Subject: Viridian Note 00075: Kyoto Politics
X-UIDL: ab75fafc2d1e207a2094d0ae29b9b219
Key concepts: inadequate government, Kyoto Protocol, US
Senate
Attention Conservation Notice: it's entirely and utterly
political. There are 1,300 words of it.
Links: Alliance to Save Energy
http://www.ase.org/
Senator Thad Cochran, Republican from Mississippi
http://www.senate.gov/~cochran/
United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change
(includes full text of Kyoto Protocol):
http://www.unfccc.de
Republican Senators Resent Clinton's Temerity on Kyoto:
http://www.senate.gov/~rpc/releases/1997/Gwupdate-mw.htm
Kirk Fordice, Governor of Mississippi, on Kyoto Protocol:
http://www.govoff.state.ms.us/pr051998.htm
Horrific EPA graph of growing climate temperature
anomalies:
http://www.epa.gov/globalwarming/news/j-dlo_pg.gif
Entries in the Viridian Couture Contest:
None. Greenhouse heat wave in effect, Viridians
reduced to shabby sombreros and gym shorts.
This contest expires July 21, 01999.
In Viridian Note 00074: "Browning the US Govt," we
described how Senator Thad Cochran of Mississippi tried to
stop the President of the United States from mandating
less CO2 use in the federal government. On the face of
it, the Senator's act seems incredibly stupid, vindictive
and pointless, and was promptly denounced as
"unbelievable."
While politics are of tangential interest to the
Viridian movement, it's important to understand why the US
government has become so dysfunctional in climate issues.
Why have even simple, "no-brainer" reform efforts that
actually *save taxpayers money* become areas of partisan
confrontation?
Why did Thad Cochran do this apparently ludicrous
thing? Let's speculate, shall we?
It would be too simple to denounce Senator Cochran as
a corrupt puppet of the carbon-mining industries. This
kind of polarizing demogoguery is boring and
counterproductive. It's been done to death.
Obviously the carbon industries are major players in
the energy process. It could scarcely be otherwise. For
instance, the recent Interior Appropriations Bill (which
Senator Cochran deliberately amended in order to frustrate
the President), contains about 300 million dollars in
Energy Department federal subsidies for oil and coal.
But the carbon industries don't own Thad Cochran.
Mississippi isn't Kuwait. He's never been an out-and-out
oil man, unlike, for instance, George Bush. There's some
oil and a whole lot of foul, soft-lignite coal in
Mississippi, with mining representing maybe 2 percent of
the state's economy, but Senator Cochran's main
legislative interest is catfish farming.
Maybe the guy is just incomprehensibly mean-spirited.
Perhaps he hates Bill Clinton so much that, like many
Republican zealots, he's willing to slash his own wrists
to bleed on Clinton's shoes. But no. Thad Cochran is a
former Eagle Scout, a white-haired Baptist lawyer from
Mississippi whose demeanour is commonly described as
"courtly." Cochran is the senior Senator from
Mississippi, a career pol who wins his re-elections by
large, cozy margins. Cochran pre-dates the savage trench-
warfare epoch of his junior Senator, Trent Lott, and the
politically extinguished Newt Gingrich. The Senator has
been in power a long time. He is not childish, and he
doesn't make trouble merely for trouble's sake.
The Alliance to Save Energy artfully suggests that
Senator Cochran is attempting to fleece the American
taxpayer while stuffing fat back into the government. If
mere pork was the goal, Senator Cochran would be doing
what he specializes in doing, i.e., rural Mississippi
water projects.
No, Thad Cochran has two basic reasons to do what
he did. Defending the Senate's privileges, and
ideological pressure.
First, the jealous Senate. In introducing his
amendment, the Senator irately declared that the
President's action was a "thinly disguised effort to
implement the Kyoto Agreement." Why does he consider
this a bad thing? Because it makes the Senate into a
potted plant, that's why. The Senate believes it has
already successfully dealt with Kyoto. The Senate, in the
bipartisan persons of Senators Byrd and Hagel, carried out
a maneuver, back in 1997, called "putting the treaty in
the parking lot."
The Senate didn't want a straight-up,
confrontational vote on the Kyoto treaty, because this
might cause political stress. So, they simply stuck the
treaty into permanent limbo, by passing the "Byrd-Hagel
Resolution." This resolution states, more or less, that
the US Senate is not going to consider the Kyoto Protocol
unless it's firmly established from the get-go that the
United States comes out on top in the UN negotiations no
matter what.
Byrd-Hagel is a silly resolution, but the text of
the resolution isn't really important. The resolution's
formal text is just vapid rhetorical dogfood for various
economic and military American interest groups. The
point of the Byrd-Hagel resolution is to exploit the
Senate's privilege to "advise and consent" on foreign
treaties.
In practice, "advising and consenting" has become a
procedural brake. The Senate can quietly pocket
treaties, and do basically nothing, forever, while
avoiding any serious political costs. The legislative
woods are full of vital yet uncertified international
treaties stuck permanently in the US Senate, such as
nuclear arms accords. US Administrations and their State
Departments, in despair, have come to act as if the
treaties were in force anyway.
It is demeaning for the Senate to have their bluff
called in this way. It's highly irritating to have Bill
Clinton do what little he can to behave as if the Kyoto
treaty were in force. Therefore, Cochran threw a
procedural spanner into the works, by shifting the ground
to a different area, where the Senate controls the purse
strings.
Cochran's been made to look bad == after all, it's
true that he is wasting money unnecessarily, and surprise
amendments are always a cheap shot, and when you come
right down to it, Senator Cochran is not a very bright man
== but he can afford it, and he probably considers the
humiliation worth it. His point was to make Clinton pay a
price for encroaching on the balance of powers.
Then there's the second matter: rabid anti-Kyoto
ideology. I frankly doubt that Senator Cochran himself
cares much about the substance of the Kyoto Accords one
way or the other. He's never made a major issue of global
warming, and the Senate has pretty well set it up so that
he'll never have to take a public stand. But back home in
Mississippi, the Republican Governor, Kirk Fordice,
regards Kyoto as tantamount to foreign invasion and
economic catastrophe. And the Governor has said so,
loudly, and brought pressure on his state's Senators.
As we have stated in previous Notes (see Note 00009)
we Viridians aren't big fans of the Kyoto Protocol.
Assuming the treaty is ratified (it won't be), even
assuming it's efficiently enforced worldwide (it can't
be), Kyoto is basically the industrial status quo of 1988,
forever. That is way, way too much carbon dioxide.
Kyoto's proposed scheme appears better than exploding
growth rates in carbon dioxide, but Kyoto's bogus solution
is nowhere near enough to get the planet off the hook.
Carbon use has to crash drastically, fast. It has to
wiped out by the same process that created it, industrial
revolution.
Kyoto is a bland assertion, by 173 separate national
governments, that rickety confederations can control
global industry. Kyoto is all about ration-tickets, caste
systems, and national-boundary bailiwicks. The Kyoto
Protocol looks like a document from a vanished epoch.
Governments can't even control their own currencies any
more, much less offshore maquilladorasx and carbon moguls
like Qaddafi and Saddam Hussein. Even the well-organized
and financed American government has blundered drastically
with its state-sponsored emissions standards == America's
best smog-control efforts gave rise to ghastly mutants
like the Sport Utility Vehicle.
Kyoto represents alien political control of the
untrammeled pioneer spirit of Henry Ford, Thomas Edison
and John D. Rockefeller, legendary American heroes who
are, without question, the three sinister godfathers of
the Greenhouse Effect. The implications of Kyoto are just
too much for certain people to take, and Kyoto is
especially too much for particularly unpleasant, paranoid
people.
