BBC Medical Science — About 10,000 cases of breast and bowel cancer could be prevented each year in the UK if people did more brisk walking, claim experts. The World Cancer Research Fund scientists say any moderate activity that makes the heart beat faster should achieve the same.

For example, data suggest 45 minutes a day of moderate exercise could prevent about 5,500 cases of breast cancer. Physical exercise helps prevent obesity, which is a cancer risk factor. The WCRF team stress in their report that it is the total time spent being active that is important. You do not need to set aside half an hour each day to exercise. Shorter bouts of activity will be just as beneficial as long as they add up to the same, the charity says.

Alongside brisk walking, other activities that would count include cycling or swimming at a leisurely pace, dancing, gardening and vacuuming combined with other housework, says the WCRF.

Their head of science, Dr Rachel Thompson, said by making small changes to their daily routine people could achieve significant health gains. “There is now every strong evidence that being physically active is important for cancer prevention. Even relatively modest increases in activity levels could prevent thousands of cancer cases in the UK every year.

“These figures also show you do not have to go to the gym every day to benefit. You can reduce your cancer risk just by making small changes and this is highlighted by the fact that so many cancer cases could be prevented through something as simple as brisk walking.

“By taking up walking as a hobby or even walking to the shops instead of taking the bus or car, people can make a real difference to their health.” (09/01/10)

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BBC Technology — How much does the audio quality of your mobile phone calls matter to you?

Not much if you are to believe the mobile industry. After all over the last 20 years the operators and the manufacturers have spent billions of pounds upgrading their networks and perfecting their handsets. But while everything else about the mobile experience has been transformed, there has been no real improvement in the quality of our audio calls.

But now Orange is betting that call quality does matter to a significant number of consumers. It has become the first operator to launch HD voice, which promises the biggest improvement in voice calls in 20 years - indeed just about the only real advance since we moved from analogue to digital.

Why has it taken so long? It sounds to me that the problem was inertia - why spend the money unless you were clear about customer demand? But Orange says the answer is a long wrangle over standards. Until the whole industry could agree on a new codec - the software which encodes data to send it over the network - everybody stuck with the existing way of channelling voice data around the world.

Now that has been agreed and, combined with new hardware in the form of HD ready handsets, it can deliver what Orange describes as “crystal clear calls”. We decided to put that to the test, making calls between two HD handsets over the Orange handset, then calling from the same place using a standard phone over a non-HD network. You can hear the two calls here.

The difference is noticeable, although I’m not sure you could quite describe the HD call as “crystal clear”. Orange says it is not just about a software change in the network - the new handsets developed by the likes of Nokia, Sony Ericsson and Samsung can all deliver better audio as it leaves the caller.

So will HD Voice take off in the same way as HD TV has? Unless all the networks decide this is something they need to offer to their customers as a matter of course, I think this could be a slow burner. You can watch HD TV whether or not your neighbours has it, but if you decide to get one of Orange’s HD phones you will only be able to make an HD call to someone on the same network who also has one of the new handsets.

So a network effect could be slow to arrive - although improvements in the audio quality of VoIP calls, made over the internet rather than a phone network, may spur the industry into action. (09/01/10)

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BBC Environmental Science – An ancient reef found in the Pacific may provide clues to what will happen to coral when sea temperatures rise. A team of researchers from Australia and New Zealand have discovered a huge 9,000-year-old reef surprisingly far south. Lord Howe Island is 600km east of the Australian mainland and has a small modern coral reef - the furthest south in the world.

The ancient reef however is nearly 30 times as large as the modern reef. The scientists, headed by Colin Woodroffe from the University of Wollongong in Australia and researchers from Geoscience Australia, discovered a large ridge about 30m under water in the Tasman Sea. They have published their work in Geophysical Research Letters.

The team suspected it might be an ancient reef. The size and shape of the ridge can be mapped using a type of sonar called multi-beam echo sounding. The researchers could not be sure it was coral until they had taken samples.

Drilling for samples in the Tasman Sea is very dependent on weather and the seas can be rough - it involves lowering a submersible drill from a boat. The samples confirmed that it was indeed coral and radiocarbon dating confirmed its age. Other similar ancient reefs - called relict reefs - have been discovered before, but none as far south as this.

The team think that this reef died when it was flooded as a result of sea levels rising about 7,000 years ago, but the modern temperature at these latitudes also limits coral growth, which is why the relict reef is so much bigger than the modern reef. Now that sea temperatures are rising, however, reefs may start to grow bigger at higher latitudes.

The relict reef doesn’t have an extensive modern reef attached to it but it does have some individual corals which are newer - from the last 2,000 years. (09-01-10)

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CommUnity of Minds — Over 62 million mortgages are now held in the name of MERS, an electronic recording system devised by and for the convenience of the mortgage industry. A California bankruptcy court, following landmark cases in other jurisdictions, recently held that this electronic shortcut makes it impossible for banks to establish their ownership of property titles—and therefore to foreclose on mortgaged properties. The logical result could be 62 million homes that are foreclosure-proof.

Mortgages bundled into securities were a favorite investment of speculators at the height of the financial bubble leading up to the crash of 2008. The securities changed hands frequently, and the companies profiting from mortgage payments were often not the same parties that negotiated the loans. At the heart of this disconnect was the Mortgage Electronic Registration System, or MERS, a company that serves as the mortgagee of record for lenders, allowing properties to change hands without the necessity of recording each transfer.

MERS was convenient for the mortgage industry, but courts are now questioning the impact of all of this financial juggling when it comes to mortgage ownership. To foreclose on real property, the plaintiff must be able to establish the chain of title entitling it to relief. But MERS has acknowledged, and recent cases have held, that MERS is a mere “nominee”—an entity appointed by the true owner simply for the purpose of holding property in order to facilitate transactions. Recent court opinions stress that this defect is not just a procedural but is a substantive failure, one that is fatal to the plaintiff’s legal ability to foreclose.

That means hordes of victims of predatory lending could end up owning their homes free and clear—while the financial industry could end up skewered on its own sword.

