"Today, mind and brain scientists have made enormous progress in understanding how the human brain works. There has been many surprises in these recent advances. But the biggest shocker is that the brain doesn't decide what to do. Decision making is not controlled centrally in the brain. The mind-brain appears to act as a coordination and consensus system for all the cells, tissues, and organs in the body. The brain doesn't decide to eat. The cells of the body decide to eat, the brain coordinates their activity and carries out the consensus will. Our human brain stores the gathered information from the body's sensing of its environment, the brain presents opportunities for action reflective of both the sensing of environment and the needs and goals of the 40,000,000,000,000 cells it serves. The brain is not the leader of the body, it is the follower of the body. It is a system that matches needs in the body with its sensing of opportunities to meet these needs by action within the environment. The brain is a 'government' that truly serves its constituents– the cells, tissues, and organs that make up the human body. The apparent " I " is not real. It is really a " We ". ... If the human body can using unanimous rule democracy and synergic consensus can organize and coordinate the actions of 40 trillion cells so totally that we identify the whole organism as a single individual, then we humans should be able to use these same mechanisms to organize our species and solve our human problems..."

"Wealth is the performance per pound utilization of the world's resources. It is the number of forward days that the number of people on earth can live at an increasingly higher standard of living without the negative effects of environmental pollution."

"Intellect and energy; measured by the amount of forward days for how many humans with which we are technically organized to cope. Because energy can neither be destroyed nor created, and 'know-how' of intellect can only increase with each experiment, or experience, wealth consisting of both the physical and metaphysical can only increase with each and every re-employment."

USA
1. Honeywell (rockets, chemical)
2. Spectra Physics (chemical)
3. Semetex (rockets)
4. TI Coating (atomic, chemical)
5. Unisys (atomic, chemical)
6. Sperry Corp. (rockets, chemical)
7. Tektronix (rockets, atomic)
8. Rockwell (chemical)
9. Leybold Vacuum Systems (atomic)
10. Finnigan-MAT-US (atomic)
11. Hewlett-Packard (atomic, rockets, chemical)
12. Dupont (atomic)
13. Eastman Kodak (rockets)
14. American Type Culture Collection (biological)
15. Alcolac International (chemical)
16. Consarc (atomic)
17. Carl Zeiss - U.S (chemical)
18. Cerberus (LTD) (atomic)
19. Electronic Associates (rockets)
20. International Computer Systems (atomic, rockets, chemical)
21. Bechtel (chemical)
22. EZ Logic Data Systems, Inc. (rockets)
23. Canberra Industries Inc. (atomic)
24. Axel Electronics Inc. (atomic)

Britain
1. Euromac Ltd-Uk (atomic)
2. C. Plath-Nuclear (atomic)
3. Endshire Export Marketing (atomic)
4. International Computer Systems (atomic, rockets, chemical)
5. MEED International (atomic, chemical)
6. Walter Somers Ltd. (rockets)
7. International Computer Limited (atomic, chemical)
8. Matrix Churchill Corp. (atomic)
9. Ali Ashour Daghir (atomic)
10. International Military Services (rockets) (owned by the British Ministry of Defence)
11. Sheffield Forgemasters (rockets)
12. Technology Development Group (rockets)
13. International Signal and Control (rockets)
14. Terex Corporation (rockets)
15. Inwako (atomic)
16. TMG Engineering (chemical)
17. XYY Options, Inc (atomic)

Doc: "Well, I guess I'm one of those NewAgers, but I'm an OldAger too, and the crank in me agrees completely. The Net is a new world. You can do all kinds of stuff on it, and with it. ALL kinds. Exclude nothing, because it'll happen. Worlds are like that.

About making money. Ever asked yourself what the business model of rocks is? Of dirt? Of trees? Of rotted plants? Of reproductive urges? Last I looked the building, concrete, lumber, oil and porn businesses were doing pretty well. The difference with the Net is: its resources are infinite. They don't need to be renewed, because they're not scarce. You mine and harvest them by processes like duplication. Take all you want; just don't buy the illusion that you "own" any of it. You don't, any more than you own the air you breathe or the jillion-ton wedge of rock and lava between your yard and the core of the Earth. Deep down, it's a commie kinda place. Deal with it.
Think of the Net as a laboratory for human nature, because it's the first world entirely made by human beings. And as Craig Burton says, we've only begun to terraform it. It's like we created a parallel planet, occupying the same space and time as the one we already inhabit. We're there already and have to make the most of it. Including the fact that some of our founding dreams were wet."