In further Notes, we will examine some of Kyoto's
most virulent enemies.
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I'M DIGGING COAL WITH MY RETURN KEY
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Topic 39 of 52 [spirit]: Viridian List
Response 86 of 136: Paul Terry Walhus (terry) * Sat, Jul 3, 1999 (02:53) * 2 lines
Comments?
Topic 39 of 52 [spirit]: Viridian List
Response 87 of 136: Paul Terry Walhus (terry) * Fri, Jul 9, 1999 (12:08) * 418 lines
Key concepts: lobbying groups, political power structure
in USA, Viridian Notes Table of Contents 00001-00075
Attention Conservation Notice: It's political. It goes on
quite a while.
Entries in the Viridian Couture Contest:
http://www.powerbase-alpha.com/bigmike/computercasual.html
http://humlog.homestead.com/viridianart/Fashion0110.html
Prada's Fall 99 "EcoWarrior" get-up, pirate-scanned out of
July 01999 issue of VOGUE:
http://www.well.com/conf/mirrorshades/viridian/contest5.ht
ml
(((Thanks for showing us how the pros do it, Miuccia!
Everybody go click the banner ads in gratitude at
http://www.vogue.com!)))
Links: http://www.wholeearthmag.com
Summer 1999 issue of Whole Earth magazine has lead article
on "Viridian Manifesto"
http://www.bespoke.org/viridian
Tor Kristensen remarks:
"The links in the bespoke.org Viridian Notes are now
active (clickable). Please notify the Viridian public that
I need an Archive Administrator to update the Viridian
archive while I'm in Alaska. It's dead simple. Copy,
Paste, Click 'submit.'"
Tor Kristensen tor@araneum.dk^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^***?
Sources: FORTUNE magazine December 01997
When you're baking in inhuman heat beneath an angry sky,
just as, for instance, millions of inhabitants of the East
Coast of the United States are doing as I write this, the
carbon dioxide problem can seem monstrous and unstoppable.
After all, the planet's entire atmosphere has been soiled.
There's no place left for anyone to hide. It's easy to
feel helpless and to become very paranoid.
No entity anywhere seems to be helping climate matters
much. Especially in politics. The National Wildlife
Federation's *Conservation Directory* (44th edition) lists
no fewer than 3,000 government and private environmental
groups, in the USA and Canada alone. Many of them have
been beavering along in the halls of power for decades
now. Yet we're still roasting in our own exhaust spew,
just like the turkeys we are.
But in fact, to date, CO2 has never become a central
political issue. The Kyoto treaty is buried under the US
Senate's carpet. Even the political anti-Kyoto forces,
(and there are plenty of them with plenty of funds) are
very much fringe amateur small-fry, power-politically
speaking. Before I tear into the anti-Kyoto groups as if
they were causing the end of the world (as in point of
fact they may be), it's useful to put CO2 politics into a
broader political perspective.
We'll stick to an American political perspective for
the time being, because I haven't found good data yet for
other juridictions, and the Americans clearly play a
major, starring role in the planet's CO2 crisis.
Who actually runs the American political system?
Could it be CIA/NSA/FBI? The Military-Industrial Complex?
Freemasons? The ultra-rich? The Skull and Bones Society?
The 4,312 guys on the grassy knoll who shot Jack Kennedy?
Alas no!
In December 01997, FORTUNE magazine took the
trouble to conduct a formal poll of members of Congress,
Congressional staffers, and White House officials. The
magazine, aided by two professional pollsters, asked 2,200
politicians to rank American interest groups in terms of
their political clout. These were America's top
politicians, talking about the people who tell them what
to do. Who can get their way from the US government? Who
do American politicians fear to cross? Who really compels
their political attention?
Interest groups have their ups and downs, just like
all other aspects of industrial democracy. It's only a
year and a half since the FORTUNE poll though, and we're
still in the same Administration. So this is a viable
snapshot of the American political landscape, seen from
the top of the system.
FORTUNE did the ranking, but I'm doing my own helpful
commentary. I hope that non-Americans may find this list
of particular use.
1. American Association of Retired Persons
Old people who vote faithfully and have plenty to gain and
lose by government subsidy.
2. American Israel Public Affairs Committee
Wealthy, discreet alien sympathizers with a focussed
agenda.
3. AFL-CIO
Largest labor union. Historically dominates Democratic
Party.
4. National Federation of Independent Business
The small-business lobby.
5. Association of Trial Lawyers of America
The privileged legal caste. They know how legislators
think and act because many of them are future, current or
former legislators.
6. National Rifle Association of America
Notoriously zealous American armed-populace freaks and the
industries that supply their ammo. The classic single-
issue pressure group.
7. Christian Coalition
TV-satellite evangelical empire. Good at grass-roots
attacks on Republican party structure.
8. American Medical Association
The privileged medical caste.
9. National Education Association
Huge numbers of government-employed teachers.
10. National Right to Life Committee
Abortion zealots.
11. National Association of Realtors
Huge real-estate industry is highly vulnerable to changes
in federal tax structure.
12. American Bankers Association
The privileged financial caste.
13. National Association of Manufacturers
Classic iron-bending industrial lobby.
14. American Federation of State, County,
and Municipal Employees
Government workers who have everything to gain and lose by
activities and budgets of governments.
15. Chamber of Commerce of the U.S.A.
Broad-scale business lobby.
16. Veterans of Foreign Wars of the United States
Caste of military veterans. Formerly in government
uniform, receive many formal privileges, have own Cabinet
officer.
17. American Farm Bureau Federation
Agro-business.
18. Motion Picture Association of America
American global entertainment complex: movie, video, DVD
and ancillary rights subdivision.
19. National Association of Home Builders of the U.S.
Home construction industry.
20. National Association of Broadcasters
Traditional broadcast television lobby.
21. American Hospital Association
Lower and industrial ranks of medical caste
22. National Governors' Association
Fifty state executives below federal level, common source
of Presidential candidates.
23. American Legion
Military caste.
24. National Restaurant Association
Food/entertainment industry.
25. International Brotherhood of Teamsters
Large,scary labor union notorious for organized-crime
ties.
*26 United Auto Workers
Labor union, and the very first group in the listing that
might have any direct interest in CO2 issues.
27 Independent Insurance Agents of America
Insurance industry.
28 National Retail Federation
Retailing industry.
*29 American Trucking Associations Inc.
Transportation lobby, another group of CO2 interest.
30 Health Insurance Association of America
USA is unique in having no government health policy,
creating anomolous boom situation among medical lobbyists.
*31 American Automobile Manufacturers Assn.
Auto lobby. Major CO2 greenhouse interests.
32 Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association
Yet more medical lobbyists.
33 Business Roundtable
Ultra-wealthy business caste.
34 National Beer Wholesalers Association
Drug industry, heavily regulated, still remembers
America's "noble experiment" with alcohol prohibition.
35 Natl. Com. to Preserve Social Security and Medicare
Elderly demographic group protecting cross-generational
subsidies.
*36 National Automobile Dealers Association
Car salespeople. They sell large devices that spew CO2.
*37 Sierra Club
First environmental group on the list, finally in at
number 37. Old, wealthy, well-organized. But you could
fill a banquet hall with powerful Washington lobbyists
before the first environmentalist got a Birkenstocked foot
in the door.
38 American Federation of Teachers
Another teacher's lobby.