The latest of these court decisions came down in California on May 20, 2010, in a bankruptcy case called In re Walker, Case no. 10-21656-E–11. The court held that MERS could not foreclose because it was a mere nominee; and that as a result, plaintiff Citibank could not collect on its claim. The judge opined:

Since no evidence of MERS’ ownership of the underlying note has been offered, and other courts have concluded that MERS does not own the underlying notes, this court is convinced that MERS had no interest it could transfer to Citibank. Since MERS did not own the underlying note, it could not transfer the beneficial interest of the Deed of Trust to another. Any attempt to transfer the beneficial interest of a trust deed without ownership of the underlying note is void under California law. (08/30/10)

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The Onion — WASHINGTON—The U.S. economy ceased to function this week after unexpected existential remarks by Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke shocked Americans into realizing that money is, in fact, just a meaningless and intangible social construct.

What began as a routine report before the Senate Finance Committee Tuesday ended with Bernanke passionately disavowing the entire concept of currency, and negating in an instant the very foundation of the world’s largest economy.

“Though raising interest rates is unlikely at the moment, the Fed will of course act appropriately if we…if we…” said Bernanke, who then paused for a moment, looked down at his prepared statement, and shook his head in utter disbelief. “You know what? It doesn’t matter. None of this—this so-called ‘money’—really matters at all.”

“It’s just an illusion,” a wide-eyed Bernanke added as he removed bills from his wallet and slowly spread them out before him. “Just look at it: Meaningless pieces of paper with numbers printed on them. Worthless.”

According to witnesses, Finance Committee members sat in thunderstruck silence for several moments until Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) finally shouted out, “Oh my God, he’s right. It’s all a mirage. All of it—the money, our whole economy—it’s all a lie!”

Screams then filled the Senate Chamber as lawmakers and members of the press ran for the exits, leaving in their wake aisles littered with the remains of torn currency.

As news of the nation’s collectively held delusion spread, the economy ground to a halt, with dumbfounded citizens everywhere walking out on their jobs as they contemplated the little green drawings of buildings and dead white men they once used to measure their adequacy and importance as human beings.

At the New York Stock Exchange, Wednesday morning’s opening bell echoed across a silent floor as the few traders who arrived for work out of habit looked up blankly at the meaningless scrolling numbers on the flashing screens above.

“I’ve spent 25 years in this room yelling ‘Buy, buy! Sell, sell!’ and for what?” longtime trader Michael Palermo said. “All I’ve done is move arbitrary designations of wealth from one column to another, wasting my life chasing this unattainable hallucination of wealth.”

“What a cruel cosmic joke,” he added. “I’m going home to hug my daughter.”

Sources at the White House said President Obama was “still trying to get his head around all this” and was in seclusion with his coin collection, muttering “it’s just metal, it’s just metal” over and over again.

“The president will be making a statement very soon,” press secretary Robert Gibbs told reporters. “At the moment, though, his mind is just too blown to comment.”

A few U.S. banks have remained open, though most teller windows are unmanned due to a lack of interest in transactions involving mere scraps of paper or, worse, decimal points and computer data signifying mere scraps of paper. At a Bank of America branch in Spokane, WA, curious former customers wandered aimlessly through a large empty vault, while several would-be robbers of a Chase bank in Columbus, OH reportedly put their guns down and exited the building hand in hand with security guards, laughing over the inherent absurdity of the idea of $100 bills. (08/29/10)

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BBC Science — Tiny, irregularly shaped fossils from South Australia could be the oldest remains of simple animal life found to date. The collection of circles, anvils, wishbones and rings discovered in the Flinders Ranges are most probably sponges, a Princeton team claims. The rocks in which the forms were found are 640-650 million years old.

This is at least 70 million years older than some other claims for the most ancient animals in the fossil record. …

The Princeton team found them by accident whilst studying rocks the group thought might hold clues about environmental conditions just before the very severe ice age.

“We were accustomed to finding rocks with embedded mud chips, and at first this is what we thought we were seeing,” Professor Maloof recalled.

“But then we noticed these repeated shapes that we were finding everywhere - wishbones, rings, perforated slabs and anvils. By the second year, we realised we had stumbled upon some sort of organism, and we decided to analyse the fossils.

“No-one was expecting that we would find animals that lived before the ice age, and since animals probably did not evolve twice, we are suddenly confronted with the question of how some relative of these reef-dwelling animals survived the ’snowball Earth’.” (08/18/10)

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BBC Environmental Science — Extreme heat and wildfires have led to a blanket of smog over Moscow. … The UK Met Office said there are likely to be more extreme high temperatures in the future. Experts from the environmental group WWF Russia have also linked climate change and hot weather to raging wildfires around the Russian capital.

Meteorologists say severe conditions may linger for several more days. Birds have very intensive breathing, and such extreme levels of air pollutants have definitely affected them. The Moscow health department said earlier that the number of people dying daily in the city had reached about 700 - twice the usual number.

Jeff Knight, a climate variability scientist at the UK Met Office, attributed the situation in Moscow to a number of factors, among them greenhouse gas concentrations, which are steadily rising. The recent El Nino, a climate pattern that occurs across the tropical Pacific Ocean and affects weather around the world, and local weather patterns in Russia may have also contributed to this summer’s abnormal conditions.

“The Russian heatwave is related to a persistent pattern of circulation drawing air from the south and east (the very warm steppes),” said Dr Knight. “Circulation anomalies tend to create warm and cool anomalies: while it has been very hot in western Russia, it has been cooler than average in adjacent parts of Siberia that lie on the other side of the high pressure system where Arctic air is being drawn southwards. Some long-term records have been broken - for example the highest daily temperature in Moscow. We expect more extreme high temperatures as the climate changes. This means that when weather fluctuations promote high temperatures… there is more likelihood of records being broken.”

The head of the climate and energy programme at WWF Russia, Alexei Kokorin, said the abnormal temperatures soaring to up to 40C increased the likelihood of wildfires around the capital.

And though this summer in Moscow had proven harsh for people and animals alike, it was possible that temperatures would continue to rise over the years to come, he warned.

“We have to get ready to fight such fires in the future because there is a great possibility that such a summer will be repeated. This tendency won’t stop in the coming 40 years or so, until the greenhouse gas emissions are reduced,” he said. (08/11/10)

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BBC Space Engineering — A second spacewalk to repair vital cooling units on the International Space Station is under way. The ISS has been operating with half its cooling capability, crucial for keeping electronics from overheating, since a coolant pump failed in July. An attempt to fix the cooling units on Saturday was aborted after astronauts struggled to detach hoses connected to them, causing ammonia to leak out.

A third spacewalk will still be required to replace the coolant pump. The unit, approximately the size of a bathtub, is one of two that cools the station.

