http://www.designmuseum.org/

 

(((The National Building Museum showcases big, green

buildings.)))

http://www.nbm.org/Exhibits/current/Big_and_Green.html

 

(((Touchingly retro-prescient art by Boris

Artzybasheff.  Stun your friends.)))

http://www.enter.net/~torve/art/artzy/markiii.html

http://www.enter.net/~torve/art/artzy/executive.html

 

(((Now that you're unemployed, why not write some

science fiction stories for cool pulp magazines?

These lovely relics of a lost media age are barely

surviving today, but people always write for magazines

during Depressions.  A great entertainment bargain.  

Subscribe now and save them for a later generation!)))

http://www.asimovs.com/

http://www.sfsite.com/fsf/

 

((((Ten bucks a month for your own Linux computer online.)))

http://www.workspot.com/

 

(((The strange and provocative WonderWalker.)))

http://wonderwalker.walkerart.org/

 

(((Hey Baby Boomers.  Remember that weird, trippy, British

LP cover art by Roger Dean, on big vinyl "progressive

rock" records of the 1970s?  Well, soon you can

LIVE INSIDE IT!)))

http://www.homeforlife.co.uk/

 

(((Bangalore isn't just computer chips.  It's also

Indian eco-housing.)))

http://inika.com/chitra/projects.htm

 

(((Enjoy emergent, bizarre, toroidal circulation

phenomena, and get wasted on Tia Maria liqueur

at the same time.  Yes, this stunt has been home-tested

in the Viridian Vatican, and it works.)))

http://www.newscientist.com/lastword/article.jsp?id=lw201

 

(((Never mind the Bush push on fuel-cells == if you're a

rich guy with a generous tax break, you can buy nifty-keen

fuel-cell desktop toys.)))

http://www.fuelcellstore.com/product....ex.html

 

(((Solar cells have quietly re-entered the White House.)))

http://www.buildinggreen.com/news/white_house.html

 

(((Convulsively funny Viridian comic relief from an old Onion article.)))

http://www2.gol.com/users/coynerhm/hippie_update.htm

 

(((Duncan Stewart of the Viridian Curia remarks: "Decasia is a film for the

Viridian Movement.  Deliciously analog. The film is made from black and white

movie clips from the early days of  the previous century.  All in various

states of corruption, from the celluloid  of the film itself to the silver

nitrate which provides the canvas.  A stepping stone to

a new level of organic artistry.")))

http://www.decasia.com/

 

(((An Arts and Crafts mall.  That's right, a mall.)))

http://www.lileks.com/bleat/archive/03/0103/013103.html

 

((A fun, nifty-keen Danish webgame.)))

http://www.titoonic.dk/products/games/spider/default.html

 

(((Beautiful, beautiful sunflowers.  Our kind, of course.)))

http://www.perpetualocean.com/artpage6/sunflowers.html

 

(((The 100 most beautiful women in Bollywood cinema.  Okay,

there's nothing remotely Viridian about this, but holy Vishnu,

what a swarm of goddesses.)))

http://photogallery.indiatimes.com/cms.dll....1795245

8&type=

 

(((The vast and awesomely beautiful Eden Project.)))

http://www.edenproject.com

 

(((Cities of the future, by students of today.)))

http://www.futurecity.org/

 

(((Hoberman is making bug toys now.)))

http://www.hoberman.com/fold/grobots/mantis.htm

 

(((Dead design gizmos are often more beautiful than

the ones that got market traction.)))

http://www.business2.com/articles/mag/0,1640,38426|2,00.html

 

(((Cosmic scales convey the many consolations of natural philosophy.)))

http://micro.magnet.fsu.edu/primer/java/scienceopticsu/powersof10/

 

(((An Atlas of Cyberspaces.)))

http://www.cybergeography.org/atlas/whats_new.html

 

(((The stunningly cosmic Celestia.)))

http://www.shatters.net/celestia/gallery.html

 

(((The harsh beauty of Mars, under intense and

continuing observation.)))

http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/mgs/msss/camera/images/index.html

 

(((Incredible inflatable space architecture.  Why not put

them in West Texas?)))

http://www.ilcdover.com/SpaceInf/habitats/transhab.htm

 

(((Take a carbon-fiber elevator straight into the heavens.)))

http://www.highliftsystems.com/

 

O=c=O O=c=O O=c=O O=c=O O=c=O O=c=O

A THING OF BEAUTY IS A JOY FOREVER

O=c=O O=c=O O=c=O O=c=O O=c=O O=c=O

Obviously we cannot condone anyone downloading copyrighted material. Especially Talsorians stuff as they are a very small family company, so go buy the stuff and keep them in business!

Key concepts: oil riches, economic destabilization,

carbon mining

 

Attention Conservation Notice:  A FORTUNE magazine

article points out that carbon mining has ruined

Venezuela.  But why wasn't this helpful tip delivered much

earlier?  And what about all those other formerly

prosperous countries massively harmed  by corrupt carbon

domination in their centers of government?   Not that

we're naming any names.

 

Links:

It's so bad in Venezuela that even oil technocrats are

really scared. Man, it's hard to be a rich, educated guy

on strike.

http://www.petroleumworld.com/

http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/N26259889

http://www.theglobalist.com/DBWeb/StoryId.aspx?StoryId=2462

 

Here come the next eager victims *after* Venezuela.

http://www.transparency.org/cgi-bin/dcn-read.pl?citID=51408

 

Ever seen terrifying, naked, out-of-control class warfare

from immiserated, dirty, semiliterate slum dwellers? Go

see this movie and find out how that worked in America.

http://www.gangsofnewyork.com/

 

Hey wait, since the North Pole is melting, we don't

need Venezuela any more.  We can ship in some handy

Russian oil where there used to be solid ice.

http://www.msnbc.com/news/864942.asp?0bl=-0

 

But wait!  Russia is a carbon-mining state just like

Venezuela, so it doesn't have a workable economy, either.  

It's wall-to-wall corrupt energy moguls selling out the

population wholesale!  Let's pretend that's really

respectable, though. We don't have much of a choice.

http://www.transparency.org/cgi-bin/dcn-read.pl?citID=51414

 

Okay Australians: brace yourselves, and check out this

ghastly prediction about what's going down in China.

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/0126-07.htm

 

 

Source:  Fortune magazine, Feb 3, 2003

page 96

http://www.fortune.com/fortune/articles/0,15114,409899,00.html

 

"The Devil's Excrement"

 

by Jerry Useem

 

"'Ten years from now, 20 years from now, you will see,'

former Venezuelan Oil Minister and OPEC co-founder Juan

Pablo Perez Alfonso predicted in the 1970s, 'oil will

bring us ruin.'

 

  (((Well, oil brought Perez Alfonso's nephew some ruin

recently, after he tried to throw a Venezuelan coup and

had to scram to Florida.  Perez Alfonso himself died  

years ago in Maryland of  pancreatic cancer.)))

http://www.sptimes.com/2002...._.shtml

 

    "It was an oddball statement at a time when oil was

bringing Venezuela unprecedented wealth == the

government's 1973 revenues were larger than all previous

years combined, raising hopes that the black gold would

catapult Venezuela straight to First World status.  But

Perez Alfonso had a different name for oil: 'the devil's

excrement.'

 

    "Today he seems a prophet. When it hit the jackpot,

Venezuela had a functioning democracy and the highest per-

capita income on the continent.  Now it has a state of

near civil-war and a per-capita income lower than its 1960

level.  (((Venezuela also has a screwed-up climate and is

badly polluted, but who's counting.)))

 

    Far from an anomaly, Venezuela is a classic example

of that economists call the 'natural resource curse.'  A

1995 analysis of developing countries by Jeffrey Sachs and

Andrew Warner found that the more an economy relies on

mineral wealth, the lower its growth rate.  Venezuela

isn't poor despite its oil riches == it's poor because of

them."

 

(((Read it 'n' weep.  This Sachs-Warner thing is 8 years

old.  Ever heard of it before? Me neither.)))

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=225459

 

    "How could that be?  For the same reason so many

entertainers go bankrupt. (((Hey, at least we make people

laugh, fella.)))  Showered with sudden windfalls,

governments start spending like rock stars, creating

programs that are hard to undo when oil prices fall.  And

because nobody wants to pay taxes to a government that's

swimming in petrodollars == 'In Venezuela only the stupid

pay taxes,' a former President once said == the state

finds itself living beyond its means.  (((Boy,

irresponsible deficits like that would never happen in

America.  Rich people get no tax breaks, either.)))

 

    "A cycle begins.  The economy can't absorb the sudden

influx of money, causing wages and prices to inflate the

the nation's currency to appreciate (by an average of 50

percent, according to a World Bank economist's study)."

 

Link:

http://www.xe.com/ucc/

(((Euros now worth more than dollars.  My goodness me.)))

 

    "That makes it harder for local manufacturers to

compete.  Incentives, meanwhile, become wildly distorted.  

When free money is flowing out of the ground, people who

might otherwise start a business or do something

innovative instead busy themselves angling for a share of

the spoils.  Why slog it out in a low-margin industry when

steering some oil business toward a contact could make you

a millionaire?  Thus a deadly double dynamic: a ballooning

public sector, a withering private one."  (((Unless you

are Enron, in which case you innovate in angling for

spoils, while privatizing the public sector.  No wonder

FORTUNE loved those guys for years on end.)))

 

   "Eventually you're 16th-century Spain.  (((Do we

really have to stretch this far for a cogent comparison?  

The US National Security Council is chock-a-block with oil

people)))   It too, once struck it rich on gold (not the

black kind) from the Americas.  Its monarchs spent like

loons,  ((nice turn of phrase there)))  expanding the army

15-fold, creating an elaborate patronage system and

sending conquistadores in search of El Dorado.

 

   (((This piece is so politically touchy that it reads

like an Aesop's fable.  'You see, one king is a kind of

log, while the other king is a kind of stork, and....')))

 

   "(...).  While inflation and currency appreciation

slowly killed industry and agriculture, a parasitic class

of noblemen lived off gold money (think of Saudi Arabia's

idle princes) (((hereditary nobleman unknown in American

politics, thankfully))) waiting for the next ship to come

in.  By the time the ships stopped coming, Spain wasn't

able to feed itself, forcing it to declare bankruptcy

eight times and finishing it as a world power."