39 Pharm. Research & Manufacturers of America
Pharmaceutical lobby.
40 Children's Defense Fund
Social-welfare lobby beloved of Hillary Clinton and
others.
*41 American Petroleum Institute
The first Washington lobby that can be unhesitatingly
classified as a Viridian class-enemy, with direct
responsibility for climate damage, and compelling,
unavoidable reasons to damage more and more.
42 American Insurance Association
Yet another insurance lobby.
43 NARAL
Reproductive rights zealots.
44 American Council of Life Insurance
More insurance.
45 Recording Industry Association
American global music entertainment complex.
46 American Bar Association
Legal caste.
47 Securities Industry Association
Financial caste.
48 National Association of Wholesaler-Distributors
Business distributor lobby
49 National Assn. of Letter Carriers of the U.S.
Postal employee lobby.
50 Tobacco Institute
Nicotine drug industry.
So much for the top fifty power players. As you can see,
climate scarcely ranks at all. This is not without its
benefits, as, if things work out the way we Viridians hope
they will, climate will quickly cease to matter
politically. We don't *want* a permanent political
interest in CO2 issues. That might be fatal. If climate
spins so drastically out of control that climate becomes a
long-term, central political crisis, it probably means
catastrophe for civilization.
Just for fun, here's a swarm of the following fifty minor
players, where the situation remains very the same.
51 National Cable Television Association
52 National Council of Senior Citizens
53 Communications Workers of America
54 Service Employees International Union
55 Independent Bankers Association of America
*56 International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers
Labor union including electric utilities.
57 United Steelworkers of America
58 Associated General Contractors of America
*59 National Rural Electric Cooperative Association
Electric utilities, possible solar, wind
60 Mortgage Bankers Association of America
61 American Cancer Society
*62 Citizens for a Sound Economy
Anti-environmental group
63 Intl. Assoc. of Machinists & Aerospace Workers
64 Grocery Manufacturers of America
65 Planned Parenthood Federation of America
66 Americans for Tax Reform
67 National Association of Life Underwriters
68 Handgun Control Inc.
69 Beer Institute
70 Credit Union National Association
*71 League of Conservation Voters
Environmental group
72 United States Conference of Mayors
73 National League of Cities
*74 Chemical Manufacturers Association
CO2
*75 Independent Petroleum Assn. of America
Oil drillers, carbon miners
*76 National Cattlemen's Beef Association
Methane problems, highly energy-intensive industry.
77 National Association of Independent Insurers
78 American Nurses Association
79 Natural Resources Defense Council
80 United States Telephone Association
81 Food Marketing Institute
*82 United Mine Workers of America
Carbon mining a major sub-industry.
83 National Association of Securities Dealers
84 Bond Market Association
85 Hotel Empl. and Restaurant Empl. Intl. Union
*86 Environmental Defense Fund
Legal arm, carries out class-action lawsuits.
*87 American Forest and Paper Association
Cuts trees and plants them.
*88 National Wildlife Federation
Biodiversity.
*89 American Lung Association
Anti-soot group.
*90 Edison Electric Institute
Electrical power lobby.
91 Common Cause
92 American Heart Association
93 League of Women Voters
94 Federation of American Health Systems
95 Distilled Spirits Council of the U.S.
96 National Association of Counties
97 Newspaper Association of America
98 Air Line Pilots Association International
99 Union of Needletrades, Ind., and Tex. Empl.
100 Electronic Industries Association
You'll notice that the "Viridian Design Movement" is
nowhere listed. But on the other hand, neither is the
"Global Climate Coalition," with their vile assertions
that CO2 is just great for Mom and apple pie. It's still
hand-to-hand battle among small clusters of savages, out
on the CO2 frontier. And with luck, it will stay that way
until no one has to worry about it any more.
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Table of Contents 1-75
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Viridian Notes 1-75 (complete with titles, some
retroactively bestowed):
00001: Viridian Design Speech
00002: Viridian List Mechanics
00003: Viridian Design Principles
00004: Historical Awareness
00005: Viridian Aesthetics
00006: Floods 1
00007: Floods 2
00008: The Science Press on Global Warming
00009: The Science Press on Global Warming, Rewritten
00010: Comments from Viridians
00011: Viridian Mascot Contest
00012: Web Links
00013: Link Criticism
00014: Remembrance Agents
00015: Weather Violence
00016: Bio-Refineries
00017: Viridian Aphorisms
00018: The Viridian Model Family
00019: Viridian Domains of Interest
00020: Energy Reform, the Swedish "Solution"
00021: The World Is Becoming Uninsurable, Part 1
00022: The World Is Becoming Uninsurable, Part 2
00023: The World is Becoming Uninsurable, Part 3
00024: Kelly's Koan
00025: German Greens
00026: Viridian Aphorisms
00027: Viridian Graphics
00028: Viridian Gardening
00029: The Interfund
00030: The View From Ecotopia
00031: Self-destructive Jungles
00032: The Viridian Refueling Project
00033: Viridian Aesthetics: Andy Goldsworthy
00034: Researching Andy Goldsworthy
00035: Viridian Aesthetics: Landscape Transformation
00036: Offshore Wind Power
00037: Viridian Commentary
00038: Viridian Aphorisms
00039: Starck's New Catalog
00040: German Politics
00041: The Viridian Product Catalog
00042: the Viridian Alcohol Cellphone
00043: the Viridian Electrical Meter
00044: The Viridian Service Station
00045: Twentieth-century Thinking
00046: German Bankers Love German Greens
00047: Viridian Imaginary Products Exhibition
00048: Viridian Aphorisms
00049: Submerging Carbon
00050: Wired Urban Forests
00051: Viridian Commentary
00052: Human-Assisted Wildlife Migration
OOO53: The Ecosystem Game
OOO54: The Festo Stingray
OOO55: Biodiversity Maps
OOO56: Viridian Commentary
00057: Extinct Megafauna
00058: Grass Gas
00059: Viridian Aphorisms
00060: Viridian Strategy
00061: Web-site Power Banner Contest
00062: What I Did for Earth Day
00063: Real-World Projects
00064: Viridian Finances
00065: Burning Man Festival
00066: Freeplay's Wind-Up Power
00067: Eco-Disaster Tourism
00068: Household Localizers
00069: Viridian Aphorisms
00070: The Coal-Burning Net
00071: Greening the US Govt.
00072: Viridian Couture Contest
00073: Viridian Commentary
00074: Browning the US Govt.
00075: Kyoto Politics
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thick black icky death beneath electric wings of light
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Topic 39 of 52 [spirit]: Viridian List
Response 88 of 136: Alexander Schuth (aschuth) * Thu, Aug 26, 1999 (18:32) * 581 lines
Below is of interest for gamers, game designers, and anybody residing in virtual communities or virtual community builders (= YOU!).
************************************************************
Date: Tue, 24 Aug 1999 18:36:01 -0500
Subject: Viridian Note 00090: Design Principles for Virtual Worlds
Key concepts: virtual communities, computer gaming,
virtual politics, virtual economics, violence, automation,
virtual personae, entertainment industry
Attention Conservation Notice: Almost 3,000 words. Of
interest mostly to net.organizational specialists.
Written in subcultural jargon of computer gaming industry.
Unlike most tracts on virtual community, reflects actual,
sustained, hard-won experience with its subject matter.
Has little to do with CO2 emissions, except that 125,000
computer gamers whacking imaginary dragons with imaginary
swords are emitting a lot of actual carbon dioxide.
