WELCOME to Cold War City (population: 4). It covers 240 acres and has 60 miles of roads and its own railway station. It even includes a pub called the Rose and Crown.

The most underpopulated town in Britain is being put on the market. But there will be no estate agent’s blurb extolling the marvellous views of the town for sale: true, it has a Wiltshire address, but it is 120ft underground.

The subterranean complex that was built in the 1950s to house the Conservative prime minister Harold Macmillan’s cabinet and 4,000 civil servants in the event of a Soviet nuclear attack is being thrown open to commercial use. Just four maintenance men are left.

Property developers looking for the ultimate place to get away from it all need not apply. The site has a notional value of £5m but there is a catch. It is available only as part of a private finance initiative that involves investing in the military base on the surface above.

"Kiva.org is the world’s first peer-to-peer, distributed microloan website. A great idea where PayPal meets Gates Foundation. The site allows you to lend a small amount of money, say $25, to needy microenterprises in developing countries. You receive repayment at the end of the loan period (normally 6-12 months) without interest. If they default on the loan, your loan becomes a donation – though none of the businesses have defaulted yet. A great low-risk, high-reward idea."

This bussiness is now using the loan money that they received from Kiva. They received loan money worth $500. They have bought 3 Bulls and 2 cows for their first sells in the cattle market in Tororo Town. I will keep you posted immediately after the firt sells is done. Thanks alot for supporting this bussiness with the loan monwy. These are the poorest of the poor people living in desparete stuation in the village. Yours Moses Onyango.

Conversation is different from talk

Talk in the past was about rising up the social scale. Etiquette - not what you thought. You had your place in society and that was it.

Conversation is a new thing. Conversation means who you keep company with. Not just the exchange of words - a social activity. When society was hierarchical we had one kind of conversation - now we need to invent a new kind of conversation. An exploration and self revelation. You each reveal things about what are important to you in your lives. You have admitted each other into private worlds and created links - you create shared experiences.

A predicted thaw in the Arctic ice cover combined with a search for energy supplies is leading to a new "gold rush" in the high north, bringing diplomatic problems in its wake as five countries vie for access to resources.

There are disputes involving all of the five - the United States, Canada, Russia, Norway and Denmark.

The US and Canada argue over rights in the North West Passage, Norway and Russia over the Barents Sea, Canada and Denmark are competing over a small island off Greenland, the Russian parliament is refusing to ratify an agreement with the US over the Bering Sea and Denmark is seeking to trump everyone by claiming the North Pole itself.

Imagine you are the problem or issue under consideration.

▪ How do you feel?
▪ How would you rather feel?
▪ Broadly, what would it take to create this new feeling?
▪ What practical steps might you take?
▪ What's the first step?

"To think in terms of building a sustainable village, like the Anasazi dwellings, we have to think of designing not a house, but a village. We can not longer afford to think in terms of single family dwellings, but think about what is good for the entire community. When one thinks of all the refugees throughout the world as well as the one's who became refugees through environmental disasters like what happened to New Orleans or the millions of homeless people in the United States, we need to think in terms of building villages within villages, an arcology for millions of people.

What I am visualizing is a mass exodus occurring from our dying civilization to a more evolved, holistic developmental pattern that allows us to have individual freedom along side of the responsibility of the collective. I'm seeing the labor force of the world turning around and moving in a new direction that brings us back in balance with nature by building a network of arcologies.

I'm excited with the idea of arcology as a center of culture, a place where arts are not on the side lines of civilization but are the life blood of the people. Such a vision gives the children of the world a future of human dignity, a future where they can enjoy the revival of now-threatened plant and animal species, and have the time and resources to pursue the adventures of the mind and heart, producing great art, advancing miraculous science, and living with the beauty of star light forever."

"Tekkies think that electronic documents and the World Wide Web are something completely new and that they own it, exactly the way every generation of teenagers thinks they've invented sex and it's their secret.

But it's not new and they don't own it. Word processing and the World Wide Web are not intrinsically new. They are literature.