Nasa said the three Russian cosmonauts and three US astronauts aboard the ISS were not at any risk, but that the sole functioning coolant system was having to do all the work. Astronauts Douglas Wheelock and Tracy Caldwell Dyson had hoped to remove the faulty pump on their first spacewalk, but it took longer than anticipated to remove hoses connected to the unit.

They were working on the hoses for over eight hours, one of the longest spacewalks in history. When the astronauts wrestled one of the hoses free they were sprayed with ammonia, forcing them to call off the spacewalk and return inside to clean their suits.

The difficulties meant Nasa mission control had to add a third spacewalk to their itinerary in order to replace the pump, which failed one-and-a-half weeks ago. That is not expected to happen until Sunday. The cooling units allow the station to cope with external temperatures ranging from 121C (250F) to -157C (-250F).  (08/11/10)

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The Huffington Post — Ellen Brown writes: President John Adams is quoted as saying, “There are two ways to conquer and enslave a nation. One is by the sword. The other is by debt.” The major conquests today are on the battlefield of debt, a war that is raging globally. Debt forces individuals into financial slavery to the banks, and it forces governments to relinquish their sovereignty to their creditors, which in the end are also private banks, the originators of all non-cash money today. In Great Britain, where the Bank of England is owned by the government, 97% of the money supply is issued privately by banks as loans. In the U.S., where the central bank is owned by a private consortium of banks, the percentage is even higher. The Federal Reserve issues Federal Reserve Notes (or dollar bills) and lends them to other banks, which then lend them at interest to individuals, businesses, and local and federal governments.

That is true today, but in the past there have been successful models in which the government itself issued the national currency, whether as paper notes or as the credit of the nation. A stellar example of this enlightened approach to money and credit was the Commonwealth Bank of Australia, which operated successfully as a government-owned bank for most of the 20th century. Rather than issuing “sovereign debt” — federal bonds indebting the nation to pay at interest in perpetuity — the government through the Commonwealth Bank issued “sovereign credit,” the credit of the nation advanced to the government and its constituents.

The Bank’s achievements were particularly remarkable considering that for its first eight years, from 1912 to 1920, it did not have the power to issue the national currency, and it operated without startup capital. Sir Denison Miller, Governor of the Bank from its creation in 1912 to 1923, was quoted in the Australian Press on July 7, 1921 as saying:

The whole of the resources of Australia are at the back of this bank, and so strong as this continent is, so strong is the Commonwealth Bank. Whatever the Australian people can intelligently conceive in their minds and will loyally support, that can be done.

…  The Commonwealth Bank received almost all of the powers of a central bank in emergency legislation passed during World War II, and at the end of the war it used this power to begin a dramatic expansion of the economy. In just five years, it opened hundreds of branches throughout Australia. In 1958 and 1959, the government split the bank, giving the central bank function to the Reserve Bank of Australia, with the Commonwealth Banking Corporation retaining its commercial banking functions. Both banks, however, remained publicly-owned.

Eventually, the Commonwealth Bank had branches in every town and suburb; and in the bush, it had an agency in every post office or country store. As the largest bank in the country, it set the rates and set policy, which the others had to follow for fear of losing customers. The Commonwealth Bank was widely perceived to be an insurance policy against abuse by private banks, serving to ensure that everyone had access to equitable banking. It functioned as a wholly owned state bank until the 1990s, when it was privatized. Its focus then changed to maximization of profits, with steady and massive branch and agency closures, staff layoffs, and reduced access to Automated Teller Machines and to cash from supermarket checkouts. It has now become just another part of the banking cartel, but proponents say it was once the lifeblood of the country. (08/04/10)

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E-Mail — I received the following note a few days ago. I think you may find it interesting. The writer is associated with an organization called Human Wisdom and one of their projects called Terra City, I first mentioned Terra City here on the SynEARTH Network in 2005. What follows is an excerpt from the Mr. Bostan’s letter with some interesting links he had included:

The Terra City project is slowly following its course. In February 2009 I sent this open letter to President Obama and other leaders worldwide:

View Video  of  A World without Recessions

Meanwhile I was blessed to generate a couple of other projects that brought much joy in my life. In 2009 I created what I call “Running Indeed” - a new fitness treadmill that allows us to actually walk, jog and run on it.

This year, “The Chopper” came up - a new VAWT wind turbine aiming to a higher efficiency than any existing model.

View Video of an animated illustration of this turbine.

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I wish you and everyone around you all the best!

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Sincerely,

.

Dan Bostan

Human Wisdom

Future Positive — After that last post we are going to need something a little lighter. The following positive post about our individually experienced economy is equally valid and equally true.

Being human requires being able to live comfortably with paradox and ambiguity. Enjoy today’s authors:

Jafree Ozwald and Margot Zaher write: Would you like to receive more wealth from the Universe? Would you like to be free from stressful financial issues forever? The secret to becoming Financially Receptive is to embrace a state of relaxation instead of stress about your current financial state. That’s right! The more you relax into and surrender your attempt to control your current stressful relationship with money, the more your energy field expands and opens, naturally attracting more prosperity into your life.

“When you are grateful,
fear disappears
and abundance appears.”
~ Anthony Robbins

The energy of relaxation carries a high vibration that instantly shifts you into a receptive state and consequently allows the Universe to fill your request for abundance. On the other hand, when you are stressed, you automatically shut down your manifesting channels, repelling that which you want to manifest. Vibrationally speaking, what you want to attract literally cannot get into your field because the energy of stress blocks it. So relax…really relax…. going infinitely deeper and deeper into the relaxation. Allow the feeling of any financial burden to be lifted from your life forever.

“The greatest revolution of our generation
is the discovery that human beings,
by changing the inner attitudes of their minds,
can change the outer aspects of their lives.”
~William James

The good news is that it is easy to relax and it feels soooo good to do so! Relaxation is your natural state, and therefore you can effortlessly tap into the part of you that is always relaxed and knows that you are divinely supported. Deep relaxation is something we ALL look forward to, yet how frequently do you give this gift to yourself? Can you simply decide to let yourself relax more than you ever have before this month? When you allow time to relax, you open up your field to receiving more abundance from the Universe.
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Simply let yourself decide when you are going to relax this week. Claim your space! Before you relax it’s always good to recite an all-powerful affirmation: “The more calm I am, the more open I will be to financial opportunity!” (08/02/10)

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CommUnity of Minds — What is coming next? Some of our wisest humans warn that we are rapidly approaching a negative turning point in our economy. This downturn will result in a major deflation. What is deflation? How does it work? How might it affect my life? Good questions! To provide us with some answers will require three voices—the first voice is spoken by a female, she is a economic realist who goes by the name of Stoneleigh. Stoneleigh2010 says deflation is already here and ignoring it would be really really stupid!