"People no longer work for a living. They hold jobs for a living, which pays better.

"Over the last two centuries, they argue, an increasingly efficient economy, coupled with a rise in democratic thinking and growing access to information, has opened up life's possibilities to increasing numbers of people. Because participation in the consumption-based economy is unavoidable, the general public looks to markets to provide 'deep support' in their quest for individualization, but 'are routinely punished for being complex psychological individuals in a world still fitted out for the old mass order.' This macroeconomic structure treats people as either employees or consumers and inevitably hurts their feelings. Zuboff and Maxmin would eliminate the 'little murders' of customer service interaction by replacing the current transaction-based model with a form of 'distributed capitalism' based on a customer-supplier relationship, so semi-anonymous customer service reps will be replaced by 'advocates' fully emotionally involved in their clients' needs."

"Value Chains are the means by which originators get rich in a market economy — they are combinations of producers, distributors, middlepeople and retailers.

Value Chains have always been hard to forge, defend, manage and collect from, which is why they're so profitable. The Internet is poised to combine productive individuals into value chains which reward their participants as richly as traditional value chains."

"The Internet is a conversation.

And that Markets are conversations, as described by the folks at ClueTrain.

Work and its Reward is primarily a conversation about quality: money is just the punch line.

The quality of the work-reward conversation, not money, is the best benchmark for a 'New' Economy.

Internet protocols are the best model for a quality-based, more even-handed Economic Operating System.

Establishing a quality-based Economic OS requires no new laws, technical standards or protocols, so it needs nobody's permission..."

"Wealth is relationships. In what sense is this true? If you have relationships, then you can get a loan, an education, a job, timely ideas, opportunities. Whereas knowledge is worthless out of context. Even money is worthless if there is nobody to take it, that is, if there is no web of relationships to back up the currency.

If you are poor, then you lack relationships, you must be 'out of the loop'. But if we can bring you 'into the loop', help you form social connections, integrate you into the economy, then we are creating wealth. This suggests that a business might sustain itself, fight poverty and create wealth by integrating people into the economy...

"A biology that sees all nature as co-evolving holons (living entities) in holarchies (interdependent embeddedness) will quickly reveal much about humanity itself as one such holon - containing its own holarchy of individuals, families, organizations, communities, nations and world. Through this understanding of ourselves, we will gain profound insights on where we succeed and where we fail as a living system." --Biology Revisioned

"We are learning that there is more than one way to organize functional systems, to produce order and balance; that the imperfect and flexible principles of nature lead to greater stability and resilience in natural systems than we have produced in ours-both technological and social-by following the mechanical laws we assumed were natural...On the whole, there seems to be good reason to believe our species' recklessly egotistical and destructive phase is coming to an end with new knowledge that leads us back to ancient wisdom. We are capable of regaining our reverence for life, of replacing the drive to conquer with the will to cooperate, of remaking our engineered institutions, including our corporations, into living systems." --Earthdance

Mitch Ratcliffe says, and I agree: "This is sheer idiocy, because it will actually increase the risks to the national information infrastructure. From its inception, the Net was conceived as a distributed system that could reorganize around failures (in the case of the original designs, the Net was built to route around damage caused by nuclear weapons). Centralizing all network communications to facilitate surveillance will create a huge, ripe and easily attacked target, reducing the reliability and performance of the Internet on the whole and for each individual user. Likewise, the plan would invade the digital borders of other countries, creating many conflicts that don't impede communication today."

"Blogging is basically just writing live on the Web. There are lots of upsides to it, as we know. But there's at least one downside: saving stuff. When you're writing for yourself, you save constantly. But when you're writing live, for the world, you don't always want to do that. You might want to wait until you're done with your post before you save it. That's risky. ... as I just found out when I wasted twenty minutes I didn't have answering Eric Norlin's latest volley, point by point. I was up to number 5 out of 6 when something "unexpectedly quit" and I lost it all."

• People have different norms. Some people feel they trust everybody unconditionally.
  
• Many people feel obliged to be reciprocal, even if they don't quite mean it.
  
• Some people try to have several virtual personalities, so they can give each other points.
  