 

(((For a rather less business-friendly economic analysis,

check out this Hazel Henderson jeremiad on a Venezuelan

website.)))

Link:

http://www.petroleumworld.com/story0263.htm

 

   "But the Midas myth dies hard.  'This is a country

that can never, ever sustain itself on oil,' Terry Lynn

Karl, author of 'The Paradox of Plenty: Oil Booms and

Petro-States,' says of Venezuela.  'But everyone from the

President to the poor believes it can.'  And therein lies

the trap."

 

(((Looks like the peace for oil is even more debilitating

than the war for oil.)))

Link:

http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/5599.html

 

    "President Hugo Chavez rode popular rage into office

by focussing on corruption.  But what neither he nor

anyone else will face up to is this:  oil is not an

economy. (((!))) Creative economic activities have

spillover effects that become self-sustaining.  Oil spills

only into a barrel == and from there usually into the

hands of a favored few.  That's the real reason

Venezuela's productivity growth has been roughly half the

Latin American average."

 

(((It might be useful to have a word with people on the

coast about Spain about where that oil spills.)))

 

   "Can the curse be avoided?  A few smaller countries:

Malaysia, Norway, Mauritius == curbed its worst effects by

spending slowly and using the money to diversify their

economies.  In Venezuela oil still accounted for 80

percent of exports before a devastating strike made even

that scarce.  As a 16th-century Spanish economist said of

his homeland, 'What makes her poor is her wealth' == a

suitable lament for Venezuelans who have been waiting so

long for their ship to come in."

 

(((So the answer to the debilitating oil disease is to get

those lazy decadent locals to work  a lot harder.  I have

another suggestion.  How about using less oil?)))

 

O=c=O O=c=O O=c=O O=c=O

OIL IS NOT AN ECONOMY

O=c=O O=c=O O=c=O O=c=O

Key concepts:  Viridian commentary, massive wildfires,

climate change, capital of Australia, Khaki Green,

Kyoto Treaty, John Howard

 

Attention Conservation Notice:  Various interested

Viridian parties weigh in on the subject of the recent

fires around the capital of Australia.  Over 2,700

words.  The earlier note was painful, ugly and scary,

but this one is worse. Large numbers of dense, brain-

clogging links.

 

Links:

 

I asked Viridians for pictures of that molten observatory,

and I got 'em.  And much more.

 

http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/01/19/1042911270928.html

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/2676247.stm

http://news.com.au/common/imagedata/0,3600,231203,00.jpg

http://www.citynews.com.au/

 

http://abc.net.au/news/galleries/2003/actfires/pages/pic18.htm

http://abc.net.au/news/galleries/2003/actfires/pages/default.htm

 

 

"What a small tactical nuke might look like:"

http://www.citynews.com.au/bushfire/index.html

 

http://sres.anu.edu.au/associated/fire/index.html

 

The molten Observatory's rare pink-tailed legless lizard:

http://www.stewarts.org/viridian

 

The Australian, global-warming, giant squid peril:

http://abc.net.au/news/2002/08/item20020801151043_1.htm

http://www.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/sailing/01/15/kersauson.ppl/index.html

 

The Great Barrier Grief:

http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/01/19/1042911270265.html

http://www.upi.com/view.cfm?StoryID=20030121-091056-6571r

 

*******************************************************

From: Joseph Hope <joseph.hope*anu.edu.au>

Date: Sun Jan 19, 2003  11:34:21 PM US/Central

To: Bruce Sterling <bruces@well.com>

Subject: Re: Viridian Note 00358:  Canberra in Flames

 

    "Dear Bruce,

 

    "Long time Viridian reader, first time commenter.

 

    "I'm a resident in Canberra, and was on alert to

defend my house yesterday, as my suburb is on the edge on

Canberra between the two main parts that are burning.  It

was still standing as of this morning, and I'm having a

day off due to a favourable wind direction.  

 

   (((Congratulations on surviving, Dr. Hope, we are glad

to have you  with us.)))

 

    "I admire a ruthless dedication to the cause of

highlighting global warming,  and Viridian notes have

provided many good links to evidence that has found its

way into my first year university physics lectures,

whether it strictly belongs there or not.  However, the

fires around Canberra can't honestly be called a

Greenhouse event.

 

(((Oh yes indeed they can! Watch me.)))

 

Link:

http://swiftek.modwest.com/cana/bush/global_warming.htm

http://www.cana.net.au/bush/forests.htm

http://abc.net.au/science/news/stories/s763013.htm

 

   "The Australian bush, particularly in this area, is

*supposed* to have a devastating fire every few decades.  

It's how the trees germinate, which is why they're so fire

resistant, and produce so much flammable forest litter

which can be started by lightning strike.  I'd call this a

very natural event.

 

   (((That is true.  And it *used* to be very natural.  

Greenhouse events are weather events. But they are

startlingly huge, historically  unprecedented events that

overwhelm conventional disaster-relief infrastructures.  

That is how one knows them.  It's not like the Australian

sky suddenly rains Dr. Seuss oobleck.)))

 

Link:

http://www.terrifictoy.com/store/oobleck.html

 

   "What's so funny is that so many people were wandering

around saying 'I didn't think this could ever happen.'  

'It feels so surreal'.  The same sorts of things people

say whenever there's a very predictable natural or

political disaster.

 

    (((I rather doubt I find that any more genuinely

funny than you do.  Yes, people do make banal remarks like

that  sometimes.  They probably breed lame cliches during

the collapse of their  civilization, maybe, for that too

is also all too predictable.  It's  right there in the

historical records, what's left of 'em.)))

Link:

http://www.viridiandesign.org/notes/226-

250/00249_cultures_killed_by_climate.html

 

   "The big climate related topic here in Australia is

the drought.   It's old news, but it just keeps growing.

(((I see.   Well, Australia is mostly desert, so if

Australia becomes 100 percent desert, that's likely a

trifling statistic that wouldn't necessarily suggest a

climate problem to a scientifically objective observer.)))

 

    "It's not treatable by throwing a little money at it,

or even a lot of money at it.  Over-irrigation is leading

to land-busting salination, which is much worse than

desert.  Australia has always been largely water-poor, and

our entire agricultural industry could really die over the

next decade.  As could most of our inland towns.  (((You

heard it here first, ladies and gentlemen.  Deserts cover

the Australian ruins.)))

 

Link:

http://www.abc.net.au/rural/drought2002/

 

  "The drought may be partially responsible for the

severity of the bushfire,   but it's a growing crisis that

may ultimately  blow such piddling problems as a few

burning houses out of  the, uh, sand. (((And what's

responsible for  that drought?  "El Nino."  And what's

responsible for El  Nino? It's "natural," but happens more

and more often with more and more severity.)))

 

   "Invading Iraq, an ex-trade partner on the other side

of the world, to secure some oil for some other country,

may become even less appealing to the Australian public.

The two sound bites from the Prime Minister on TV last

night were (this is as close to verbatim as I can manage,

but from memory):

 

   "1.  These fires are the worst I have seen.

 

    "2.  It's as though Canberra is being ATTACKED from

the TERROR of the bushfire.

 

   "He's desperately trying to create emotional links

between this and a desperate need to fight back against

the nasty weather.  With guns.  In, presumably, Iraq."  

(((War is the health of the state, unless the capital is

on fire, in which case Khaki Green emergency relief is the

health of the state.)))

 

-------------------------

Dr. Joseph Hope

joseph.hope*anu.edu.au

Dept. of Physics, Faculty of Science,

Australian National University,

Canberra, ACT 0200, AUSTRALIA

 

*************************************

From: Scott McPhee <scot*autonomous.org>

Date: Sun Jan 19, 2003  10:15:31 PM US/Central

To: Bruce Sterling <bruces*well.com>

Subject: Re: Viridian Note 00358:  Canberra in Flames

 

Bruce,

 

  "I must take issue with your wholesale description of

this as a 'Greenhouse event'.

 

   (((Quite a few Australian Viridians took surprising

issue with this description.  Not one person from

any other country did, though.  And no Australians

protested about any Greenhouse unlikeliness when I

cataloged giant monsoons in Houston and ferocious tempests

in Paris. Everybody worldwide knows that the  Greenhouse

Effect is hurting *other people.*  You know, *them.*)))

 

   "Regardless of Prime Minister Howard's culpability in

failing to approve even the fig-leaf of Kyoto treaty, the

fires are *not caused* by Greenhouse. They are perfectly

natural events that are turned into human tragedy because

of where we place our cities."

 

   (((Look, cities are supposed to be placed where the

vegetation grows.  Those are the places on Earth where

humans can  survive. It won't be very practical to place

new  Australian cities on those climate-dead Great Barrier

coral reefs  where the flames can't reach them.)))

 

   "The Australian bush has had fires ever since human

settlement tens of thousands of years ago, at least. Many

native plant species cannot reproduce without fire.

Eucalyptus burns especially well; it has evolved

to do that.  The same thing applies to the El Nino drought

that we are having. Evidence suggests this has been going

on for thousands of years.  (((Yes indeed it has.  But

it's getting worse. More trees burn much faster and

hotter.)))

 

   "Recent human agricultural activity (NB pine forests

are not natural in Australia, *plantation* is a more

accurate term) has exacerbated the drought, but did not

*cause* the drought. The drought is a natural cycle.  

(((No it isn't. It is a formerly natural  cycle being

driven to killer extremes.)))

 

    "Far closer to home than the Greenhouse effect, are

the inappropriate farming and land management techniques

which are only now changing, and slowly at that.

(((There is nothing "closer to home" than the Greenhouse

effect.  Everyone and everything on the planet is

breathing it, everywhere, all the time.)))

 

   "While these techniques certainly contribute to

Greenhouse, they *directly* cause the severe land

salination and environmental degradation that comes with

the drought. Next year there will be massive floods. No

change from 1000 years ago; except that by clearing

forest, the floods are worse than they would be.  

 

(((Australians want to reform their local land practices.

They are used to that, because it's practical, patriotic

and politically feasible.  When it comes to stopping the

global Greenhouse though, Australians aren't helping much,

least of all helping themselves.  Australia's national

government is worse than useless here.)))