The second voice is that of a well educated, very successful individual known as Philip M. Halperin. He has lived and worked all over the world in many different fields, holds advanced degrees in three different subjects, and currently consults for Global Banking and Business.

Mr. Halperin1999 provides a review of John Kenneth Galbraith’s small  book, A Short History of Financial Euphoria originally published in 1990. It is considered one of the best introductions to understanding deflation.

And our third voice will be John Kenneth Galbraith1990 with the words from the first chapter from his book. From the Wikipedia 2010: “Galbraith was a prolific author who produced four dozen books and over a thousand articles on various subjects. Among his most famous works was a popular trilogy on economics, American Capitalism (1952), The Affluent Society (1958), and The New Industrial State (1967). He taught at Harvard University for many years. Galbraith was active in politics, serving in the administrations of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson; and among other roles served as United States Ambassador to India under Kennedy.” Without further ado, let’s get started with an overview from Stoneleigh.

Stoneleigh: It is surprising how many commenters, many of whom have for the longest time dismissed the possibility of deflation, often in a smugly superior manner, are ignorant of what it actually is. They look at Japan and ask how a country can become mired in a long and drawn-out deflation, and why the Japanese experience is so different from the rapid and accelerating deflationary spiral of the Great Depression.

They assume that central bankers possess the tools to prevent deflation, which suggests that they think those in control in other times or places must simply be too stupid to employ them. If it were so simple to prevent deflation then it would never have occurred anywhere, and yet it has.

Many persist in viewing deflation as a price phenomenon, rather than as the monetary phenomenon it always is. They cling to the notion of the fundamentals driving the credit markets, and then wonder why it is impossible to make accurate predictions. In short, the causation runs the other way. The availability of credit drives the real economy, because credit expansions are Ponzi schemes that generate large swings of positive-feedback (self-fulfilling prophecies) in both directions. It is only the context and scale that are different.

Japan’s experience of deflation has been blunted, so far, by the enormous quantity of money that they had available to burn through, which enabled them to put off addressing the bad debt in their banking system, and by the availability of a booming global economy, which allowed them to generate wealth from exporting goods to consumer societies. We do not have these luxuries. In place of a vast pile of money, we have a vast sinkhole of debt at every level – personal, corporate, governmental.

We will not have the ability to export, partly because we produce very little of value, but also because the global market will not have the purchasing power to allow the export model to survive in any case. We will be fully exposed in the short term to the logic of our credit expansion business model, which creates primarily virtual wealth, whereas Japan was not. We will resemble Argentina (only worse), not Japan.  (08/01/10)

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P2P Foundation — Timothy Wilken, MD writes: “Market is unsustainable, inefficient, and enormously destructive to the biosphere. And, it is failing. There will be no solutions from Big government or from Big business. All attempts to work within or through these failing systems will be wasted effort.

There is no need to fight against these obsolete systems. They are failing on their own.

Instead, we need to focus all our energy and efforts on creating synergic co-Operative alternatives. Giftegrity replaces market. Ortegrity replaces business. Synocracy replaces adversary-neutral government.

My description of such an alternative future is described here: Synergic Future and  Synergic Future II.

Enlightenment, Genius, and Wisdom are possibilities build into the structure of the human brain. Any human can become enlightened. Any human can learn to think like a genius. Any human can learn to be wise. We humans CAN solve our problems, if we simply change our minds and work together. And, the time to do so is NOW!

Those humans that choose to become enlightened, genius and wise, have no problem converting to synergic co-Operative alternatives. Once they know these alternatives are available, they will choose and support them whole-heartedly, thus the need for Project Enlightenment. I know of no faster way to convert adversaries and neutralists to synergists.

I think it is also time to create a Synergic Co-Operative Wikipedia of Best Practices.

Success in the Adversary world requires coercive force. You make others help you by hurting them.

Success in the Neutral world requires money, you pay others to help you.

Success in the Synergic world requires love, you help others and trust that they will help you.” (08/01/10)

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BBC Medical Science – Doctors say they have used a genetically engineered herpes virus to treat successfully patients with head and neck cancer. A London hospital trial of 17 patients found that use of the virus alongside chemotherapy and radiotherapy helped kill the tumours in most patients. It works by getting into cancer cells, killing them from the inside, and also boosting the patient’s immune system. Further trials are planned for later in the year.

Head and neck cancer, which includes cancer of the mouth, tongue and throat, affects up to 8,000 people every year in the UK. Study leader Dr Kevin Harrington, who is based at the Institute of Cancer Research in London, said current treatments were effective if the cancer was picked up early but that many patients were not diagnosed until it was more advanced. The herpes virus, which is also being tested in patients with skin cancer, is genetically manipulated so that it grows inside tumour cells but cannot infect normal healthy cells.

Once there it has a triple effect - it multiplies, killing tumour cells as it does so, it is engineered to produce a human protein that activates the immune system and it also makes a viral protein that acts as a red flag to immune cells.

In the 17 patients injected with the virus, in addition to their standard treatment, at the Royal Marsden Hospital, 93% showed no trace of cancer after their tumour had been surgically removed. More than two years later, 82% of patients had not succumbed to the disease. Only two of 13 patients given the virus treatment at a high dose relapsed, the journal Clinical Cancer Research reported.

There were no safety concerns with use of the virus, the researchers said, and it is hoped the virus could one day be used to fight other types of cancer. “Around 35 to 55% of patients given the standard chemotherapy and radiotherapy treatment typically relapse within two years, so these results compare very favourably,” said Dr Harrington. (08/01/10)

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BBC Environmental Science — A UN panel has added Florida’s Everglades National Park and Madagascar’s tropical rainforest to a list of world heritage sites at risk. Unesco’s World Heritage Committee said development in the Everglades had caused water flow to fall 60% in the wetland, a major wildlife sanctuary. The pollution level there was so high it was killing marine life, it added.

Illegal logging and poaching following last year’s military coup has meanwhile imperilled Madagascar’s rainforests. On Thursday, the committee voted to remove the Galapagos Islands from the at-risk list, saying Ecuador had made significant progress protecting its ecosystem. At a meeting in Brazil, the Unesco panel said the Everglades had been added to the List of World Heritage in Danger at the request of the US government because of “serious and continuing degradation of its aquatic ecosystem”.