Entries in the Viridian Summer Health Warning Contest:
http://www.earthlight.co.nz/~bretts/vs.html
http://www.tux.org/~lasser/viridian/
http://www.subterrane.com/heat.htm
http://www.ugrad.cs.jhu.edu/~rmharman/img/viridian/sun.bmp
http://humlog.homestead.com/viridianart/HEAT.html
http://members.tripod.com/~MSpong/viridian/heatdeath.html
http://www.premierestedivolt.com/HEAT.HTML
http://www.radix.net/~kreinsch/viridian/heatkills.html
http://www.provide.net/~herrell/heat.html
http://www.gothic.net/~weasel/viridian/
http://home.earthlink.net/~keim9/heatwarning.htm
http://www.well.com/conf/mirrorshades/viridian/viridianhea
t.html
http://www.octa.net/heatposter.html
http://www.boston.quik.com/kitsune/gfx/heatwarn.jpg
http://jhunix.hcf.jhu.edu/~djb14/viridian/heatkills.htm
http://www.artlung.com/viridian6/
http://www.well.com/~smendler/heat.html
http://www.greenbuilder.com/viridian_heat_load@148K.html
http://www.powerbase-alpha.com/bigmike/heatkills.html
http://www.cs.brown.edu/~pal/viridian.html
http://www.potatoe.com/viridian/poster.html
http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/Village/3203/viridian_heat.h
tml
This contest expires on September 1, 01999.
Links: http://www.ultimaonline.com
http://mud.sig.net/raph/gaming/
(((Raphael Koster (rkoster@origin.ea.com*) was lead
designer for Ultima Online, an interactive virtual world
with over 125,000 subscribers. He and his colleagues have
come up with a set of principles and rules of thumb for
managing these complex interactive environments. ==
bruces)))
The Laws of Online World Design
by Raphael Koster
These are taken from both experience and from the writings
of others. Many who have done this sort of game design
take some of these rules for granted, but other rules may
be less intuitive. Many of the laws here were actually
stated as such by others, and not by me.
A Caveat
Ola's Law About Laws:
"Any general law about virtual worlds should be read as a
challenge rather than as a guideline." You'll learn more
from attacking it than from accepting it.
Design Rules
The secrets to a really long-lived, goal-oriented, online
game of wide appeal:
* Have multiple paths of advancement (individual features
are nice, but making them ladders is better);
* Make it easy to switch between paths of advancement
(ideally, without having to start over)
* Make sure the milestones in the path of advancement are
clear, visible, and significant (having 600 meaningless
milestones doesn't help);
* Ideally, give your game a sense of limitless significant
milestones (try to make your ladder feel infinite).
Modes of expression
You're trying to provide as many modes of expression as
possible in your online world. "Character classes" are
just modes of expression, after all.
Persistence means it never goes away
Once you open your online world, expect to keep your team
on it indefinitely. Some of these games have never closed.
And closing one prematurely may result in losing the faith
of your customers, damaging the prospects for other games
in the same genre.
Macroing, botting, and automation
No matter what you do, someone is going to automate the
process of playing your world.
Corollary: Looking at what parts of your game players
tend to automate is a good way to determine which parts of
the game are tedious and/or not fun.
Game systems:
No matter what you do, players will decode every formula,
statistic, and algorithm in your world via
experimentation.
It is always more rewarding to kill other players than to
kill whatever the game sets up as a target.
A given player of level x can slay multiple creatures of
level y. Therefore, killing a player of level x yields
(n)y reward in purely in-game reward terms. Killing
players will therefore always be more rewarding in game
terms than killing monsters of comparable difficulty.
However, there's also the fact that players will be more
challenging and exciting to fight than monsters, no matter
what you do.
Never trust the client.
Never put anything on the client machine. The client is in
the hands of the enemy. Never, ever, ever forget this.
J. C. Lawrence's "do it everywhere" law:
"If you do it one place, you have to do it everywhere."
Players like clever things and will search them out. Once
they find a clever thing, they will search for other
similar or related clever things that seem to be implied
by what they found, and will get pissed off if they don't
find them.
Hyrup's "do it everywhere" Corollary:
"The more detailed you make the world, the more players
will want to break away from the classical mold."
Dr Cat's Stamp Collecting Dilemma:
"Lots of people might like stamp collecting in your
virtual world. But those who like stamps will never play
with those who like other features. Should you have stamp
collecting in your world?"
We know that there are a wide range of features that
people find enjoyable in online worlds. We also know that
some of these features are in conflict with one another.
Given the above, we don't yet know if it is possible to
have a successful world that incorporates all the
features, or whether the design must choose to exclude
some design elements in order to keep the players happy.
"Koster's Law" (Mike Sellers was actually the one to dub
it thus): "The quality of roleplaying is inversely
proportional to the number of people playing."
Hyrup's Counter-observation: "The higher the fee, the
better the roleplayers." (And of course, the higher the
fee, the smaller the playerbase.)
Enforcing roleplaying
A roleplay-mandated world is essentially a fascist state.
Whether or not this accords with your goals in making such
a world is a decision you yourself will have to make.
Storytelling versus simulation
If you write a static story (or indeed include any static
element) in your game, everyone in the world will know how
the story ends in a matter of days. Mathematically, it is
not possible for a design team to create stories fast
enough to supply everyone playing.
This is the traditional approach to this sort of game
nonetheless. You can try a sim-style game which doesn't
supply stories but instead supplies freedom to make them.
This is a lot harder and arguably has never been done
successfully.
Players have higher expectations of the virtual world
The expectations are higher than of similar actions in the
real world. For example: players will expect all labor to
result in profit; they will expect life to be fair; they
will expect to be protected from aggression before the
fact, and not just to seek redress after the fact; they
will expect problems to be resolved quickly; they will
expect that their integrity will be assumed to be beyond
reproach; in other words, they will expect too much, and
you will not be able to supply it all.
The trick is to manage the expectations.
Online game economies are hard
A faucet->drain economy is one where you spawn new stuff,
let it pool in the "sink" that is the game, and then have
a concomitant drain. Players will hate having this drain,
but if you do not enforce ongoing expenditures, you will
have "Monty Haul syndrome," infinite accumulation of
wealth, overall rise in the "standard of living" and
capabilities of the average player, and thus imbalance in
the game design and poor game longevity.
Ownership is key
You have to give players a sense of ownership in the game.
This is what will make them stay==it is a "barrier to
departure."
Social bonds are not enough, because good social bonds
extend outside the game. Instead, it is context. If they
can build their own buildings, build a character, own
possessions, hold down a job, feel a sense of
responsibility to something that cannot be removed from
the game==then you have ownership.
If your game is narrow, it will fail
Your game design must be expansive. Even the coolest
game mechanic becomes tiresome after a time. You have to
supply alternate ways of playing, or alternate ways of
experiencing the world. Otherwise, the players will go to
another world where they can have new experiences.
This means new additions, or better yet, completely
different subgames embedded in the actual game.
Lambert's Laws:
"As a virtual world's 'realism' increases, the pool
of possible character actions increases."
The opportunities for exploitation and subversion are
directly proportional to the pool size of possible
character actions.
A bored player is a potential and willing subversive.
Players will eventually find the shortest path to the
cheese.
Featuritis
No matter how many new features you have or add, the
players will always want more.
Pleasing your Players
Despite your best intentions, any change will be looked
upon as a bad change to a large percentage of your
players. Even to those who forgot that they asked for the
change themselves.
Hyrup's Loophole Law:
"If something can be abused, it will be."
Murphy's Law:
"Servers only crash and don't restart when you go out of
town."