 

   "The same with the fires. Much more prescient to look

at Australians' love of building big, sprawling suburban

cities which extend right into the bush."

 

   (((Well, as I remarked in the inaugural Viridian

speech back in 1998, the longer it takes you to catch on

to this, the more prescient I get.)))

 

  "Then we go and re-plant as much of the bush as

possible into our suburbs. While Canberra was *designed*

that way, most of our other cities have been extensively

'greened' over the past three decades and have ended up

that way by default.

 

    (((So what's the practical alternative to "greened"

cities?  Browner and blacker cities?  Those are on the

way, presumably.)))

 

   "On the fringes of the city, you'll find many houses

with backyard fences right up against national park or

nature reserves. Put into context with the natural

cyclical drought, a forest environment that has evolved to

be dependant on fire, the removal indigenous 'firestick

farming' practices which kept fires numerous and small

instead of infrequent and huge, and you get the picture of

Australian summer bushfires which occur, to some extent,

every year.

 

  "In terms of stupid human behaviour, I'd like to know

why in Sydney we still get building approvals on ridge-

tops in steep hilly forested areas with eucalyptus forest

in the valley below. A few years later the places get

burnt and people want to blame the National Parks service,

instead of the town planners, or themselves.

"Regards

scot mcphee.

 

(((These are penetrating remarks and of obvious relevance

to the fire crisis, but they are local solutions to local

problems with global origins.  "Fail to think globally,

have to act locally.")))

 

******************************************

From: Peter Miller (peter*perpetualocean.com)

 

  "Australia is having  a major weather freakout at the

moment. One of the worst droughts in recorded history,

duststorms that rage from the west over into Sydney on the

east coast (all the topsoil from farms that have practised

decades of poor land management and have no natural

vegetation to hold the soil together any more) and yes,

bushfires. The only reason that you're not reading about

bushfires around Sydney (Australia's other national

capital) is that it all got burnt out last September.

 

   "Here's a flavour of how the Man on the Land sees the

drought:

 

http://www.abc.net.au/7.30/s607759.htm

(read it with appropriate Australian drawl where

indicated)

 

  "Never mind the fact that this country was never

suitable for grazing cattle. And the biggest concern? How

much it will effect the economy...

 

   "(Aside: as a result of the drought, insect numbers

are way down. This is held to be a Good Thing by farmers

and politicians but for some reason the words 'Food Chain'

keep popping into my head).

 

    "Australia 'iffy about Kyoto,' you say? Sorry chaps,

we're right up there with you Americans. This from

Australia, the country that puts out more CO2 per capita

than any nation on the planet (I'm afraid you can't be

tops at everything):

 

Link:

http://www.tai.org.au/WhatsNew_Files/WhatsNew/Percapita.htm

 

   "Meanwhile, the banks are putting a positive spin on

the Canberra situation, this from the Sydney Morning

Herald this morning:

 

    "The Canberra bushfires would have a positive effect

on the local ACT economy as homes are rebuilt and

household goods replaced, according to ANZ chief economist

Saul Eslake."

 

Link:

http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/01/20/1042911313274.html

 

   "You gotta love the caring sharing attitudes of the

financial sector.

 

(((Absolutely.  That's a great New Terror Economy pitch.  

Perhaps a massive San Francisco earthquake would redress

the problems in California's drooping information

sector.)))

 

  "The enormity of damage around Canberra depends on your

frame of reference. Sure it burnt more houses down, but

it's peanuts compared to the amount of bushland that's

been destroyed == the September NSW fires torched 1.9

million hectares of the (new) World Heritage Listed Blue

Mountains, but only 109 houses got crisped  there.

Liberated carbon? Make mine a double!

 

   "The firefighters, of course, are 'responsible' for

whatever happens. Otherwise, who can you blame if your

house burns down?  And their response is to concrete-over

the whole  flammable area.  The fire department guys spend

all this time making fire breaks... But in last year's

Sydney fires, the firestorms were jumping a kilometer and

a half over the Hawkesbury River.

 

    "Note that the flaming 'pine plantations' mentioned

in reports are radiata pine.  It's displacing all the

eucalyptus forest all over Australia because it grows

fast, grows anywhere, and logging companies can claim it

as reforesting, while manufacturers can claim it as carbon

remediation credits.  (((Greenhouse remediation forest

catches fire.  Really nice Wexelblat angle here.)))

 

   "More trees = more fires. Chop down the trees! That's

the policy they have up in Queensland, where land clearing

proceeds apace thanks to the excellent tax incentives and

sky-rocketing real estate developments.

 

    "We might be a tiny country, but you can't say we're

not pulling our weight when it comes to booting the planet

down the dusty lane to oblivion."

 

Signing out from Downunder

Peter

 

*****************************************************

 

From: "Michael Jennings" <mjj12*mjj12.freeserve.co.uk>

Date: Mon Jan 20, 2003  07:05:05 AM US/Central

To: "Bruce Sterling" <bruces*well.com>

Subject: Mt Stromlo Observatory photos (was Re: Viridian

Note 00358:  Canberra in Flames)

 

   "Mt Stromlo observatory was largely a training and

historical site at this point. The lights of Canberra have

in recent decades become too bright for much useful

astronomy to occur there. Most of Australia's actively

important astronomical telescopes are at Siding Spring,

near the town of Coonabarabran about 600km North.

 

    "Of course, that observatory is on the top of a hill

in the middle of the forest also."

 

*************************************************

 

From: R Michael Harman <rmharman*auros.org>

Date: Sun Jan 19, 2003  11:33:33 PM US/Central

To: Bruce Sterling <bruces@well.com>

Subject: Mt Stromlo Observatory

 

  "The Observatory's website is down. Presumably their

web-server has become a hunk of melted plastic, metal, and

semiconductors.  Now, just think of the great infospace

Wexelblat disasters that could happen if a major node

along a backbone were consumed by fires."

 

Cheerfully,

Auros, who had a bunch of stars and chevrons before the

Viridian ranking system went away.  Sigh.

 

R Michael Harman / Auros Symtheos

rmharman*auros.org ............ http://www.auros.org/

 

Linguist and Software Engineer, Lexicus, Motorola

rmharman@motorola.com .........

http://www.lexicus.mot.com/

 

New Media Reviews Editor, Strange Horizons Speculative

Fiction Weekly

reviews@strangehorizons.com ...

http://www.strangehorizons.com/

 

**********************************************

 

(((We concluded this extensive report with some extremely

painful speculations from an interested climate expert.)))

 

From: "Patrick Mazza" <patrick*climatesolutions.org>

 

Link:

http://www.climatesolutions.org/

 

   "As you indicate, this looks to be Australia's future.

Proximate reason is that the Pacific will increasingly be

in El Nino conditions, which brings drought to Australia.  

The fact Australia has been in the worst drought of a

century during what is regarded as a moderate El Nino is

one more piece of evidence that the global impacts of El

Nino are being magnified by the effects of global warming.  

 

   "The floods earlier this year in Europe, the drastic

swings from unusually dry to monsoon rains in California,

are other pieces of this picture.  The drum I think we all

need to be banging loudly == Earth systems are inclined to

disproportionate responses to small changes in

temperature.  So all this after just 1 deg. F rise...

 

   "What does 2-3-5-10 degrees do?  Global catastrophe

from extreme climate change piling on top of a world of 10

billion people living on depleted resources and frayed

natural systems, and all the wars and ugliness of which we

humans are capable when we're hungry.

 

    "On top of my regular Climate Solutions work, I've

been funded by MacArthur Foundation to do a critical

analysis of the hydrogen economy, to sort out the hype

from the reality.  Might turn into a book."

 

O=c=O O=c=O O=c=O O=c=O O=c=O

WELL, AT LEAST THE FIRE'S OUT

O=c=O O=c=O O=c=O O=c=O O=c=O

I got my acceptance letter from The London Institute on Friday. I am starting a 2 year part time MA in Media Management next week.

 

Like I had enough on my plate already!

 

That will teach me to go round the neighbors on Christmas eve for a drink or two - The course director lives in our road and thought I was eminently suitable for the course. The good news is that work is paying for it!

Key concepts:  massive wildfires, climate change, capital

of Australia, Khaki Green, Kyoto Treaty, John Howard

 

Attention Conservation Notice:  You'd think it

would be a big "national security issue" if your capital

city was on fire, but, oddly, nobody seems to spin it

that way.

 

Links:

 

A whole lot of people are hitting this furniture page.  

It's outdoing the Viridian Contests, even.

http://viridiandesign.org/products/furniture.htm

 

I love this Sparenberg gizmo. Got one in the office.

A perennial Viridian darling.

http://www.sparenberg.nl/little-vibes.htm

 

Had to have this one, too.

http://www.sparenberg.nl/vase.htm

 

Why don't I own this?  Somebody find me

a commercially available one.

http://www.sparenberg.nl/inner_vibes.htm

 

What the heck is this thing?  How does it work?

http://www.sparenberg.nl/crystal_vibes.htm

 

For a gizmo this size, the entertainment value

is staggering.  Drives the household cats nuts

with its rushing fragments of rainbows.

http://www.plumasmansion.com/rainbow_makers.htm

 

 

(((Well, war and rumors of war dominate the headlines,

while the business pages wilt under staggering debts and

deficits.  Meanwhile, a Greenhouse event is roasting the

capital of Australia, a nation that mines a lot of coal

and was kind of iffy about Kyoto.   This is a wondrously

unpleasant topic, but from a Viridian perspective,

Canberra on fire is the most significant thing going on

right now.  How many other capitals will burn from

unnatural events (as we try to make up our minds to bomb

one)?  Just look at the untoward events here.  Try to

imagine explaining this freakiness to someone in 1975.)))

 

Source:

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/australasia/story.jsp?story=370969

 

"Canberra in panic as four die in 'worst bushfires ever'

 

By Kathy Marks in Melbourne

 

"20 January 2003

 

 

    "Thick smoke blanketed the Australian capital,

Canberra, yesterday and a layer of ash coated the white

Parliament building after forest fires raced into the

city, killing four people and destroying 400 homes.  

(((Alternate headline: "Brutal Evidence of Greenhouse

Effect Literally Coats Parliament Building.")))