Agricultural and urban development were the main reasons for the decrease in water flow and increase in pollution levels, Unesco said. It is the second time the Everglades, home to 20 endangered species, have been added. The wetlands were first classified as at risk between 1993 and 2007 after being devastated by Hurricane Andrew. “We commend the USA’s request to re-inscribe the site on the danger list, and its plans for major infrastructure overhaul to restore the Everglades’s fragile wetland ecosystem,” said Mariam Kenza Ali of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).

The Atsinanana rainforests of Madagascar, which lie within six national parks in the east of the island, were put on the list because of the threat to the many unique species inhabiting them, especially primates and lemurs. (08/01/10)

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BBC Science – The six human crew members of the International Space Station (ISS) have been forced to reduce power after half the cooling system suddenly shut down over the weekend. Nasa officials insisted the three Americans and three Russians aboard were not in danger. Urgent spacewalk repairs are being discussed for this week.

Without thermal controls, temperatures on the ISS’s Sun-facing side can soar to 121C (250F), plunging to minus 157C (-250F) on the dark side, Nasa says. “There might be a comfortable spot somewhere in the middle of the station, but searching for it wouldn’t be much fun,” a statement on its website adds. The station is now operating on a single string, the Associated Press reports, and has no safeguard in case of further cooling system failures.

Trouble arose on Saturday night when one of the two ammonia-fed cooling loops shut down, triggering alarms throughout the ISS. The two ammonia lines ensure that all the station’s electronic equipment does not overheat.

Astronaut Tracy Caldwell Dyson set in motion equipment shutdown procedures and, with crewmate Douglas Wheelock, installed a jumper cable to keep all the rooms cool.

The Global Positioning System circuit, several power converters and a set of devices that route commands to various pieces of equipment were switched off.

Two of the four gyroscopes - part of the space station’s pointing and navigating system - were initially shut down but the crew installed a jumper cable to bring up a third gyroscope, leaving the station in a much more stable position, AP says.

Flight controllers tried to restart the disabled ammonia pump early on Sunday but the circuit breaker tripped again.

Any repairs later this week almost certainly will involve replacing the faulty ammonia pump, the six team members face a difficult job that would require two spacewalks, AP adds. (08-01-10)

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BBC Technology — A Japanese electronics firm has shown off a vibration-harvesting generator that could replace standard batteries. The Vibration Energy Cell batteries deliver power after a vigorous shake. Brother Industries, better known for its line of printers, claims the devices could be used in place of AA or AAA batteries for some applications.

At an event in Tokyo, the firm showed the device powering a TV remote control, a remote switch for a lamp and an LED torch. The mechanism works similarly to that of a bicycle light dynamo, only in this instance movement from a few shakes provides the energy to power.

“Our Vibration Energy Cells generate electricity using a coil, a magnet, and condenser that charges electricity. These are all embedded in the battery,” a Brother spokesman told BBC News. “Because of its low output this type of cell is designed to be used for things such as TV remote controls and LED devices, which consume low power and do not consume electrical power continuously.”

The idea behind the technology is to remove the need for toxic rechargeable batteries and other disposable batteries that can harm the environment, said the company. So far, two of the AA sized prototypes developed produce a voltage of 3.2V or lower, which is just enough to charge low power consumption device such as TV remote controls.

Despite the low power, Carl Telford an analyst at electronics business consultants Strategic Business Insights, says the batteries are a significant break through with much potential. “It’s great because they will work OK in a low-power application for AA batteries that one can shake without breaking; a remote control, for example,” he told BBC News. “Of its size, it is small, compact, and directly compatible with existing power sources. Brother says that it can produce enough power at reasonably low frequencies, around 4-8Hz - this is impressive. “Walking with a device in your pocket would vibrate with a frequency of around 2Hz. You’d need to shake the remote quite briskly, but it would work.”

Other researchers are also working on motion-generated and alternative power for gadgets and electronics in the hope of making them self-sufficient. (07-22-10)

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BBC Weather Science –British Petroleum workers in the Gulf of Mexico have stopped drilling a relief well and are preparing to evacuate the oil spill site if a tropical cyclone approaches. There is a “near 100%” certainty that a cyclone will form over the Bahamas, the National Hurricane Center says. The path of the probable storm is not known, but because of the slow-moving vessels at the spill site, evacuation plans are well under way.

Work on the relief well could be suspended for up to two weeks.

A “packer” - a plug used during storms - has been placed in the relief well to stabilise it.

The government’s incident commander, Thad Allen, along with BP, must decide whether to leave the well shut during any storm, or to open it and allow oil to gush out into the sea.

Shell Oil has already begun to evacuate employees stationed out in the Gulf.

A US Coast Guard ship, the Decisive, is heading to the spill site. “It’s a controlled chaos out there,” Lt Patrick Montgomery told the Associated Press news.

The BP well is currently closed for an integrity test to see if there are weaknesses in the well or ruptures in the sea bed. The test was conditional on close seismic, acoustic and visual monitoring - all of which would have to stop during the evacuation as ships and remote-operated vehicles moved out of the potential path of the storm. (07-22-10)

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Future Positive — Reverend Doctor Dia Lynn writes: During my Ordination of Ministers’ Ceremony on May 31, 2010,  I spoke of my long term-commitment to service as a healer, using the poem from The Course in Miracles as my guidance.

“I am here only to be truly helpful.

I am here to represent He Who sent me.

I do not have to worry about what to say or what to do
because He who sent me will direct me.

I am content to be wherever He wishes me to be
knowing He goes there with me.

I will be healed as I let Him teach me to heal.”

–ACIM p.28

“‘I AM” is a statement of who is doing the healing.

“ONLY HERE” indicates having one’s consciousness completely here in the present without focus on the past (or the client’s past) or worry about the imagined future.

“TO BE” Beingness is a state of presence, receptivity, receptivity, a willingness or being available. It is different than doing or thinking. A healing modality may require some action but it is not the technique, machine or medicines that are creating the healing. The Course states that the body cannot heal, only the mind can correct error thoughts.

