 by Flemming Funch
Gaia Theory: Science of the Living Earth - an excellent introduction to Gaia theory. It is the idea that the Earth is essentially a living organism. It was championed mostly by James Lovelock and then by Lynn Margulis. There is a lot of evidence for how the Earth regulates itself, to keep the contents of the atmosphere, the saltyness of the oceans, and many other things stable enough to support other life forms. Dead rocks don't do such things.
James Lovelock: "For me, the personal revelation of Gaia came quite suddenly - like a flash of enlightenment. I was in a small room on the top floor of a building at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. It was the autumn of 1965 ... and I was talking with a colleague, Dian Hitchcock, about a paper we were preparing ... It was at that moment that I glimpsed Gaia. An awesome thought came to me. The Earth's atmosphere was an extraordinary and unstable mixture of gases, yet I knew that it was constant in composition over quite long periods of time. Could it be that life on Earth not only made the atmosphere, but also regulated it - keeping it at a constant composition, and at a level favourable for organisms?" See good interview with Elisabet Sahtouris. Life is recognized by a quality of autopoiesis:
"Autopoiesis is a Greek word, of course, meaning literally "self-creation." The definition goes: A living entity is any entity that constantly creates itself. This really distinguishes it from a mechanism, because a machine is not constantly creating itself. In fact, if it changes itself at all it's probably broken and you would rather it didn't do that; while a living thing is always changing, or it's dead." Cass says "Real quick, a book Ming might like: Leadership and the New Science". Yes, he's right, I like it very much. Meg Wheatley is great. Well, actually I've only listened to the audio book version, but several times.
That brings up: How do I know if somebody says something about me or to me in their weblog? I do seem to have a sixth sense about it, but I probably can't rely on that. There is a proposed standard approach to that, which might tell me automatically, called Trackback Ping, developed by Movable Type, one of the major weblog designers. Note to self: I need to implement that in this program.
A number of years ago, before there was anything called search engines, there was an all-knowing being known as Kibo. The web hardly existed yet, but 100's of thousands of messages were posted every day on thousands of different UseNet Newsgroups. And it was said that no matter where you posted a message, if you said anything at all about Kibo, he would instantly know. I didn't quite believe, so I tested it. I mentioned his name in some obscure newsgroup. And, indeed, before long there was an answer from him. He seemed to be able to have an off-the-wall conversation about anything anytime. At the time it seemed quite magical that he would know everything anybody said about him, and a whole wacky religion, called Kibology sprung up around him. Well, all that went on was that he had a program that searched the UseNet feed going into some particular server for the word "Kibo". That was a novel idea at the time. Nowadays anybody can do the same in Google Groups any time they want.
Consumers Shun Copy-Protected CDs. Study finds music fans support copying for personal use, backup.
"The problem is never how to get new, innovative thoughts into your mind, but how to get the old ones out." Dee Hock
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