What is literature? Literature is (among other things) the study and design of documents, their structure and connections. Therefore today's electronic documents are literature, electronic literature, and the question is what electronic literature people really need.

Electronic literature should belong to all the world, not just be hoarded by a priesthood, and it should do what people need in order to organize and present human ideas with the least difficulty in the richest possible form.

A document is not necessarily a simulation of paper. In the most general sense, a document is a package of ideas created by human minds and addressed to human minds, intended for the furtherance of those ideas and those minds. Human ideas manifest as text, connections, diagrams and more: thus how to store them and present them is a crucial issue for civilization.

The furtherance of the ideas, and the furtherance of the minds that present them and take them in, are the real objectives. And so what is important in documents is the expression, reception and re-use of ideas. Connections, annotations, and most especially re-use-- the traceable flow of content among documents and their versions-- must be our central objectives, not the simulation of paper.

Those who created today's computer documents lost sight of these objectives. The world has accepted forms of electronic document that are based on technical traditions, and which cannot be annotated, easily connected or deeply re-used. They impose hierarchy on the contents and ensnare page designers in tangles only a few can manage.

"Technology" must no longer be the emphasis, but literature. "Hypertext"-- a word I coined long ago-- is not technology but potentially the fullest generalization of documents and literature. Text on paper was the best way to present ideas in the paper era, when there was no other way; but now we see fantastic movies and commercials to imitate, and we have super-power graphics cards that can enact swoops and zooms hitherto scarcely imaginable. Tomorrow's true hypertext can give us far more powerful ways to show, integrate and embellish ideas-- leaving behind the imitation of paper represented by word processing and the web. It's time for a new flying cinematic literature to represent and present tomorrow's ideas."

The connections between ordinary objects are fleeting and superficial. Two atoms may collide and separate, never to meet again. Others can stick together by virtue of the chemical bonds they form, until the day that bond is broken.

But there is another type of connection that is far more powerful and romantic. Certain objects can become linked by a mysterious process called entanglement. Particles that become entangled are deeply connected regardless of the distance between them. If they become separated by the width of the Universe, the bond between them remains intact. These particles are so deeply linked that it’s as if they somehow share the same existence.

Physicists do not yet fully understand the nature of entanglement but there is growing evidence that it is a fundamental property of the universe. Unfettered by the restrictions of space, entanglement may be the ghostly bedrock upon which reality is built.

For those who don't know Infiltration, it's one of the most popular and well-regarded zines in the world. And for excellent reason: it's filled with great real-life adventure stories, homegrown yarns peculiarly native to our era. Instead of seeking excitement travelling abroad as I did, Jeff found it in his own city. He would knock off work at his day job and check on how the Sheppard Subway dig was going; pop by an interesting looking church he'd heard about at Yonge and Lawrence; see if there were any unlocked doors today at Union Station. It was part of his life and how he saw the world.

He referred to urban exploration as a "hobby," even when it grew to the point (take a look around infiltration.org to get a sense of the massive size) where it could have easily been called a movement. But in his modest and unassuming way, he managed to communicate and spread his mildly illicit desire to access all areas.

On the surface, Access All Areas is a well-written and thorough how-to guide for those new to the subculture, spiked with hilarious asides and tales of forbidden forays: but at its heart, it's Jeff Chapman passing on his love for an unusual pasttime in a way that manages to be fascinating yet responsible.

I came here today because I believe that American democracy is in grave danger. It is no longer possible to ignore the strangeness of our public discourse . I know that I am not the only one who feels that something has gone basically and badly wrong in the way America's fabled "marketplace of ideas" now functions. How many of you, I wonder, have heard a friend or a family member in the last few years remark that it's almost as if America has entered "an alternate universe"? I thought maybe it was an aberration when three-quarters of Americans said they believed that Saddam Hussein was responsible for attacking us on September 11, 2001. But more than four years later, between a third and a half still believe Saddam was personally responsible for planning and supporting the attack.