“TRULY HELPFUL” True indicates surrender to God’s will, being dedicated, authentic and in integrity in the role of healer with client (a brother in Christ). Helpful is full with extending God’s love to others as God loves us, unconditionally, impersonally and not special. (07-07-10)

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CommUnity of Minds – James Howard Kunstler writes: Now that congress has passed a fake financial reform bill that will accomplish absolutely nothing to correct a recently engrained culture of swindling, I want to start my own tea party. I don’t want to associate it with the other tea parties that have already formed because I am allergic to much of the idiot ideology they express – especially the bent for merging Christian fundamentalism with governance. …

My tea party would systematically dismantle Too-Big-To-Fail banks into smaller units subject to real reforms that would prevent any further “socialization” of losses by financial buccaneers. In effect, my party would re-enact the Glass-Steagall laws – and get rid of the 3000-page bundle of prevaricating crap in the current “Fin-Reg” law, which has been constructed with all the guile and mendacity of a collateralized debt obligation. My party would seek the return of banking to its function as a utility, while letting investment freebooters gamble with their own funds without any government back-up. (You’ll see the investment houses get small fast that way.)

My tea party would get the government out of the housing business. The main effect of 70 years of federal intervention for the sake of “affordable” housing has been to drive the price of housing up far beyond the ability of normal people to afford a place to live. And the current policies devised during the bubble crackup crisis have only served to prevent the price of houses from returning to a level where people might be willing to buy them. Of course, the whole process has also encouraged local governments to jack up property taxes to a level that can only be described as intolerable (in the 1776 sense of the word).

My party would undertake a rebuilding of the US passenger railroad system – not a flashy new “high speed” system, which we cannot afford, but the system that is lying out there rusting in the rain waiting to be fixed. This is imperative because we are on the verge of very disruptive problems with our oil supply which are going to put our beloved Happy Motoring matrix out-of-business. We also face the end of mass commercial aviation (even if flying remains an option for the wealthy). A restored passenger rail system will not solve all the problems connected with the demise of mass motoring, but it will help a lot, and would be an aid to the necessary re-activation of our small towns and cities as suburbia inevitably loses its value and utility.

The leaders of my tea party from the president on down would make a concerted effort to inform the public in straight talk about the real problems that we face involving peak oil and debt. My tea party would promote reality-based politics rather than techno-grandiose fantasies and wishful thinking. My tea party would encourage the necessary downscaling of all the critical activities of American daily life, including the re-localization of food production, the rebuilding of local commercial networks, the revitalization of the small towns and cities, and the difficult transition out of extreme car dependency. My tea party will do everything possible to construct a coherent consensus about what is happening to us and what we can do about it. My tea party is based on the true spirit of 1776 – the binding together of common interests and common culture – not the destruction of them as in the spirit of 1861. (07-07-10)

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RealClimate — Rasmus E. Benestad writes: According to some recent reports (e.g. PlanetArk; The Guardian), the public concern about global warming may be declining. It’s not clear whether this is actually true: a poll conducted by researchers at Stanford suggests otherwise. In any case, the science behind climate change has not changed (also see America’s Climate Choices), but there certainly remains a problem in communicating the science to the public.

This makes me think that perhaps a new simple mental picture of the situation is needed. We can look at climate models, and they tell us what we can expect, but it is also useful to have an idea of why increased greenhouse gas concentrations result in higher surface temperatures. The saying “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler” has been attributed to Albert Einstein, which also makes me wonder if we – the scientists – need to reiterate the story of climate change in a different way.

Gavin has already discussed this (also see here and here), but it may be necessary to tell story over again, with a slightly different slant. So how can we explain how the greenhouse effect (GHE) work in both simple terms and with a new angle? I also want to explain why the middle atmosphere cools with increasing greenhouse gas concentrations associated with an increased GHE. Here I will try to present a conceptual and comprehensive picture of GHE, explaining both the warming in the lower part of the atmosphere as well as the cooling aloft, and where only the most central features are included. Also, it is important to provide a good background, and we need to start with some very fundamental facts.

Four main physical aspects

Several factors are involved, and hence it may be useful to write a simple recipe for the GHE. This recipe then involves four main ingredients: (i) the relationship between temperature and light, (ii) the planetary energy balance, (iii) the distance light travels before being absorbed, and (iv) the relationship between temperature and altitude. (07-07-10)

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BBC Medical Science — A woman who suffered severe facial burns during the 7/7 terror attacks in London five years ago is showing off her new face to the world. The image of Davinia Turrell holding a gauze mask to her injured face came to symbolise the horror of the bombings. Five years on, her facial scars are gone thanks to specialists at London’s Chelsea and Westminster Hospital. …

The 29-year-old, who is now called Davinia Douglass after marrying last year, survived the fallout of the detonated bomb at Edgware Road station, but the “ball of fire” created in the carriage scorched the skin from the left side of her face. Davinia told the Evening Standard: “I walked through the entire length of the train. I remember people screaming and sounding shocked as I walked through the back carriages. I didn’t realise I was injured, I was still in shock. I remember telling people that I needed to get to work.”

Photographers captured her as she was helped across the road to a makeshift A&E station by former fireman Paul Dadge while wearing the protective mask. Mrs Douglass was subsequently treated at the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital - the only hospital to offer a specialist burns service in London.

She said: “I went from being convinced that I would be seriously scarred for life and that my life would be ruined, to being hopeful that the medics who were looking after me would be able to put me back together as I had been before.” (07-07-10)

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BBC Medical Science — Having depression may nearly double the risk of developing dementia later in life, new research suggests. Experts know that the two conditions often co-exist, but it is not clear if one actually leads to the other. Now two studies published in the American journal Neurology suggest depression does mean dementia is more likely, although they do not show why.

And the researchers stress that the findings merely reveal a link, not a direct cause. They say more studies are needed to find out why the two conditions are linked. They believe brain chemistry and lifestyle factors like diet and the amount of social time a person engages in may play a role.

Dr Jane Saczynski of the University of Massachusetts, who led the first of the two studies, said: “While it’s unclear if depression causes dementia, there are a number of ways depression might impact the risk of dementia. Inflammation of brain tissue that occurs when a person is depressed might contribute to dementia. Certain proteins found in the brain that increase with depression may also increase the risk of developing dementia.”

Her study, which followed 949 elderly people for 17 years, showed dementia more often followed a bout of depression. By the end of the study, 164 of the people had developed dementia. Specifically, 22% of those who had depression went on to develop dementia compared to 17% of those who did not have depression.