 

    "Emergency services remained on high alert as

authorities warned that hot, windy weather forecast for

today could whip up flames that are still burning in

bushland around the city. More than 1,000 people remained

in evacuation centres, while others were allowed to return

to the wreckage of their suburban homes.

 

   "The firestorms that hit Canberra on Saturday, laying

waste to suburban streets and overwhelming firefighters,

were the capital's worst. 'This is certainly the most

devastating bushfire experience that any community in

Australia has ever suffered,' said John Stanhope, Chief

Minister of the Australian Capital Territory.

 

   "Mr Stanhope defended emergency services against

criticism that they were unprepared for the scale of the

disaster, ((As if Australian firemen invented climate

change.  Try defending ExxonMobil)))   with hundreds of

householders left to fight the flames alone with buckets

and garden hoses.  ((("Failed to Think Globally, Have to

Act Locally'.  "At least I can afford this handy garden

hose after getting those carbon taxes off my back.")))

 

  'It was a one-in-100 or 200 years' experience, an event

of such enormity, of such force and such devastating power

that it simply ran over the top of us,' he said.  ((('One

in a hundred.' Why do they keep saying that?  Go talk to

some weather insurance people.)))

 

Link:

http://www.enn.com/news/enn-stories/2002/08/08272002/s_47833.asp

 

    "The bushfires that swept into the suburbs,  (((The

"Bush" Fires.  It's almost too easy)))   driven by hot,

strong winds and fuelled by tinder-dry pine forests and

grasslands, had been burning in mountains west of the

capital for weeks. Most were started by lightning strikes.

 

    "Don Horan, a resident of the worst-affected

neighbourhood, Duffy, saw the wall of fire approaching.

'It knocked me off my feet,' he said. 'I ran inside. When

the fireball had passed, the sky rained burning embers.

 

    "'It was horrendous. The whole area just blew up.

Then the fire got underneath my house and I knew I had to

get out. I just grabbed the two cats and ran for it.' The

victims, including a 61-year-old man and an 83-year-old

woman, died of smoke inhalation in Duffy.

 

    "A total of 260 Canberra residents were injured and

50 remained in hospital yesterday including three who were

in a critical condition with severe burns. As well as

politicians and diplomats, Canberra is home to 350,000

ordinary Australians, many of them attracted by the

beautiful bushland that rings the city. One of the worst

droughts in a century has turned the vegetation == which

is fire-prone at the best of times == into a tinder-box.

 

     "John Howard, the Prime Minister, cut short his

annual holiday to tour fire-ravaged areas and comfort

residents. 'I have been to a lot of bushfire scenes in

Australia, but this is by far the worst,' he said. 'A man,

a veteran of World War Two, showed me his charred medals.

One lady, clearly traumatised, said that she had lost

everything.'

 

Link:

John Howard refuses Kyoto Treaty;  'it will hurt the

country'

http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/16298/story.htm

 

    "Power and communications were severely affected by

the fires, with an estimated one-quarter of homes without

electricity yesterday and raw sewage threatening to spill

into a river system that supplies water for a large area

of south-eastern Australia.  (((Nice 'Wexelblat Disaster'

angles here.)))

 

    "Authorities warned of an extreme danger of fire over

the next two days.

 

   "'You've got just about every tree, the whole root

system, still smoking,' said Mike Castle, director of

emergency services. There are fears that nine fires could

merge to form an unstoppable wall of flames.  (((My, that

would be very remarkable.)))

 

    "As firefighters strengthened defences around the

capital,  (((note Khaki Green paramilitary rhetoric

here))) residents of Duffy sifted the charred remains of

their homes. Melted garden hoses lay strewn like snakes

across blackened lawns and the streets were full of

wildlife including birds, kangaroos and dogs, some dead,

some alive.

 

     "Ross White, a psychologist in Duffy, who lost his

house and all his client files to the flames, said: 'All I

have is the clothes I'm wearing and a garden gnome.'  

(((With a wit like that, Dr White won't lack for

clients.)))

 

Source:

http://www.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,4057,5859333%255E2,00.html

 

"Fires: four dead, 400 homes burned

By James Grubel and Sandra O'Malley

January 20, 2003

 

HOMES DESTROYED (368):

* Kambah - 39

* Rivett - 6

* Cotter area - 14

* Chapman - 75

* Duffy - 185

* Holder - 33

* Lyons - 3

* Curtin - 3

* Weston - 10

 

DEVELOPMENTS

* Death toll rises to four

* Authorities say all fires under control by 4pm

* $20 million damage at Mt Stromlo observatory

* Parts of RSPCA animal shelter destroyed, three kittens

and native birds killed

* $10,000 emergency funding for families who lost

uninsured homes

* Prime Minister, Governor-General and Opposition leader

visit worst hit areas

* Federal Government promises financial help

* A fire protection line established to protect Canberra's

northern suburbs

* Fears of a sewage spill into the Murrumbidgee River

* Some parts of Canberra without power for the next week

* Most of Canberra's pine plantations, which support the

city's softwoods industry, destroyed

* Hotter weather, with stronger winds, expected for coming

days

* ACT Chief Minister Jon Stanhope warns Canberrans to

prepare for continuing fire danger for the next seven days

* Batteries and bottled water in some southern suburbs

sold out

* Man arrested for looting

* About 240 people treated for injuries at Canberra and

Calvary hospitals. 60 people admitted to Canberra hospital

* Three people transferred to Sydney with serious burns

 

 

(...)

 

   "Authorities admitted they were helpless to prevent

the firestorm which engulfed parts of the city's western

and southern suburbs, overwhelming the national capital's

meagre firefighting resources.  ((("Authorities admitted

they were idiots to knuckle under to fossil fuel

companies, promised immediate climate policy changes for

survival of the national capital."  No, no, they'd much

rather be helpless, actually.  Enjoy breathing that smoke,

lawmakers.)))

 

 

(...)

 

   "Cooler and calm weather gave firefighters some

respite today and enabled authorities to declare all fires

under control by 4pm.  But the state of emergency

remained, with higher temperatures over the coming two

days threatening a repeat of Saturday's disaster.  (((What

if most of the firefighters had died inside some

skyscraper?)))

 

   "Among the casualties was the historic Mt Stromlo

astronomical observatory, where fire largely destroyed the

79-year-old facility, causing an estimated $20 million

damage.  (((The burning observatory.  What a Ballardian

image.)))

 

(...)

 

     "Prime Minister John Howard cut short his holidays

for a briefing on the disaster and to visit those who lost

their homes.  (((Does this Prime Minister have any idea

what is really happening to himself and his people, do you

suppose?  And its direct relevance to his own behavior?  

"Gosh, climate change has ruined my vacation, as well as

threatening to consume my capital wholesale.  Could this

problem get really serious?  No, no, too farfetched!")))

 

    "He held talks with Mr Stanhope and promised federal

disaster relief funds would be made available.  (((There

are infinite supplies of disaster relief funds; they come

right out of the deficits.  Taxing coal, on the other

hand, man, that could hurt the economy.)))

 

    "'I have been to a lot of bushfire scenes in

Australia... and this was by far the worst,' Mr Howard

told reporters.

 

      "The ACT government has pledged $10,000 assistance

for people who lost uninsured homes.  ((("The world is

becoming uninsurable."  Good luck insuring the house if

you dare to rebuild, mate.)))

 

   "As people returned to their burned homes today, many

expressed anger at the lack of support from ACT fire

crews, who were overwhelmed by the blaze as it raced into

suburban areas.  (((Maybe someday they'll point a finger

at the actual malefactors:  the fossil fuel industries.  

"No firefighter blood for oil.")))

 

 

(...)

 

    "But Mr Stanhope told reporters emergency services

did all they could but had no way of stopping the

disaster.   'We were faced yesterday with an event that

would happen perhaps once every 100 or 200 years, the like

of which has never been seen in Canberra,' he said.  

(((That's right, Mr Chief Minister.  It's never been seen

before now.  And that's no coincidence, either. You can

expect to see a lot more of it.)))

 

    "Mr Stanhope said the ACT urban fire service had only

12 tankers at its disposal, which would normally be enough

to fight six house fires simultaneously.  But they would

have needed up to 800 fully staffed fire trucks to have

saved all the houses.  (((Interesting math here.  

Presumably, sometime around the 2060s when weather damage

costs outpace the global GNP, everybody on Earth becomes a

fireman.)))

 

    "'It was a holocaust of an extent that we simply did

not and could not possibly have had the capacity to deal

with,' Mr Stanhope said.   (((That makes a nice epitaph.  

A little wordy, maybe.  The Mayans could have chiselled

that into a nice tall plinth just before their

civilization collapsed.)))

 

     "'They did everything humanly possible; they risked

their lives, they went out of their way, they put their

lives on the line in an attempt to save lives and save

property and I defend them, I defend them absolutely.'  

(((How many firemen know that they're fighting the

Greenhouse here?  Australia is rather known for its Green

contingent; there must be at least a few firemen who are

aware that the nature of their job is changing just as the

climate does, and that they are being flung into a

meatgrinder that their grandfathers never faced.)))

 

 

Source:

 

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2003/01/item20030119054139_1.htm

 

Mon, Jan 20 2003 6:05 AM AEDT

 

"Canberra counts the cost"

 

 

(...)

 

    "Acting chief health officer Dr Charles Guest says

Canberra's hospitals have been inundated with more than

600 people seeking treatment in last 48 hours.

 

   "'A lot of the people presenting have minor emergency

problems and then there have been the major issues the

burns that have gone Sydney,' Dr Guest said.  'We're

seeing people with smoke inhalation, there's been lots of

minor burns, fractures.' (...)

 

"Landmarks lost

 

   "The list of Canberra landmarks lost in the fires

includes almost the entire ACT softwood plantations, the

Uriara and Mount Stromlo forestry settlements, and all

Canberra's public health laboratories.   (((Public health

labs on fire.   Good moment for a biological warfare

attack.  Or, what the heck, just get two guys from Al

Qaeda and start dropping matches in the woods.  They could

destroy the capital of Australia.  Really, they could.

Just calling in an Islamic phone claim with terrorist

arson threats would be enough to drive people wild.)))

 

    "Australia's oldest active observatory Mt Stomlo, has

been extensively damaged in the fires.  Helicopter

observations have revealed its handful of giant domes are

either burnt to the framework or molten masses of metal.  