Dr Cat's Theorem:
"Attention is the currency of the future."
Dr Cat's Theorem as expressed by J C Lawrence
"The basic medium of multiplayer games is communication."
Hanarra's Laws:
"Over time, your playerbase will become the group of
people who most enjoy the style of play that your world
offers. The others will eventually move to another game."
"It is very hard to attract players of different
gaming styles after the playerbase has been established.
Any changes to promote different styles of play almost
always conflict with the established desires of the
current playerbase."
"The ultimate goal of a virtual world is to create a
place where people of all styles of play can contribute to
the world in a manner that makes the game more satisfying
for everyone."
"The new players who enter the world for the first
time are the best critics of it."
"The opinions of those who leave are the hardest to
obtain, but give the best indication of what changes need
to be made to reach that ultimate goal."
Elmqvist's Law:
"In an online game, players find it rewarding to save
the world. They find it more rewarding to save the world
together, with lots of other people."
A corollary to Elmqvist's Law
"In general, adding features to an online game that
prevent people from playing together is a bad idea."
A caveat to the corollary to Elmqvist's Law:
"The exception would be features that enhance the sense of
identity of groups of players, such as player languages."
Baron's Design Dichotomy
According to Jonathan Baron, there are two kinds of online
games: "Achievement Oriented," and "Cumulative Character."
In the "Achievement Oriented" game, the players who "win"
do so because they they are the best at whatever the game
offers. Their glory is achieved by shaming other players.
In the "Cumulative Character" game, anyone can reach the
pinnacle of achievement by mere persistence; the game is
driven by sheer unadulterated capitalism.
Online identity
We spend a lot of time enabling people to have a very
strong personal identity in our worlds (letting them
define themselves in great detail, down to eye color). But
identity is portable. How many of you have been playing
the same character in RPGs for 15 years, like me? You
cannot count on a sense of identity, of character
building, to keep someone in your game.
In-game calendars
It's nice to have an in-game calendar. But emotional
resonances will never accrue to in-game holidays. The only
calendar that really matters is the real world one.
Don't worry about breaking fiction==online games are about
social interaction, not about fictional consistency.
Social Laws
Koster's Theorem:
"Virtual social bonds evolve from the fictional towards
real social bonds."
If you have good community ties, they will be out-of-
character ties, not in-character ties. In other words,
friendships will migrate right out of your virtual world
into email, real-life gatherings, etc.
Baron's Theorem:
"Hate is good." This is because conflict drives the
formation of social bonds and thus of communities. Hate is
an engine that brings players closer together.
Baron's Law:
"Glory is the reason why people play online; shame is what
keeps them from playing online." Neither is possible
without other people being present.
Mike Sellers' Hypothesis:
"The more persistence a game tries to have; the longer it
is set up to last; the greater number (and broader
variety) of people it tries to attract; and the more
immersive it attempts to be--then the more breadth and
depth of human experience it needs to support."
If you try to create a deeply immersive, broadly
appealing, long-lasting world that does not adequately
provide for human tendencies such as violence,
acquisition, justice, family, community, exploration, etc
(and I would contend we are nowhere close to doing this),
you will see two results.
First, individuals in the population will begin to display
a wide range of predictable socially pathological
behaviors (including general malaise, complaining,
excessive bullying and/or Player-Killing, harassment,
territoriality, inappropriate aggression, and open
rebellion against those who run the game).
Second, people will eventually vote with their feet==but
only after having passionately cast 'a pox on both your
houses.' In essence, if you set people up for an
experience they deeply crave (and mostly cannot find in
real life) and then don't deliver, they will become like
spurned lovers==some become sullen and aggressive or
neurotic. Eventually almost all leave.
Schubert's Law of Player Expectations:
"A new player's expectations of a virtual world are driven
by his expectations of single-player games."
In particular, he expects a narrow, predictable plotline
with well-defined quests and a carefully sculpted role for
himself as the hero. He also expects no interference or
disruption from other players.
These are difficult, and sometimes impossible,
expectations for a virtual world to actually meet.
Violence is inevitable
You're going to have violence done to people no matter
what facilities exist in the game. Violence may be a
combat system, theft, blocking entrances, trapping
monsters, stealing kills to get experience, pestering,
harassment, verbal violence, or just rudeness.
Is it a game?
A virtual world is a SERVICE. Not a game. It's a WORLD.
Not a game. It's a COMMUNITY. Not a game. Anyone who says,
"it's just a game" is missing the point.
Player Identity
You will NEVER have a solid unique identity for your
problematic players. They essentially have complete
anonymity because of the Internet. Even addresses, credit
cards, and so on can be faked==and will be.
Jeff Kesselman's Theorem:
"A MUD universe is all about psychology." After all, there
IS no physicality. It's all psych and group dynamics.
Psychological disinhibition
People act like jerks more easily online, because
anonymity is intoxicating. It is easier to objectify other
people and therefore to treat them badly. The only way to
combat this is to get them to empathize more with other
players.
Mass market facts
It's disturbing for those used to smaller environments,
but: administrative problems increase EXPONENTIALLY
instead of linearly, as your playerbase digs deeper into
the mass market.
Traditional approaches start to fail. Your playerbase
probably isn't ready or willing to police itself.
Anonymity and in-game administrators
The in-game admin faces a bizarre problem. He is
exercising power that the ordinary virtual citizen cannot.
And he is looked to in many ways to provide a certain
atmosphere and level of civility in the environment.
Yet the fact remains that no matter how scrupulously
honest he is, no matter how just he shows himself to be,
no matter how committed to the welfare of the virtual
space he may prove himself, people will hate his guts.
They will mistrust him precisely because he has power, and
they can never know him. There will be false accusations
galore, many insinuations of nefarious motives, and former
friends will turn against him.
It may be that the old saying about power and absolute
power is just too ingrained in the psyche of most people;
whatever the reasons, there has never been an online game
whose admins could say with a straight face that all their
players really trusted them (and by the way, it gets worse
once you take money!).
Community size
Ideal community size is no larger than 250. Past that, you
really get subcommunities.
Hans Henrik Staerfeldt's Law of Player/Admin Relations:
"The amount of whining players do is positively
proportional to how much you pamper them."
Many players whine if they see any kind of bonus in it for
them. It will simply be another way for them to achieve
their goals. As an admin, you hold the key to many of the
goals that they have concerning the virtual environment
you control. If you do not pamper the players and let them
know that whining will not help them, the whining will
subside.
Hal Black's Elaboration:
"The more responsive an admin is to user feedback of a
given type, the more of that type the admin will get."
Specifically, as an admin implements features from
user suggestions, the more ideas for features will be
submitted. Likewise, the more an admin coddles whiners,
the more whining will ensue.
J C Lawrence's "stating the obvious" law
"The more people you get, the more versions of 'what
we're really doing' you're going to get."
John Hanke's Law (cited by Mike Sellers):
"In every aggregation of people online, there is an
irreducible proportion of ... jerks" (he used a different
word :-)
Rewarding players
It is not possible to run a scenario or award player
actions without other players crying favoritism.
Rewards
The longer your game runs, the less often you get kudos
for your efforts.
J C Lawrence on Utopias;
"Don't strive for perfection, strive for expressive
fertility." You can't create utopia, and if you did,
nobody would want to live there.
Who contributed (purposely or inadvertently!), sorted
alphabetically:
Myself, of course.
Richard Bartle: along with Roy Trubshaw, developed
the first MUD.
Jonathan Baron: producer & designer for Air Warrior.