The second study, meanwhile, followed 1,239 US people and looked at the number of times a person experienced depression related to their risk of dementia. It showed that the more times someone experienced depression, the higher their dementia risk was. Having two or more episodes of depression nearly doubled the risk of dementia. (07-07-10)

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BBC Science — A Dutch inquiry into the UN’s climate science panel has found “no errors that would undermine the main conclusions” on probable impacts of climate change. However, it says the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) should be more transparent in its workings. The Dutch parliament asked for the inquiry after two mistakes were identified in the IPCC’s 2007 report.

The inquiry is the latest in a series that have largely backed “mainstream” climate science against detractors. The Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency (PBL) does not give the panel a completely clean bill of health, however.

Whereas the IPCC’s landmark Fourth Assessment (AR4) from 2007 “conclusively shows” that impacts of human-induced climate change are already tangible in many places around the world and will become more serious as temperatures increase, PBL also says the foundation for some of the specific projections “could have been made more transparent”. …

PBL now accepts the blame for some of the mistake lies within its own doors.

“We acknowledge that this error was not the fault of the IPCC… the error was made by a contributing author from the PBL, and the (co-ordinating) lead authors (of AR4 chapters) are not to blame for relying on Dutch information provided by a Dutch agency,” it said. (07-06-10)

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BBC Science — Scientists have developed way of predicting how likely a person is to live beyond the age of 100. The breakthrough, described in the journal Science, is based on 150 genetic “signposts” found in exceptionally long-lived people.

The researchers created a mathematical model, which takes information from these signposts to work out a person’s chance of reaching 100. It is based on the largest study of centenarians in the world.

This is a rare trait - only one in 6,000 people in industrialised countries reaches such a ripe old age. And 90% them are still disability free by the age of 93. The researchers now think they have cracked the genetic secret of this longevity. The team originally embarked on their study in 1995. Since then, they have scanned the genomes of 1,000 centenarians.

They identified genetic markers that are “most different” between centenarians and randomly selected individuals. (07-01-10)

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BBC Science — It is one of the most exquisite views we have ever had of the Earth. This colourful new map traces the subtle but all pervasive influence the pull of gravity has across the globe. Known as a geoid, it essentially defines where the level surface is on our planet; it tells us which way is “up” and which way is “down”.

It is drawn from delicate measurements made by Europe’s Goce satellite, which flies so low it comes perilously close to falling out of the sky. Scientists say the data gathered by the spacecraft will have numerous applications. One key beneficiary will be climate studies because the geoid can help researchers understand better how the great mass of ocean water is moving heat around the world.

The new map was presented here in Norway’s second city at a special Earth observation (EO) symposium dedicated to the data being acquired by Goce and other European Space Agency (Esa) missions.

Europe is currently in the midst of a huge programme of EO development which will see it launch some 20 missions worth nearly eight billion euros before the decade’s end. The Gravity Field and Steady-State Ocean Circulation Explorer (Goce) is at the front of this armada of scientific and environmental monitoring spacecraft.

Launched in 2009, the sleek satellite flies pole to pole at an altitude of just 254.9km - the lowest orbit of any research satellite in operation today. The spacecraft carries three pairs of precision-built platinum blocks inside its gradiometer instrument that sense accelerations which are as small as 1 part in 10,000,000,000,000 of the gravity experienced on Earth. (06/28/10)

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BBC Plant Science — In a small, noisy laboratory, tucked away in London’s Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, a tiny plant is growing. It looks just like a very small parsley bush, but it is actually a very special little plant indeed. Clean air has to be constantly circulated in the lab to protect it from any bacteria.

This precious specimen is the Anogramma ascensionis fern, commonly known as the parsley fern. Since the 1950s, botanists believed it to be extinct.

It is native to Ascension - an island in the South Atlantic, which is one of Britain’s overseas territories. And a small project supported by Kew’s overseas territories programme has rediscovered and rescued it - a timely success story, as this year has been dubbed International Year of Biodiversity.

Kew botanist Phil Lamden and local conservation officer Stedson Stroud found the plucky little plant clinging to a precarious existence on a mountainside in the harsh volcanic landscape.

“We were down the back of Ascension’s Green Mountain, which has very, very steep slopes. You have to be really careful because if you slip you’re a goner,” Mr Stroud recalled.

“And we came across this beautiful little fern and immediately knew it was the lost Anogramma that had been extinct for the last 60 years.”

Ascension is covered by bleak, forbidding lava flows, and only 10 plant species are known to be truly “endemic” - found nowhere else in the world. (06-25-10)

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StarChild Science — When asked, What was her inspiration for the Hear the Call Poster, Judy Wilken answered: When I was a small girl my grandfather would hoist me up onto his shoulders on warm summer mornings and take me down the “back alley”, as he called it, to the post office to get his mail. On the way down the alley he would ask me to tell him everything I saw in each of the neighbor’s backyard garden. What I saw several decades ago has always been with me. My grandfather was a railroad engineer in Saskatchewan, Canada in the 1930’s through the1960’s. His most enjoyable runs were when he delivered the spring wheat harvest across the country every fall in his steam engine. All the farmers knew him. He was their extended arm, pouring grain into their silos every September without a lick; he was on time, on track. They could depend on him. They used to call him ‘chief’ when he stepped down out of his steam engine. When he wasn’t in his steam engine he would be at home surrounding himself with children. He enjoyed being with children. Children from the neighborhood would knock on his door when they knew he was home and beg him to come outside and swing them on the tire swing he made for his own children in his front yard. That swing lasted long enough for his great grandchildren to swing on it.

I remember the “back alley” walks as if they happened just yesterday. They began the same way all summer long. Grandpa would walk through his own garden, past his blueberry bushes, rows of corn, turnips, radishes; green beans winding up pole after pole; onions and carrots. He would open his back gate with me on his shoulders, turn to the right revealing the “back alley” bare and straight, dirt in chunks, no ditches, and already steaming hot. It was bordered with fences, each one was high and colored white like clouds. The alley had great proportions for a five year old; it was wider than Main Street and prairie-flat. From Grandpa’s shoulders I could easily see fresh green vine leaves spreading down the alley side of the fences; large traffic-light yellow sunflowers lopped over some of their tops. I always looked to the very end of the alley at the beginning of our walks because I thought that when we got to where it was small and narrow that meant I would be this close to licking a cold ice cream cone at the Creamery after Grandpa got his mail.