Its offices and research facilities are also severely

burnt.   (((Somebody find me the photo online.  A molten

observatory.  Man oh man, what a 21st-century

signifier.)))

 

   "Mr Jon Stanhope says the damage bill is expected to

run into the hundreds of millions of dollars.  (((Charge

it to the former Global Climate Coalition.)))  He says

families who have lost their homes will receive $10,000 in

immediate assistance.  (((While their insurance and taxes

consequently skyrocket.)))

 

   "Governor-General Peter Hollingworth has issued a plea

for people not to lay blame for the devastation.  'We must

not go on with recrimination,' he said.  'The fact of the

matter is Australia is a high incendiary place.'  (((That

is not the whole fact of the matter, Mr Governor-General.  

The fact of the matter is that Australia is a coal-

exporting, coal-using country that has taken an

unconscionable risk with the biosphere, and now, with

almost Biblical accuracy, your political center is reaping

an almighty flaming whirlwind.  You *must* go on with

recriminations, because your own policies make your own

nation pathetically vulnerable to climate extremes.)))

 

  "Meanwhile, Western Australia's acting Health Minister

Sheila McHale has offered Canberra the services of medical

staff from Royal Perth Hospital, who treated victims of

the Bali tragedy.  (((Don't even get me started on the

nexus of ironies here.)))

 

(...)

 

"Power cuts

 

    "About 15,000 Canberra residents remain without power

after Saturday's devastating fires in the ACT, where

blackouts continue to affect more than 30 suburbs.    As

the fires raged on Saturday there were reports of power

poles exploding.  (((Fossil fueled power poles, no

doubt.)))

 

  "New South Wales

 

   "Weather conditions are likely to worsen today in the

Kosciusko National Park and 12 tankers are on standby to

cater for the grim forecast.  Firefighters were able to

resume waterbombing on the large blaze due to calmer

weather conditions yesterday.  ((("Khaki Green" is the

Viridian term for militarization under Greenhouse

conditions.  "Waterbombing" is a great Khaki Green

coinage.)))

 

O=c=O O=c=O O=c=O O=c=O O=c=O O=c=O O=c=O

NOW IMAGINE THE SAME THING HAPPENING

IN ANY POOR NATION THAT LACKS FIREMEN

O=c=O O=c=O O=c=O O=c=O O=c=O O=c=O O=c=O

Unless the yacht is in dry dock/on land in a cradle a few 20mm shells through it will fundamentally destroy the hull integrity and it will sink. Yachts are made light to go fast but not through a hail of lead!

 

As for the aluminium it may be stronger to glue it.

Key concepts:  futurism, nonfiction books,

publicity tours, Viridian Pope-Emperor

 

Attention Conservation Notice:  The obligatory

labor of stoking the starmaker machinery.

 

My new nonfiction book "TOMORROW NOW: Envisioning

the Next Fifty Years" has just come out.  It doesn't

have one single mention of the word "Viridian" in it,

but boy is it Viridian.

http://www.well.com/conf/mirrorshades/

 

I'm taking on all comers at the Well's "inkwell"

conference online.

http://www.well.com/

 

William Gibson's got a weblog now.

http://www.WilliamGibsonBooks.com/index.asp

 

Cory Doctorow has published his first science fiction

novel, and he is giving away copies online literally by

the tens of thousands.

http://www.boingboing.net/

 

******************************************************

 

I'm on a brief West Coast tour to support my new book.

If geography allows, come by and press the Papal flesh.

 

Seattle

Tuesday, January 14, 02002

 

3:45 pm

Third Place Books

17171 Bothell Way NE

Lake Forest Park, WA 98155

 

 

7:00 pm  

Reading, Talk, & Signing

University Bookstore

4326 University Way NW

Seattle, WA 98105

 

San Francisco

Wednesday, January 15, 02002

 

12:30 pm  

Reading, Talk, & Signing

Stacey's Books

581 Market Street

San Francisco, CA 94105

 

7:30 pm

Reading, Talk, & Signing

Cody's Books

2454 Telegraph Avenue

Berkeley, CA 94704

 

O=c=O O=c=O O=c=O O=c=O O=c=O O=c=O

"GEE, I REALLY LIKE YOUR BOOKS,

ESPECIALLY THE EARLY, FUNNY ONES"

O=c=O O=c=O O=c=O O=c=O O=c=O O=c=O

Key concepts:  geopolitical perspectives, 2002 AD.,

Global Business Network, Gwynne Dyer

 

Attention Conservation Notice:  It's a political

assessment of the past year in global affairs.  Over 2,500

words. Might be considered somewhat contrarian as it is

Canadian and fails to chew over the usual sets of

shibboleths.

 

Links:

 

Gwynne Dyer.

http://www.dfait-maeci.gc.ca/skelton/dyer_bio-en.asp

 

Now that I'm a WIRED contributing editor, why, I feel

driven to read important stuff like Dr. Dyer's musings.

Not that I wasn't doing that anyway.

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.01/view.html?pg=4

 

The entirely unnecessary but woefully unavoidable

"Iraqi Oil Worm"  and "Prestige Worm."

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/55/28624.html

http://www.net-security.org/virus_news.php?id=142

 

Hey wow, a refreshing industrial design note:

Niels Diffrient and Ross Lovegrove

cutting a cardboard rug at Nike.

http://newsletter.dwr.com/images/newsletter/nike.html

 

 

 

GBN Global Perspectives

by Gwynne Dyer

 

"2002: Year-End Review

 

    "The past year has been dominated by a US obsession

with Iraq which, remarkably, only seized the Bush

administration three long months after the terrorist

attacks on the United States in September, 2001.  

 

   "In my year-end survey twelve months ago, just after

the US occupation of Afghanistan, I simply wrote that

Middle Eastern Muslims were waiting to learn 'which of

their countries the United States would hit next:  Iraq,

Somalia or Sudan.' Washington was clearly looking for a

fresh target, but nobody had a clue which way it was going

to jump.

 

   "In that sense, the most important event of 2002 was

President George W. Bush's speech in late January in which

he announced that he had uncovered an 'axis of evil', and

gave Iraq first place.  The subsequent months have been

filled with endless speculation about when and how the US

would attack Iraq, whether it would go to the United

Nations first (it did, in September), and whether it would

give the UN arms inspectors time to do their job (which

remains to be seen) == but it all distracted the US

public's attention through a year of recession and

corporate scandals, and gave control of the Senate back to

the Republican Party in the November

Congressional elections.

 

   "Whatever the original motives for the choice of Iraq,

the project now has an almost unstoppable momentum within

the introverted world of Washington politics, and the Bush

administration almost certainly will attack Iraq, probably

in the next few months.  But the weird thing about 2002 is

that the international news has been virtually monopolised

by a non-event.  There has been no fighting in the Middle

East apart from the familiar cycle of violence between

Israelis and Palestinians, and no regimes have toppled.  

Indeed, nothing tangible has yet changed in the region,

apart from a gradual increase in the usual pace of US and

British bombing in Iraq's 'no-fly zones'.

 

    "The terrorists haven't been very busy either, or at

least not the ones who are the primary concern of the US

'war on terror'.  As usual, terrorists killed thousands of

people in places like Colombia and Nepal, in guerilla wars

that barely make it into the mainstream media.  Many

hundreds died in terrorist attacks in Israel and Russia,

countries fighting wars against Muslim subject peoples

that have managed to hitch their local struggles to

Washington's global crusade.  But barely two hundred

Westerners were killed by terrorists in 2002, most of them

in one attack in Bali  == and hardly any of them were

Americans.  Things may change dramatically once the US

attack on Iraq gets underway, but in 2002 the allegedly

'titanic struggle between good and evil' (in Mr Bush's

words) has been a phony war for both sides.

 

   "Almost unnoticed amidst all the media hype about

coming events, there was dramatic progress in closing down

the real wars that have been ravaging whole regions and

killing huge numbers of people.  First came the 27-year-

old Angolan civil war, which suddenly ended in April after

the rebel leader Jonas Savimbi was caught in an ambush and

killed.  Next, in July, there was a breakthrough in peace

negotiations in Africa's oldest war, between the Arabised

Muslim northerners and southern, mostly Christian Africans

of Sudan.

 

   "There is not yet a definitive ceasefire in Sudan, but

a war that has killed two million people over 33 years

finally seems to be subsiding. Then, still in July, a

peace agreement in the Democratic Republic of Congo

(formerly Zaire) ended what has been called 'Africa's

First World War'.  Most of the six foreign armies have

already gone home, and the fighting that caused over two

million Congolese deaths in four years has subsided to

sporadic outbreaks of banditry.

 

   "The miracles then moved east, to the two longest-

running wars in Asia. In September the Liberation Tigers

of Tamil Eelam dropped their demand for a separate state

for Sri Lanka's Tamil minority, opening the way for

negotiations to end the 19-year war that has devastated

the island nation. In December, Indonesia signed a peace

deal with the separatist rebels of Aceh in northern

Sumatra, ending a 26-year war by granting the provincial

governments of the region a 70 percent share in Aceh's oil

and gas revenues.  Also in December, the Tutsi-dominated

government of Burundi signed a power-sharing agreement

with the largest of the Hutu opposition groups which

offers gives the Central African country its best chance

for peace since 1963.

 

   "There was bad news, too: a new civil war broke out in

once-stable Ivory Coast in September, and the Maoist

insurgency in Nepal, gaining strength by the month,

threatens to produce a new Year Zero in that impoverished

and misgoverned country.  But from fifteen wars only five

years ago, Africa is now down to only three or four

(depending on whether Sudan is really over), and Asia is

down to just three (in Nepal, Kashmir and the southern

Philippines).  Even allowing for one civil war in the Arab

world (Algeria) and one in Latin America (Colombia), the

world is a more peaceful place this month than it has been

at any time since September, 1939.

 

     "More peaceful, but far from out of the woods.  The

most terrifying confrontation of the past year was the

summer stand-off between India and Pakistan, two newly

fledged nuclear powers that have fought each other three

times already.  If they were to do so again, using their

new weapons, the death toll would exceed the total losses

in all the other wars of the past ten years in a matter of

days.  New Delhi and Islamabad have stepped back from the

crisis for the moment, but huge armies still face each

other across the border and the Kashmir dispute is a

permanent irritant.