• If there is a list of people's reputation ratings as numeric values, ordered in descending numeric order, people change their behavior and get competitive about getting better numbers.
  
• If I made the system, and I'm first on the list, people get suspicious.
  
• People who are very active get high ratings
  
• Some people end up hating reputation systems
  

"I'm not sure if this is a rehash of an old idea, an improvement to it, or something totally useless, but here goes:

j-mo talks about wanting her blog to immediately express her mood. Lots of people have various icons on their entries on Live Journal and other places to show current mood.

It always seems that some days are bad mood days for lots of people. This time of year often has a lot of those days.

The idea of measuring this is a little like imood and their "mood of the Internet" - but that is a single service that you have to register for. I don't really think that scales very well. It seems like an open system that all could use for whoever they wanted to would be better.

What I'm thinking about is a standard XML tag that could be read by the various RSS aggregators and such (read Scripting News and the links there if you are interested in more about this).

This could also be worked into blogging software - set your mood and it sets the styles or whatever you want automatically.

Anyone could them compile a "mood" index for the part of the world that interested them - ranging from just their friends to everyone listed in one of the big indexes..."

"While media experts were preoccupied with analyzing Osama bin Laden's voice, they failed to comprehend, or even read, his actual words. Speculation about hidden meanings and secret clues totally ignored the obvious intended message, which is so clear that it doesn't even need decoding.[...]

All of bin Laden's messages have a consistent theme, emotional tone and logic. All are about reciprocity, expressed in many different ways. The message from Nov. 12, 2002, began, 'The road to safety begins by ending the aggression. Reciprocal treatment is part of justice. The incidents that have taken place ... are only reactions and reciprocal actions.'[...]

Bin Laden's messages are misinterpreted as unconditional threats and vows to attack. This is incorrect. They are all conditional warnings that whatever we do, they will respond in kind. What is missed by media and political leaders, whether intentionally or unconsciously, is the conditionality, the centrality of our role in provoking retaliation or preventing retaliation and reducing terrorism."

Doc Searls: "I came to the conclusion ... that blogging is about nothing more than writing — and that more of us will be writing to more people, with more effect, because of it. Every new blogging tool is one more step in the evolution of the Web as, literally, the ultimate writing medium: one that lets anybody write for everybody."

Britt Blaser: "The problem with a planet of bloggers is, how can we quantify the clustering of discrete trends and imperatives the bloggers feel strongly about? My proposal continues to be a coherent blog aggregation protocol:

Culture-wide Blog-based Knowledge-Logs
Let's take all blogs' RSS feeds and slice and dice them to aggregate our combined sensibilities.
1) Create a mechanism for people to identify and define the issues they care about, and the major positions that surround each issue.
2) Inspire and help bloggers to structure their RSS feeds to expose which issues they're discussing and where they stand on each issue.
3) Let bloggees indicate where they stand on each issue as they view it. Compile all these data points and let a million flowers bloom."

Britt Blaser: "I want a new superorganism - a culture - that reflects my values and beliefs, and I want that culture to take over the world as soon as possible. I want freedom from want through economics based on abundance, not scarcity. I want young people raised by adults confident enough to be gentle, reasonable and informed enough to mentor them skillfully. I guess I want to live in Jean-Luc Picard's world. Above all, I want patriarchy and fundamentalism to be a distant bad dream. Is that too much to ask?"

"One of Senge's patterns is the general problem addiction loop. Quick fixes seem to solve a problem, but often feed back to create other problems. Fundamental solutions which take longer to understand and implement are ignored in the flurry of quick fixes, creating a vicious circle. The flurry of quick fixes then feeds some kind of assessment system which makes it appear that we are being productive, with all that activity going on. This is like trying to get out of a hole by digging it deeper, and measuring your productivity by how many shovelfuls you scoop each day.

The flip side of this is to create a virtuous circle, addressing the fundamental issue to create a solution-generating feedback loop. This dissolves problems rather than solves them, which appears to be infinitely unproductive to those who use problem-solving metrics..."

"It is not enough to be busy, so are the ants.
The question is: what are we busy about?"
- Henry David Thoreau

"The user must find it easy and intuitive to get around your website. If they feel that they have reached a 'dead end', and have to use the 'back' button to get out, you have got a terminal stagnation of ch'i. If the user can swim easily through your pages to get to where they would like to be, that's great ch'i."