Hal Black: And another MUD-Dev member!
Dr Cat: the man behind Dragonspires and Furcadia.
Niklas Elmqvist: another active MUD-Dev member.
Ola Frosheim Grostad: researcher into virtual spaces,
MUD-Dev member.
Marion Griffith: leads the !Overlord Project.
Hanarra, aka Jason Wilson,: of Nightfall.
Darrin Hyrup: designer and/or programmer for
Gemstone, Dragon's Gate, Darkness Falls, and Magestorm.
Jeff Kesselman: helped run Dark Sun Online, and is
developing DSO2.
Amy Jo Kim: consultant and web designer.
Jon A. Lambert: active MUD-Dev member.
J C Lawrence: moderator for the MUD-Dev mailing list.
Damion Schubert: a key designer for Meridian 59,
Might & Magic Online, and Ultima Online.
Mike Sellers: a prime mover behind Meridian 59.
Hans-Henrik Staerfeldt: one of the guys who wrote the
original DikuMUD.
And all the members of the MUD-Dev list as well.
O=c=O O=c=O O=c=O O=c=O O=c=O O=c=O O=c=O
TEXAS 1999: FLOODS, A HURRICANE, BROWNOUTS
AND FEDERAL AIR QUALITY SANCTIONS. BUT
COMPARED TO 1998, IT'S BEEN PARADISE!
O=c=O O=c=O O=c=O O=c=O O=c=O O=c=O O=c=O
Topic 39 of 52 [spirit]: Viridian List
Response 89 of 136: Marcia (MarciaH) * Thu, Aug 26, 1999 (21:47) * 1 lines
1998 must have been an year to forget...or from which to learn. How miserable.
Topic 39 of 52 [spirit]: Viridian List
Response 90 of 136: Alexander Schuth (aschuth) * Fri, Aug 27, 1999 (16:47) * 5 lines
Yeah, but what about the ideas on how to motivate people in MUDs?
That's the industry's experts, and they tell us what makes places like that - and the Spring, which is basically a bit like online roleplaying, too - work over a while (and in their cases, SPEND MONEY!)...
Springfolks, comment!
Topic 39 of 52 [spirit]: Viridian List
Response 91 of 136: Barry Kort (moulton) * Sat, Aug 28, 1999 (10:51) * 4 lines
ideas on how to motivate people in MUDs?
Bring a Candle, Not a Sparkler
Topic 39 of 52 [spirit]: Viridian List
Response 92 of 136: Alexander Schuth (aschuth) * Tue, Aug 31, 1999 (04:12) * 216 lines
Date: Mon, 30 Aug 1999 18:07:40 -0500
Subject: Viridian Note 00093: The Deep Hot Biosphere
Key concepts: non-biological petroleum, chemosynthetic
bacteria, deep hot biosphere, Thomas Gold
Attention Conservation Notice: Geologists have somehow
managed to ignore this heretic for thirty years, so why
should we be listening to him now? Provokes cognitive
dissonance of the first order. Paradigm-rupturing.
Entries in the Viridian Summer Health Warning Contest:
http://www.earthlight.co.nz/~bretts/vs.html
http://www.tux.org/~lasser/viridian/
http://www.subterrane.com/heat.htm
http://www.ugrad.cs.jhu.edu/~rmharman/img/viridian/sun.bmp
http://humlog.homestead.com/viridianart/HEAT.html
http://members.tripod.com/~MSpong/viridian/heatdeath.html
http://www.premierestedivolt.com/HEAT.HTML
http://www.radix.net/~kreinsch/viridian/heatkills.html
http://www.provide.net/~herrell/heat.html
http://www.gothic.net/~weasel/viridian/
http://home.earthlink.net/~keim9/heatwarning.htm
http://www.well.com/conf/mirrorshades/viridian/viridianheat.html
http://www.octa.net/heatposter.html
http://www.boston.quik.com/kitsune/gfx/heatwarn.jpg
http://jhunix.hcf.jhu.edu/~djb14/viridian/heatkills.htm
http://www.artlung.com/viridian6/
http://www.well.com/~smendler/heat.html
http://www.greenbuilder.com/viridian_heat_load@148K.html
http://www.powerbase-alpha.com/bigmike/heatkills.html
http://www.cs.brown.edu/~pal/viridian.html
http://www.potatoe.com/viridian/poster.html
http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/Village/3203/viridian_heat.html
http://way.nu/greens/heat.html
http://users.erols.com/ljaurbach/Kirkwood.htm
This contest expires very soon: September 1, 01999.
Viridian Individual Projects:
http://www.radix.net/~kreinsch/viridian/themeproject.html
http://www.well.com/conf/mirrorshades/everydayobject.gif
http://www.powerbase-alpha.com/bigmike/vrml
http://www.spiritone.com/~terenced
http://www.bomoco.com/Viridian/viridian.htm
A new Viridian Individual Project by Will Munslow
(anubis@deming.com^^**):
http://www.nicotinetea.com
(((Will Munslow remarks: "I was fiddling around with Perl
and ripped off some nice scripts that I reworked. A small
Viridian Version of slashdot.org. Dunno if anyone is
interested, but if the amount of information headed to you
is as big as I expect, people might enjoy having a
different place to display it.")))
*Viridian T-shirts for sale, $15 each
http://www.bomoco.com/Viridian/curia/curia.htm
http://www.bomoco.com/Viridian/curia/zebrabothsides.gif
We're Shipping the First Ones Out the Door Right Now.
*****************************************************
*The Deep Hot Biosphere:* "a renowned scientist's
revolutionary theory of a vast subterranean habitat and
its significance for life's origins on our planet and the
possibility of live elsewhere in the universe"
by Thomas Gold
Copernicus, Springer-Verlag, 1999.
ISBN 0-387-98546-8
http://www.copernicus-ny.com
Well, this new book of Thomas Gold's is getting a lot
of play. I just read it. All 208 pages of it. And I'll
say this for it: if it's true, it's certainly is
revolutionary.
Here's the pitch. "Fossil fuels" aren't fossils. They
don't come from squished dinosaurs or ancient buried
vegetation. Hydrocarbons like methane and crude oil are
inherent planetary substances. They're basically the same
material as the "carbonaceous chondrites" seen in
asteroids, or the methane and ethane seen in Jupiter and
its moons. The earth is heavily loaded with various
primeval oils and tarry goos, which have been slowly
cooked out of its crust over the eons by radioactive heat
from the core.
Here's where it gets weirder. The substances we know
as oil and natural gas have been streaming up toward the
planet's surface since the planet first formed. When this
hydrocarbon muck is still about ten kilometers down, it
gets caught within pores of the stone by primeval archaic
bacteria. These bugs live inside rock, they eat this
primeval asteroid goo, and they turn it into the stuff we
call "coal" and "crude oil." They are chemosynthetic
organisms, and they thrive in extremely high, oxygen-free
temperatures, in vast, impossible numbers. They're
probably the original form of life on Earth.
Primitive earthly life probably started inside the
Earth, in these flowing high-energy streams of goo and
muck, long before the surface was colonizable. Oil and
gas looks like organic products to a biochemist, but
that's not because they are fossilized. It's because
they've been basically fermented by a previously
unsuspected ecosystem of archaic bacteria. These ancient
bugs basically saturate the entire rocky crust of the
planet. By weight, they're probably eighty percent of all
living things on Earth.