 

    "Similar anxieties haunted the Korean peninsula,

where North Korea's desperately poor and isolated

Communist regime began talking up its nuclear weapons

programme, probably in the hope of shaking some extra aid

loose. Paradoxically, that may have helped Roh Moo-hyun to

win the December presidential election in South Korea on a

platform of reconciliation with the North, which will make

for difficult relations between Seoul and Washington.  But

in the main, Asia just got on about its business.

 

   "After almost a year's hesitation, China's 76-year-old

ruler,  Jiang Zemin, decided to hand the presidency on to

his designated successor Hu Jintao at the Party Congress

in November, but behind the scenes he remains very much in

control.  Earlier in the year, Malaysia's Prime Minister

Mahathir Mohamad, also 76, told his party congress that

he, too, would be retiring soon (after more than 20 years

in power).  The main difference was that Dr. Mahathir may

actually mean it.  And the release from house arrest in

May of Burma's democratic icon, Aung Sang Suu Kyi,

suggested that the military regime that has devoted the

past forty years to plundering the country may finally be

ready to make a deal.

 

   "The principal theme in Europe this year was expansion

== of NATO, to take in most of the former Warsaw Pact

countries that escaped from Soviet control in 1989, but

above all of the European Union.  After months of cliff-

hanging negotiations and a second referendum in Ireland

(the Irish had given the wrong answer the first time), the

15 EU countries showed up at the Copenhagen summit in

December and promised to take in ten new members in 2004

== Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, the Czech Republic,

Slovakia, Hungary, Slovenia, Malta and Cyprus == followed

by Romania and Bulgaria in 2007.

 

   "More importantly, they gave Muslim Turkey a promise

to review its case for entry in late 2004, and to open

negotiations for Turkish membership soon afterwards if its

human rights performance continued to improve. Given that

Turkey's population will be bigger than any existing

member's by 2020, some EU countries were reluctant to make

this promise, but in the end the EU decided that it was

not just a Christian club   and the newly elected Islamic

government of Turkey, whose leaders call themselves

'Muslim Democrats', was given an incentive to keep its

promises about preserving a secular, democratic state.  As

a bonus, Ankara will push the Turkish-Cypriots to join

with the Greek-Cypriots in a reunited Cyprus before the

island enters the EU in 2004.

 

   "For the rest, it was the usual heavy traffic of

national elections in a continent of almost fifty

countries, including a bad case of tactical voting in

France that unexpectedly catapulted neo-fascist leader

Jean-Marie Le Pen into a run-off with President Jacques

Chirac in June.  (Chirac won by a margin of four-to-one.)  

In the Netherlands, right-wing maverick Pym Fortuyn was

assassinated only days before the May election, sweeping

his single-issue anti-immigrant party into the new

coalition government on a massive sympathy vote (but the

leaderless party was disintegrating by year's end).  

In.Germany, Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder narrowly won

another four-year term in September by promising Germans

not to take part in Mr Bush's planned war against Iraq.

 

   "The Basque terrorists started bombing again in Spain,

but the 'November 17' urban guerilla group was finally

broken in Greece after 23 murders in 27 years.  The dust

continued to settle in the Balkans, and former Serbian

dictator Slobodan Milosevic spent much of the year before

a war crimes tribunal in the Hague.  Most of the

continent's larger economies grew very slowly, but beyond

almost universal grumbling about the new currency, the

euro, Europe's discontents remained manageable.

 

   "In the Middle East, the steady US march towards war

with Iraq terrified most local governments.  The region

remained at peace except for the low-level Israeli-

Palestinian violence and the decade-old mutual

slaughter between Islamists and the military-backed regime

in Algeria, but not a single Arab regime was confident

that it could contain the potentially huge social and

political upheavals that might be unleashed by an American

invasion of Iraq.  Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, on

the other hand, thought it was a wonderful idea, and

warmly urged Washington along.

 

   "Africa, though it is gradually emerging from its

equivalent to Europe's Thirty Years' War, continued to

labour under almost every other handicap imaginable.  

Encroaching famines put the lives of millions at risk both

in southern Africa and far to the north in Ethiopia and

Eritrea.  Out of 30 million Africans living with HIV/Aids,

only thirty thousand have access to anti-retroviral drugs;

the rest are condemned to an early death. In South Africa,

one in nine deaths is due to murder.

 

   "Some of the 'big men' who blighted Africa's first

post-independence generation are fading away at last ==  

Kenya's Daniel arap Moi allowed power to pass peacefully

to the opposition in democratic elections in December ==

but others, like Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe, cling fiercely

to office even if it means the ruin of all their previous

achievements. (Unnoticed by most of the world, Namibia's

Sam Nujoma seemed to be setting out down the same path as

2002 unfolded.)  As Nigeria's President Olusegun Obasanjo

pointed out in June, corrupt African leaders have stolen

at least $140 billion from their peoples in the decades

since independence, and it's not over yet.  But at least

the wars are ending.

 

   "In Latin America there are no wars (apart from

Colombia) and the poverty most people experience is not so

absolute, but the sense of having been cheated is even

more acute.  Even where the neo-liberal promises of rapid

economic growth came true, they meant little improvement

in the lives of the poor or even the middle class; they

just made the rich even richer. So Argentina's economic

meltdown in December, 2001, led not only to a revolving-

door presidency (five presidents in two weeks) and popular

revulsion against the whole traditional political class.  

It was also the starting gun for a wave of political

upheavals that is sweeping South America.

 

   "The first crisis, an unsuccessful US-backed attempt

in April to overthrow the continent's one existing left-

wing leader, President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, was

notable for the speed with which the poorest section of

the population came to his defence despite his failure to

improve their economic plight.  That was followed by the

imposition of a state of emergency in Paraguay and

widespread looting and bank closures in Uruguay in July,

and an electoral upset in Bolivia in August that gave over

a third of the seats to candidates of Indian descent and

brought Evo Morales, leader of the Movement Towards

Socialism, to within a hair's breadth of the presidency.

 

   "Then in quick succession came the victory of Workers'

Party leader Luiz Inacio da Silva ('Lula) in the October

presidential elections in Brazil; populist Lucio

Gutierrez's capture of the presidency in Ecuador's

November elections, less than two year after he was jailed

for leading an attempted leftist coup; and a renewed

confrontation between Hugo Chavez and Venezuela's right-

wing white elite that halted oil exports from one of

America's largest suppliers in December. Almost half of

Latin America's people now live under populist left-wing

governments, and Argentina is likely to swell their ranks

after the March elections.  While the Bush administration

has been focussing obsessively on the Middle East, it has

lost control of its own back yard.

 

   "The United States remains the great conundrum of the

planet. Americans have been so traumatised by a single

large terrorist attack on their own soil that they have

effectively handed the country over to an administration

with a radical right-wing agenda for domestic change and

foreign expansion, though fewer than a quarter of them

actually voted for it.  The question is whether the

American people can recover their balance without having

to go through some painful and expensive, though

ultimately instructive experiences in the Middle East.  

The answer, at the moment, appears to be no, so a great

deal of the rest of the world's business is being put on

hold."

 

 

Gwynne Dyer, Ph.D., is a London-based independent

journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries.

For more on Gwynne Dyer, please read his GBN interview:

http://www.gbn.org/members/ideas/society/articles/pub_oneworld.htm

 

"The Global Perspectives series is intended to challenge

and provoke the thinking of GBN members. The opinions

expressed are not necessarily those of GBN or its members.

We welcome suggestions of other writers and columnists

whose ideas we might share."

 

 

* Have Colleagues, Will Subscribe *

 

"The Global Perspectives series is a proprietary service

for current GBN members. Please feel free to share these

columns with any co-workers who you think might be

interested.  If you have colleagues who are interested in

receiving Global Perspectives, or if you or any of your

colleagues need access to the GBN web site, please send an

e-mail to: access@gbn.com

 

"If you have any questions or comments about the Global

Perspectives series, please contact Nancy Murphy at

nmurphy@gbn.com"

 

O=c=O O=c=O O=c=O O=c=O O=c=O

SEE YOU AT THE

VIRIDIAN NEW YEARS PARTY

O=c=O O=c=O O=c=O O=c=O O=c=O

May I add my congratulations to your coming of age!

I wish everyone a very happy new year and hope all your dreams come true (apart from the one with the lobster and the twins).

Mine is, and you can keep me to this, to rebuild cyberpunk.co.uk including the Views from the Edge forums to make it an even better place to hang out.

You will get it don't worry.

So where have you been?  Not here.

I went through a rather large amount of troublesome relationships in my youth. The only advice I can give is that you will never forget those special people but its always a good idea to move on with your life and adventually you will find that perfect relationship. I did 11 years ago and its still like day one evey day. Lucky me - but it was worth the long wait. The bad times I had just added to my wisdom.

 

I have been in the same situation as Agamemnon - I was young it hurt me loads but I came through. You have to. There are other people waiting to meet you on your destiny road.

and in my bestest James Stuart Voice (If you havn't seen Capra's It's a Wonderfull life - what are you doing???)

 

Merry Christmas everyone Merry Christmas!!!

 

Key concepts: Oliver Morton, transpermia, origin of life,

Thomas Gold, deep hot biosphere, crude oil, subterranean bacteria,

ubiquitous microbes

 

Attention Conservation Notice:  Science journalist Oliver

Morton weighs in on the subject of strange new notions of

single-celled life.

 

Links:

Oliver Morton.

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/bios/morton.html

 

It hasn't escaped my attention that this subject

has some pulp science-fictional aspects.

http://www.ditko.comics.org/ditko/covers/marvel/jim058.htm

 

Those strange AMODA people are gonna be playing

their "music" here tonight.

http://www.amoda.org/

 

The electronic-art installation is still running here, too.

http://www.mine-control.com

 

 

(((As we were remarking earlier in the most recent

Viridian Note, 00354:)))

 

"Consider the following, and

the possible interconnections here.

 

"A:   Michael Russell's theory that single-celled life was

formed, not in open seawater, but in water-soaked iron

sulfide rocks in hydrothermal vents.  Mineral 'cell walls'

formed first, and then self-replicating chemistry formed

within these tiny stone pockets.  If this is true, then

most rocky planets might have formed chemosynthetic life

deep underground, wherever hot water oozes through

chemically active rock.