As soon as we entered the “back alley” it was easy to see the air was trafficked by more life than just me and Grandpa: Bees, dragonflies, butterflies and red-throated Anna hummers crossed the alley ahead of us constantly. The bees must have claimed the air first because there were so many of them. They buzzed back and forth, from one side of the alley to the other side while snow white cabbage moths fluttered softly past my head. When grandpa decided to rest, he would lean against a fence and ask me to tell him everything I saw in a neighbor’s garden. “Don’t tell me how many things you see. Tell me what you see,” he would say. “Well,” I would begin, “Mrs. Dunsmore’s potatoes are pushing right up out of the dirt already.” I told him as I looked down into her garden. “And her leeks are tall and straight. They look like green pencils. There’s a whole bunch of them.” Oftentimes I would watch a few of Mrs. Dunsmore’s grandchildren run in and out of the rows of leeks while singing something about ‘leekie’. That’s when Grandpa would begin laughing so hard he had to bend over to catch his breath. “The leeks are for her cock-a-leekie soup,” he managed to tell me as he straightened up. “Mrs. Dunsmore is Scottish you know.” Mrs. Dunsmore planted her leeks and carrots at the base of her backporch steps where it was easy to pull out a handful when she needed them. Her onions were surrounded by yellow crocus flowers just beyond the steps and Prairie Lilies bordered the foundation of the entire back of her house every summer making the bell peppers and amaranth seem small in comparison. Climbing rose bushes laced her kitchen windows while butterflies walked straight into their pink blossoms, as Grandpa said, “as if they owned the joint.” I couldn’t leave her garden without reaching into it with my nose and inhaling deeply. One morning I told her her garden was the best thing I had ever smelled. “That’s because all the butterflies are like flying flowers,” she told me. When our “back alley” walks started early in the morning, it wasn’t uncommon to see a few of her grandchildren leaning into her strawberry patch in their pajamas, tossing each strawberry into their mouths like they were eating red candy. (06/12/10)

Read Judy’s full essay… ……………….Get your own Hear the Call Poster…

BBC Science & Technology — The 200-sq-m (2,100-sq-ft) membrane is attached to a small disc-shaped spacecraft that was put in orbit last month by an H-IIA rocket.

Ikaros will demonstrate the principle of using sunlight as a simple and efficient means of propulsion. The technique has long been touted as a way of moving spacecraft around the Solar System using no chemical fuels.

The mission team will be watching to see if Ikaros produces a measurable acceleration, and how well its systems are able to steer the craft through space. The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (Jaxa) said in a statement that its scientists and engineers had begun to deploy the solar sail on 3 June (JST). On 10 June, Jaxa said, confirmation was received that the sail had expanded successfully. Some thin-film solar cells embedded in the membrane were even generating power, it added.

The principle of solar sailing is a simple one. Photons, or particles of light, falling on a highly reflective, ultra-thin (in this case, just 7.5 microns) surface will exert a pressure. The force is tiny but continuous, and over time should produce a considerable velocity.

Solar sails will never replace conventional propulsion systems like chemical thrusters, but they do have the potential to play a much greater role in certain types of space mission. (06/11/10)

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Future Positive – In followup to the publication  Fouad Khan’s hypothesis On the Extinction of Species, I am pleased to publish some early comments on his seminal work.

Khan tells us that exponential growth whether in bacteria or humans has a major impact on the finite environment it finds it self in. This is just as true for a culture of bacteria living in finite growth tank in a laboratory at the University of Houston or the entire human species living on a finite planet called Earth.

Timothy– I appreciate you sending this.  I will print it out and read it. But as per the above, is this not a re-statement of Malthus? (I’m not anti-Malthus, by the way.)

Khan has discovered that exponential growth increases the rate of change of entropy,

This is not surprising, since entropy is a function of the dispersion of energy.

Now the only way for us to avoid extinction is to change our behavior. We must reduce our population. I’m sure this will happen whether we put our minds to it or not. And I don’t mean to be snooty about it.  I see our numbers falling off a cliff in the next 50 years. Oil depletion = food depletion.  Then figure in social disorder, geopolitical discord, etc.

James Howard Kunstler

Jim,

Thanks for your quick response. I look forward to your thoughts when you have had time to digest the full paper. I very much enjoyed The Long Emergency and World Made by Hand. I have reposted many of your articles on my websites. I most enjoy your posts on the positive things we could do. If we weren’t so determined to commit humanicide.

Malthus was correct in many ways, but he lived 1776 to 1834. Rudolf Clausius coined the term entropy in 1850. What is remarkable about Khan’s work is his connection of relatively unlimited resources to exponential growth resulting in a hyperentropic growth phase. What overwhelms a species is not change, but the rate of change.

Thus Khan gets us out of the world of opinion and into the world of scientific proof.

I have suggested that what Khan called hyperentropic growth phase could also be expressed as a hyper-entropic pollution phase. Malthus thought the limitation on population would be only because we ran out of food. Khan’s work demonstrates that we might actually have enough food, but poison ourselves with our waste.

I don’t know if Khan did this, but it would be interesting to see what happens if you kept feeding the bacteria in the growth tank benzene, thus no shortage of food, but the effects of hypertropic growth would still impact their finite living space.

By the way, I discovered Khan as one of the commentors on Clusterfuck Nation. Small world.

I also got a quick response from Jay Hanson. He said he would take a look and get back to me.

Best,

Timothy

Dear Timothy,

Thanks for spreading the word on my book, and for your very apt clarifications to Jim’s comments.

I’ve been an avid reader of Mr. Kunstler as well for a while now. I even dug out an old copy of The Life of Byron Jaynes from somewhere and read it; very immersive and entertaining.

You are right about Malthus. What he’s talking about, to oversimplify to some extent, is the finiteness of any one resource in a system. I think, that is just one physical manifestation of what is essentially, a living species running out of breathing space on the spectrum of permissible rates of change of entropy (the band of rates to which the species can adapt). In humanity’s case for instance, we’d have been heading towards a serious disruption to our civilization right about now anyway -even if the earth did have a “creamy nougat centre of oil”- because of global climate change. That would not have been a Malthusian collapse, but it certainly would have been a case of a species rendering its own host system inadaptable for itself by accelerating the rate of change of entropy for that entire system.

A Malthusian collapse would have been the same thing as well, just expressed differently in physical terms.

Timothy, the writings of both, Mr. Kunstler and Mr. Hanson have informed and entertained me immensely over the years and I am looking forward to their feedback on this.

Regards,

Fouad Khan.