And that's just the start of Gold's theory. These
primeval bugs give off enough fizzy foul-smelling gas to
break rocks and start earthquakes. Most metal deposits:
gold, zinc, silver etc == are not caused by flowing water
or lava, but by flowing hydrocarbons filtered and
transformed by bugs.
Even though coal sometimes has fossils in it, coal is
not fossil material. Basically, coal is mats of peat that
got into the way of an ongoing hydrocarbon flow, and have
been fossilized with carbon the way a petrified tree is
fossilized with silicon.
Most planets in the solar system share Earth's
origins, so if they have life, it is probably single-
celled and subterranean. And they probably do have life.
Whole gooey tons of life.
We're never going to "run out of oil." It's not
possible. Left to themselves long enough, most depleted
oil patches will slowly fill back up. Because they're not
buried deposits. They're lakes, backed up from streams
originating far deeper down. The planet would have
smothered in its own CO2 like Venus a long time ago,
except that the surface biosphere has been laboring
mightly to remove CO2 from the atmosphere, and save it in
massive fossil chalkbeds up on the surface.
Even if we *did* run out of oil, there are enough
methane hydrates oozing up in ocean sediments to make all
known oil reserves on Earth seem minor. There's probably
"oil" or "coal" under almost *everything*, any kind of
non-porous rock that can catch the flow and hold it down
for a while. It's just that mistaken geological
assumptions have led us to drill for oil in a minor
variety of places.
Who is Thomas Gold? Well, he's not an insane crank.
He's a physicist, and a very blue-sky thinker. Gold was
the first guy to theorize that pulsars were rotating
neutron stars. He theorized that the early Earth might
have flipped its axis of rotation (which, apparently, it
did). Gold has been saying for quite a long time that oil
and gas are basic planetary substances, not fossils. But
now he's put together his best arguments in book length,
and his thesis is considerably embroidered with many sub-
theories and bizarre implications.
Here are some reasons not to dismiss the whole scheme
immediately:
1. Plate tectonics is a weirder idea than this, and that
wasn't accepted until the 1960s.
2. Geology's full of ancient dogma because geology's a
very old science. We thought we understood the earth long
before we caught on to the truth about the other planets.
Planets and asteroids have plenty of goop that looks like
coal, natural gas, and oil.
3. If oil is a fossil, then how come oil beds are so
often full of helium? Helium is an astrophysics thing;
there aren't any plants or animals that metabolize helium.
4. It took us until the 1970s to realize that the earth
has chemosynthetic life forms. But these creatures live
around the tectonic rifts that girdle the whole planet.
That's the biggest habitat on earth. These vent creatures
are totally dependent on weird, thermophile bacteria.
And they're not just based on volcanic seeps either,
because these biota have also been discovered around
underwater oil seeps.
5. Once people started looking for subterranean bacteria,
they've have been able to find living bacteria as far down
as they've been able to drill.
Extraordinary statements require extraordinary
evidence. There's a lot less evidence than I'd like to
see in this book. For one counter-argument, I couldn't
help but notice that Gold's "pores" in the stony Earth
have whatever qualities he needs, whenever he needs them
to make his case. Sometimes they're fast, sometimes
they're slow, sometimes they're chemical filters,
sometimes they're high-speed conduits, sometimes they're
tiny, sometimes they're oceanic, sometimes they're steady-
state, sometimes they're catastrophic, and so on. Granted,
the Earth has a lot of natural variety, but that's not for
our rhetorical convenience.
But if he's half-right about any of the stuff he says
here, the human race knows nothing worth knowing about the
biosphere and carbon dioxide. If he's right, we've been
utterly ignorance throughout the twentieth century about
the most basic facts of planetary life.
O=c=O O=c=O O=c=O O=c=O O=c=O O=c=O
EVEN IF IT'S IN INFINITE SUPPLY,
IT STILL STINKS AND IT'S STILL
SCREWING UP THE WEATHER!
O=c=O O=c=O O=c=O O=c=O O=c=O O=c=O
Topic 39 of 52 [spirit]: Viridian List
Response 93 of 136: Marcia (MarciaH) * Tue, Aug 31, 1999 (10:50) * 2 lines
How very curious. Think I just might run some of this past a real Geeologist to see what he thinks of this theory. I hope this guy did a lot of footnoting, because it is easy to make statements. Backing them up is quite
another thing.
Topic 39 of 52 [spirit]: Viridian List
Response 94 of 136: Paul Terry Walhus (terry) * Thu, Sep 2, 1999 (11:14) * 4 lines
Let us know what the geologist thinks. I guess the implications are that
oil is forever?
Topic 39 of 52 [spirit]: Viridian List
Response 95 of 136: Alexander Schuth (aschuth) * Sat, Sep 4, 1999 (11:17) * 3 lines
If using this stuff is bad, and the supply of them is (nearly) infinite, doesn't that make even worse news?
Marcia, have that rock-science-son of yours investigate the matter!
Topic 39 of 52 [spirit]: Viridian List
Response 96 of 136: Marcia (MarciaH) * Mon, Sep 6, 1999 (21:42) * 3 lines
It is a good thing I telnet on occasion. It makes me go through all new posts
includeing this one which I had forgotten. I willpaste him the article athis
office tomorrow. (please excuse the poor typing...)
Topic 39 of 52 [spirit]: Viridian List
Response 97 of 136: Marcia (MarciaH) * Tue, Sep 7, 1999 (18:38) * 5 lines
I asked son David (the Geologist) to comment on the review of Gold's book.
Terse and to the point, he said:
" I have heard of (the book) before and I think it is horse pucky."
Topic 39 of 52 [spirit]: Viridian List
Response 98 of 136: Alexander Schuth (aschuth) * Wed, Sep 8, 1999 (14:31) * 5 lines
Thanks for this funny quote, hehe... "Pucky" - is that Hawaiian or Geologistian ?
The reviewer makes a point of showing that this author has been thought wrong often... Circumstances proved that not be be correct at times...
I wish we could some opinion from a knowledgeable person who had actually read this - HEY TEXANS! Y'all have dem oil-science boys, right? How about it?
Topic 39 of 52 [spirit]: Viridian List
Response 99 of 136: Marcia (MarciaH) * Wed, Sep 8, 1999 (14:46) * 1 lines
For what it's worth, David's main job is purging old gas station sites of residual oil and petroleum in the soil after the leaky tanks and other stuff was removed. He does know about oil and things related to it, but not these critters. "pucky" is a euphemism clean enought ot send to his Mother...self-invented, I think.
Topic 39 of 52 [spirit]: Viridian List
Response 100 of 136: Paul Terry Walhus (terry) * Thu, Sep 9, 1999 (01:27) * 3 lines
Mmm, viridian horse pucky revealed. Any details?
Topic 39 of 52 [spirit]: Viridian List
Response 101 of 136: Marcia (MarciaH) * Thu, Sep 9, 1999 (01:45) * 1 lines
None yet...just a quick note from his cubicle at work. Will try to pry more out of him over the weekend.
Topic 39 of 52 [spirit]: Viridian List
Response 102 of 136: Paul Terry Walhus (terry) * Thu, Sep 9, 1999 (09:06) * 5 lines
I love would love to hear a detailed critique of that piece. It's so
radical in it's implications and to the unknowing it may have a certain
plausibility. I mean, what is the evidence that dinos decayed in to oil?
Topic 39 of 52 [spirit]: Viridian List
Response 103 of 136: Alexander Schuth (aschuth) * Thu, Sep 9, 1999 (12:47) * 68 lines
Right, Terry, it makes us ole conspiracy theoretists-cum-fanatical-viridina-pose really nervous, like "I want to believe!", and "The Truth is down there!".