 

"B: NASA/Stanford suggests possible fossil Martian

microbes in Antarctic meteorites.

 

"C: Dirk Schulze-Makuch says there's an odd chemical

imbalance in atmosphere of Venus, which could be caused by

sulfur-metabolizing bacteria, living in damp, pleasant

temperatures in high Venusian clouds.

 

"D:  Oliver Morton's ideas that Earth's cloud formation

involves ocean bacteria nucleating ice crystals.   As

Morton puts it, 'Clouds might be plankton's way of moving

a great distance.'

 

"E:  New collision models for asteroids suggest that

chunks of rock might be flung from planet to planet, with

live bacteria intact.  Spores of 'Bacillus permians' have

been known to survive for 250 million years.

 

"F: Thomas Gold's deep hot biosphere theories.  Yes, they

are odd and his book makes a wide array of claims.  But

those claims don't all have to be factual, in order for

there to be a lot == a *whole* lot == of primeval living

biomass deep in the crust of the earth.  Tectonic drift is

a geological commonplace now, and that wasn't accepted

until the 1960s. How much of what we think we know is

wrong?"

 

**********************************************************

 

Oliver Morton remarks:

 

  You're right; it's an interesting constellation. Just

to be clear, (D), the original long distance plankton

transport idea isn't mine, but Tim Lenton' s and the late

Bill Hamilton's.  Refs are in the piece at:

 

Link:

http://hybridvigor.net/earth/pubs/index.html.

 

   I just did an article on ©,  the Venus stuff, for

Science ("Don't Ignore the Planet Next Door" November 29;

298:1706-1707).  The Venus clouds people and the earth

clouds people are beginning to talk to each other.

 

   ( is, in my view, looking shaky; but the general

idea of a refuge in the Martian depths (analogous to the

refuge in the Venusian clouds == the Mars bugs needed to

warm up when their surface froze and so dug down, while

the Venus bugs needed to cool off when their surface

boiled and so went up) is very much front and centre. (It

also predates the meteorite finding == more on this in my

book "Mapping Mars", in a chapter called "The

Underground".) At the moment, astrobiology is pretty much

entirely astromicrobiology.

 

    (E) is becoming increasingly mainstream, to the

extent that questions about the presence and origin of

life on the terrestrial planets are being decoupled.  Life

might have come about only once in this solar system == on

Mars, Venus, the Earth or even, conceivably, the Mars-

sized planet, sometimes called Orpheus or Thelia, that

smacked into the Earth to create the Moon == and still

have ended up on all of the others.

 

    Mars is arguably the best candidate for the origin of

life, because it may have been drier than the others. Hit

a wet planet with a big rock and you boil the entire

oceanic water complement, producing an atmosphere of live

steam that lasts for thousands of years, and thus sends a

sterilising heat pulse quite deep into the crust, which

makes life difficult. Such boiled-ocean events may have

frustrated early life on the Earth a number of times in

the first few hundred million years. They may also have

produced a selective advantage for bugs which can fly

through space == in some such events the only survivable

place to be would be on a rock heading outwards. Most such

bugs would end up back on the planet they were launched

from. Some wouldn't.

 

   Meteorite transfer makes the possibility of life on

other planets at some time in their history greater, which

is exciting if you want to find signs of life elsewhere,

but also makes the possibility of that life having come

about through a separate origin event from our own

smaller, which is frustrating if you want to understand

life in general. Swings and roundabouts. (I've been trying

to get people to refer to this one-to-one exchange of spit

between neighbours as "transpermia", to differentiate it

from broadcast one-to-many panspermia, but so far to

little avail.)

 

   On earthly cloud news, the University of East London

project to start doing RNA analysis of bugs in Earth

clouds looks likely to get underway next year.

 

    On the Gold stuff, a few points. One is that there

are two different propositions: a deep biosphere, and a

deep biosphere that produces hydrocarbons from primordial

methane. Many will buy into the first, pretty much only

Thomas Gold and his Russian colleagues into the second

(primordial methane requires that the mantle be chemically

reduced, whereas a lot of other evidence suggests that

it's largely oxidised). Critics point out that, for Gold,

the deep biosphere is essentially an epicycle added to

explain the clearly biogenic markers in oil; these were a

problem for the original version of the deep abiogenic

hydrocarbons theory.

 

    Another is that the biomass of a system is not

necessarily an indicator of its importance in the global

cycles.  Terrestrial biomass is hundreds of times that of

the oceans, but the oceans are pretty close to equal in

terms of such things as carbon sinkage. If there's a lot

of biomass underground, that doesn't mean it's doing much.

In nutrient-poor systems the doubling time for bacteria

can become incredibly slow == decades, maybe centuries,

maybe more. When biomass is taken as equivalent to the

"amount of life" there's a risk of mistaking the size of

the fireplace for the heat of the flame.

 

   Another is that your point that "Tectonic drift is a

geological commonplace now, and that wasn't accepted until

the 1960s"  has a certain irony, in that Gold doesn't

accept plate tectonics.

 

   Gold makes much of reports of some oil fields

apparently refilling themselves from beneath, but he has

to face the fact that in general US oil production has

followed pretty much exactly the curve that Hubbert

predicted it would without refilling. I find it hard to

believe that oil geologists (who, in my experience *really

want to find more oil* == it's built into their psyches

and their career incentives far more than a need to be

intellectually modish is) would want to or be able to

ignore this or hush it up. But then institutions do do

strange things to the way people think.

 

    I wish there was a better dialogue between Gold and

the geologists; there are strange things going on down

there, whether or not they produce the hydrocarbons. But I

fear there won't be. Gold really does seem to think

geologists are all dunces, and geological lore is full of

stories about physicists telling them what could or could

not be possible and then ending up wrong.  Lord Kelvin on

the age of the earth was wrong, most notably, but there

were also physical arguments against continental drift,

which many field geologists, expecially paleontologists,

were inclined to accept.  There's a very good book about

this by Naomi Oreskes called "The Rejection of Continental

Drift". This means geologists see interventions like

Gold's as arrogant and ignorant, and may be tempted to

dismiss them without sufficient thought.

 

    For more Gold, see an interview I did with him a few

years ago:

Link:

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.07/gold_pr.html

(Ignore silly subbing error as to his age == Professor

Gold is in his 80s, not 90s)

 

best and seasonals

 

o

==============================================

 

              Oliver Morton

 

           abq72*dial.pipex.com

 

----------------------------------------------

 

            Mapping Mars

 

Available through amazon.co.uk and amazon.com

 

  "The equivalent in scientific reportage

 of the Nigella Lawson approach to cookery"  

    -- The Sunday Times

 

(no, I don't know what that means, either...)

 

==============================================

 

O=c=O O=c=O O=c=O O=c=O O=c=O O=c=O O=c=O

SO, MICROBES EVOLVED TO HOP ON AND OFF

OF PLANETS BEING SMASHED. OKAY, I GUESS

O=c=O O=c=O O=c=O O=c=O O=c=O O=c=O O=c=O

Allegedly the UK gets the most tornados per year in the world. Obviously they are not as big as they are in the USA but all the same I was suprised by this fact.

We would like to wish all the regulars and indeed anyone who visits the site a very merry christmas and and happy and prosperous New Year.

 

We rather hope to be bringing you a new look site very shortly - despite some hardware problems we are suffering at the moment - fortunatly not on the web server - the new design is 75% complete and just needs coding and detailing plus, as promised this time last year   , the new forum software will be implemented.

Just got back from the film. Incredable. I know its not cyberpunk but I just don't care - it is amazing.  My guess is 4 oscars.

Key concepts: Thomas Gold, deep hot biosphere,

crude oil, subterranean bacteria, ubiquitous microbes

 

Attention Conservation Notice:  a note researched

and written by Michael Semer, a Viridian who took

the trouble to actually talk to Dr. Thomas Gold.

 

Links:

 

This Sunday night, December 22, it's AMODA

music night in the Viridian Vatican's front yard.

http://www.amoda.org/

 

And, whoopee, we've got an electronic-art installation

running live on the front porch!  Drop on by!

http://www.mine-control.com

 

Whoa, hey, some edgy political satire here.

http://users.chartertn.net/tonytemplin/FBI_eyes/

http://www.librarian.net/technicality.html

 

In the new, Jan 2003 issue of Metropolis, the Viridian

Pope-Emperor has a piece of fiction.  No, not

science fiction == *architecture fiction.* You should

subscribe.  Heaven knows I do.

http://www.metropolismag.com

 

That January 2003 issue of Metropolis is not just wimpy,

hippie, commune green == it is aggressive, big-budget,

metropolitan green.  I've never seen the like! There's a

swell house-of-the-future piece from an earlier issue

here.

http://www.metropolismag.com/html/content_1202/mit/index.html

 

I'd call Metropolis my favorite magazine right now, if I

hadn't just become WIRED magazine's monthly editorialist.

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/10.12/view.html?pg=4

 

 

Biosphere or Biomass?

 

by Michael Semer (msemer*i41worldwide.com)

 

  There's one question that bubbles up when I consider

Thomas Gold's theories on the "deep, hot biosphere."  What

about the old-hat fossil petroleum theory? 

 

  (Gold's theory: deep-crust bacteria are the real source

of oil and gas deposits, processing carbon and pumping out

petroleum whilst also laying down the veins of gold,

platinum and other minerals we happen across.  Not to

mention generating earthquakes, via production of

subterranean biological gases which build up and must...

be... released..!)

 

  After hundreds of millions of years' worth of accretion

of plants, animals, Dino, Fred and Wilma, wasn't enough

fossil biomass produced to pay for all those Saudi

Mercedes and Ken Lay's court costs?

 

  So I asked the good Doctor Gold himself.  His reply:

 

  "The answer is a clear NO.  There is even far too

little for all the ocean methane hydrates, which are said

to amount to as much as all the rest put together, and are

supposed to have derived from a few meters of ocean mud.  

It is a waste of time to debate the issue, as the

discrepancy is so large."

 

   And a few days later, Dr. Gold even included a P.S.:

 

   "Also just think of the amount of water that would

have been available on each cm2, compared to the amount of

oil that deposit could have generated. What would be the

ratio of oil to water that would eventually come from

those sediments?"

 

   I'm fond of Thomas Gold's theories for two reasons: 

 

   First, there's a sweet cosmic elegance about it all;

the native stuff of the universe getting transfigured by

bizarre deep bioforms we surface-crawlers can only guess

at; it's all there, interconnectedness, complexity, the

whole schmear.

 

   Second: The Prevailing Wisdom is so sold on fossil

biomass, it has hardened into cant.  Supposition == even

informed supposition == as axiom?   That practically

gooses me into weighing other notions. 

 

   I like Gold's theories == I also have no idea if

they're right or not.  But just because oil is down there,

even in prodigious supply, doesn't mean it's meant to be

up in the sky, skunking our atmosphere.  Who knows what it

means to be depleting the planet's crust of petroleum,

bacterial or not?  We could be giving our planet the

equivalent of dry scalp.  No wonder Gaia chooses to shake

us up occasionally with a huge, rude, tectonic... gaseous

emission.

 

(((bruces remarks:  I applaud Mike Semer's initiative and

am grateful to Thomas Gold for answering him and us.  I'm

not given to cranky convictions about way-out science

theories, and I do understand that extraordinary claims

demand extraordinary proof.  It may well be that weird

microbes are merely intellectually sexy this season... but

this Gold notion has got legs. Consider the following, and

the possible interconnections here.

 

A:   Michael Russell's theory that single-celled life was

formed, not in open seawater, but in water-soaked iron

sulfide rocks in hydrothermal vents.  Mineral "cell walls"

formed first, and then self-replicating chemistry formed

within these tiny stone pockets.  If this is true, then

most rocky planets might have formed chemosynthetic life

deep underground, wherever hot water oozes through

chemically active rock.

 

B: NASA/Stanford suggests possible fossil Martian microbes

in Antarctic meteorites.

 

C: Dirk Schulze-Makuch says there's an odd chemical

imbalance in atmosphere of Venus, which could be caused by

sulfur-metabolizing bacteria, living in damp, pleasant

temperatures in high Venusian clouds.

 

D:  Oliver Morton's ideas that Earth's cloud formation

involves ocean bacteria nucleating ice crystals.   As

Morton puts it, "Clouds might be plankton's way of moving

a great distance."

 

E:  New collision models for asteroids suggest that chunks

of rock might be flung from planet to planet, with live

bacteria intact.  Spores of "Bacillus permians" have been

known to survive for 250 million years.

 

F: Thomas Gold's deep hot biosphere theories.  Yes, they

are odd and his book makes a wide array of claims.  But

those claims don't all have to be factual, in order for

there to be a lot == a *whole* lot == of primeval living

biomass deep in the crust of the earth.  Tectonic drift is

a geological commonplace now, and that wasn't accepted

until the 1960s. How much of what we think we know is

wrong?

 

O=c=O O=c=O O=c=O O=c=O

THERE'S MORE TO COME

LOTS, LOTS MORE

O=c=O O=c=O O=c=O O=c=O

Quote

As to any clues..... what do you want to know? What types of clues?

How about just tell us so we can congratulate you both!

 

PS: I have a farily strong idea!

 

Key concepts: Invitation to Viridian New Years Party,

live music on the Viridian lawn, North Pole melting, Alan  

AtKisson, SFMOMA, AMODA, the Ghost of Christmas Future

 

Attention Conservation Notice: You can come over

here for New Years and witness our renewably-powered

Xmas display.

 

Links:

http://www.sfmoma.org/exhibitions/exhib_detail.asp?id=82

http://www.sfmoma.org/espace/espace_overview.html

This weekend, I'm at the San Francisco Museum of

Modern Art, (SFMOMA) pontificating with

hip European net.artists. It's good to be the pontiff.

 

http://www.amoda.org/

On the evening of Sunday December 22nd, some

Austin Museum of Digital Art (AMODA) guys have promised

to come out and digitally jam in our front yard in

the very thick of the Christmas crowds. Failing,

you know, eerie monster hailstorms or something.

And no, AMODA don't do no Christmas carols. I'm not sure

how you categorize that music, but it's weird and

it comes out of machines.

 

http://www.viridiandesign.org

Then the season's finale: New Years' at the Viridian

Vatican. We're throwing the doors open for 2003. There

will be some tasty surprises, plus the traditional

neighborhood New Years surveillance of the insane

light show on Austin's 37th Street. I'm not boasting, not

just yet, but this may, finally, be the year where I wipe

the floor with our 37th Street rivals.

Send email for directions. You can bring anything

you can carry and anybody you trust.

 

 

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/2558319.stm

Well, there goes the Arctic. Check out that graphic

of the sea ice diminishing. It's transforming fast.

We may hit some major climate crux during the Bush

Administration. Would that surprise the powers-that-be

more than the sudden collapse of Enron? Probably not!

 

(((And now, a topical, seasonal piece by Alan AtKisson,

noted author and long-valued member of the Viridian

Curia.)))

 

Link:

http://www.atkisson.com

 

"Find/Replace

 

"An Occasional Column on Sustainability, Innovation, and

Global Affairs

 

DEAR SANTA, I HEAR THE NORTH POLE IS MELTING

 

"© 2002 by Alan AtKisson

Permission granted to turn this into an email virus.

 

"Dear Santa,

 

"This year, unlike certain previous years in my life, I

have been a relatively 'good boy.' Starting a family will

do that to a person. I'm betting that I've made your list

for a pretty good present.

 

   "However, I'm afraid that what I really want for

Christmas this year, you can't give me: a new energy

system for planet Earth. A stabilization in our emission

of greenhouse gasses. The avoidance of global climate

catastrophe.

 

    "I'm betting that no amount of patient, no-complaints

baby care gets you that big a pile of chips to play in the

old Christmas Casino. You can't cash in your karma on

miracles.

 

   "But Santa, you know, global warming is a lot more

real than you are.

 

   "You know as well as I do that Nature does what it

does, regardless of whether certain political leaders and

automobile advertisers might like to pretend to the

contrary.

 

   "In fact, you know the immutability of Nature's laws

better than I do, since you're sitting up there on a

melting sheet of ice that's thinned 40% since the 1970s.

By midcentury, Santa, you'll need a summer houseboat ==

for you, the elves, and several thousand homeless polar

bears.

 

   "And apparently, there's not a snowball's chance in

Bangladesh that we humans are going to do much about it.

Did you see the news from India, Santa, about the latest

international climate negotiations conference?

 

  "'Experts espousing the views of industry were thrilled

with the shift in New Delhi,' said the New York Times on

November 3, 2002. The 'shift' was this: the world is

basically giving up on trying to stop or slow down global

warming. 'Industry' (not all industry == some industry

makes the 'Nice' list) was thrilled because they won't

have to invest in innovation, pay carbon taxes, reinvent

their products, convert to zero-emissions energy systems.

 

  "All the serious talk now, said the Times, is about

adapting to the inevitable.

 

  "Santa, I know climate change is inevitable, because it

is already happening. I try to read the science journals,

in between diaper changes: I know that hundreds if not

thousands of indicators, from the pole-ward migration of

warmer-climate species, to the increase in devastating El

Ninos, are 'consistent with the expected effects of an

increase in global temperatures.'"

 

   "Because I've been patiently taught, I know == unlike

about two-thirds of MIT graduate students tested on this

question! == that even if we stopped emitting CO2 and

other greenhouse gasses today, global temperatures would

continue to rise for years.

 

   "It's called 'a delay in the system.' It is going to

happen, for the same reason that summer days keep getting

hotter even when they're getting shorter (after June 21,

for you and me, who both live in the northern hemisphere).

 

   "You know all about delays in the system, Santa.

That's why after you make your lists, you check them

twice, in case some naughtiness or niceness got reported

late.

 

   "But delay or not, I'm not willing to just give up, and

watch my favorite Andean glaciers or Swedish ski areas

disappear. I don't like the idea of New Orleans vanishing

under 20 feet of water when the next global-warming-

enhanced hurricane goes partying on Bourbon Street.

(People usually drink 'Hurricanes' on Bourbon Street; this

Hurricane could drink them.)

 

   "Santa, I know it is unseemly for a grown man to come

begging and pleading to a fictitious troll in a red

polyester suit.But I'm writing to you, rather than to our

World Leader types, because the World Leaders have

essentially tossed in their monogrammed towels. You == the

great dispenser of unexpected gifts for the often barely

deserving == seem to be our only hope.

 

    "So, Santa, please give us something to replace the

burning of fossil fuels.

 

   "You've got to give it to us quick, and it's got to be

relatively cheap and easy to spread around == because

let's face it, Santa, everybody wants energy. And food

(grown with energy). And water (transported with energy).

And transport (powered by energy). But we've got, well,

bad energy right now. Energy is our major need, and our

major problem. Major change is in order.

 

    "For instance, if we're really going to do something

about global warming, all our cars need different motors.

All our coal-fired power plants need to be converted to

some space-age hydrogen fuel cell array, or maybe some

wacky Tesla coil device, harvesting the warps and woofs of

space itself.

 

   "I don't know if you've got something like that for us

in that slick, reindeer-powered, zero-emissions sled of

yours, Santa, but you better have something. We're about

to go to war over this stuff, again == just in time for

Christmas.

 

   "But I'm not giving up hope. We may be a kooky species

who, when it comes to planetary management, is still a

little slow on the uptake. But we try to be good. We

deserve to be on the 'Nice list, even if some of us are

being a little naughty with our corporate accounting

practices.

 

   "Santa, please, give us a new energy system. Give us

climate stability. Give our great-grandchildren the gift

of a white, icicle-y, Frosty-the-Snowman Christmas.

 

   "Or better yet == give us the guts to do it ourselves."

 

==============

 

Visit the AtKisson,Inc. website at

<http://www.AtKisson.com>.

We do consulting on how to change the

seemingly inevitable.

 

To subscribe or unsubscribe, send an email message to

FindReplace@AtKisson.com

 

O=c=O O=c=O O=c=O

TIS THE SEASON

TO BE JOLLY

O=c=O O=c=O O=c=O

Hope you pull through quickly! (else its one off your empathy score I do beleive...)