The up-side is: Don't worry, there'll be enough as long as you and your kids live.
The down-side: Keep using this, and you're not gonna live as long as you thought... Neither might the kids...
But there is fun stuff out there IN ABUNDANCE (like the French-developed car running on compressed air...). From Pointcast:
The Little Engine that Might
by Leander Kahney
3:00 a.m. 9.Sep.99.PDT -- Taking on the world's giant energy business, a tiny startup is set to launch an engine that requires no fuel, produces no pollution, and is free to run.
Naturally, the experts think it's too good to be true -- although they can't exactly say why. [I LOVE that line... A.]
---------------------------------------
See also: Plasma-Powered Trip to the Stars
---------------------------------------
Entropy Systems, a seven-person startup based in Youngstown, Ohio, is scheduled to launch the Entropy engine early next year, said the technology's inventor, Sanjay Amin, a mechanical engineer and co-founder of the company.
The Entropy engine acts like a heat sponge, absorbing heat in the atmosphere and converting it to power, Amin said. Since it consumes no fossil fuels, nuclear fuels, or electrical power, it produces no emissions, directly or indirectly. Its only byproduct is cold air.
Initially, the technology will be used to create an outboard motor for small pleasure boats, simply because it's the easiest market to break into, Amin said. But as it is developed, the technology could be used to run refrigerators, air conditioners, generators -- even automobiles.
"There's no reason it can't power a car," Amin said.
So far, Amin has built a prototype, which he said generates one-tenth of one horsepower. The outboard motor -- yet to be built -- will produce between two and three horsepower.
It will be roughly the same size as a conventional outboard motor and only marginally more expensive. But, apart from routine maintenance and lubrication, the engine will be free to run.
Named after the unit in physics that describes the amount of available energy in a system, the Entropy engine consists of a central chamber, filled with air, that has a piston in the center, Amin said.
The engine operates on a cycle. First, a starter motor spins the engine to a high speed, which pushes the gas to the edge of the central chamber, as in a centrifuge. As the gas moves to the edge, it creates a partial vacuum in the center that draws the piston out, compressing the gas.
In the second part of the cycle, the engine is slowed, and the gas redistributes itself throughout the chamber, which increases the pressure on the piston. Heat trapped in the gas is converted into the energy that moves the piston, which cools the air in the engine chamber.
The engine will run year-round in any climate, even sub-zero temperatures. Although it operates better in warmer climates, it will work in any environment above absolute zero (minus 273 degrees Kelvin).
"In physical terms, even ice has a lot of heat," Amin said.
Amin claims to have patented the technology in the United States, Australia, and Europe. He said he has published a book on thermodynamics and in 1996 received an Engineer of the Year award from the American Society of Engineers of Indian Origin.
Always obsessed with engines, Amin built steam engines as a teenager. He has devoted more than a decade to the Entropy engine. He began by looking at gravity as a power source, which eventually led to the idea of using atmospheric heat.
The technology was developed in part when Amin was studying at Youngstown State University, which helped launch the fledgling company.
Bill Dunn, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, said that while he hasn't seen the engine in action, he has examined the materials on Entropy's Web site. He said the logic appears sound, but the outcome -- free power -- doesn't make sense.
"It's the end result -- that you can create power from heat at ambient temperature -- that flies in the face of the basic laws of physics," said Dunn, who acknowledges that he hasn't devoted time to figure out why the engine shouldn't work.
"To track down where his thinking may be flawed is a difficult thing to do," Dunn said.
In Amin's favor, Dunn noted that he has attracted backing from "some very intelligent people."
Hedging his bets, Dunn said breakthrough technologies have frequently been greeted with skepticism. "Every time someone suggests something like this, you should at least give them the benefit of an open mind."
Iain MacGill, an energy campaigner at Greenpeace, said that because vehicle pollution makes up about a third of US greenhouse gas emissions, a pollution-free engine would be an incredible breakthrough. Nevertheless, it sounds to him like fiction.
"It's got a flavor of 'too-good-to-be-true' about it," he said. "I'm a wee bit skeptical."
Copyright © 1994-98 Wired Digital Inc. All rights reserved.
The principle behind sounds like a Sterling engine turned inside-out... STERLING! Haha...
Topic 39 of 52 [spirit]: Viridian List
Response 104 of 136: Alexander Schuth (aschuth) * Thu, Sep 9, 1999 (12:49) * 1 lines
BTW, THAT Sterling was only a pastor, Austin's is Pope-Emperor of a world-wide movement. Just FYI.
Topic 39 of 52 [spirit]: Viridian List
Response 105 of 136: Marcia (MarciaH) * Thu, Sep 9, 1999 (16:12) * 1 lines
Geez, you don't get much higher in the order on this Earth that the Pope-Emperor. I AM impressed!
Topic 39 of 52 [spirit]: Viridian List
Response 106 of 136: Barry Kort (moulton) * Fri, Sep 10, 1999 (19:44) * 3 lines
To absorb heat from the atmosphere, the engine has to be cooled below ambient temperature. To cool it requires the refrigeration cycle performed by the "starter motor." But the starter motor will need to be powered from some conventional source of power, and will draw more power than the rest of the system produces.
There just ain't no way to get free energy.
Topic 39 of 52 [spirit]: Viridian List
Response 107 of 136: Alexander Schuth (aschuth) * Sun, Sep 12, 1999 (05:55) * 3 lines
Do you know the principle of the Sterling engine? Creates power from temperature differences... No other fuel, just air-filled cylinders.
This technology is 19th-cent., current use is - to my best knowledge - as heatsink or cooler in satellites (possibly by exploiting the heat to have it slush around coolant).
Topic 39 of 52 [spirit]: Viridian List
Response 108 of 136: Barry Kort (moulton) * Mon, Sep 13, 1999 (10:52) * 3 lines
You need a natural source of temperature difference. This can be based on the temperature difference between the air and the ground, which relies on the way the sun's heating work. That makes it a kind of solar energy.
Most thermodynamic engines burn fuel to create the hot zone. The problem with relying on natural temperature differences is that the differential temperatures aren't very far apart, so the differential pressures (needed to move pistons) isn't very great. Still one can build a small Sterling engine, perhaps enough to power a fan.
Topic 39 of 52 [spirit]: Viridian List
Response 109 of 136: Alexander Schuth (aschuth) * Wed, Sep 15, 1999 (12:55) * 3 lines
Yes, you can order working miniature Sterling machines to show off on your desk, powered by a small flame. You can also power Sterling machines by using sun's power, collected with a convex collector mirror.
But Amin's idea is like that somehow turned inside-out. Once it's started, the compressed gas creates heat, that causes the gas to expand again. And the starter could be a crank or rope, like lawn-mowers or small boat-engines. Hmh, Terry, drag out Ray to take a look at this, please.
Topic 39 of 52 [spirit]: Viridian List
Response 110 of 136: Barry Kort (moulton) * Thu, Sep 16, 1999 (00:19) * 1 lines
Trust me. I have a Ph.D. in engineering. I actually sweated my way through Thermodynamics back in college. Once you stop pumping in energy with the starter motor, the thing comes to equilibrium and stops moving. You push on the piston and compress the gas. The gas pushes back. You let go of the piston, and the gas pushes the piston out, expands, and cools. End of cycle. Nothing happens after that unless you push on the piston again. Which is where the energy is coming from.
Topic 39 of 52 [spirit]: Viridian List
Response 111 of 136: Marcia (MarciaH) * Thu, Sep 16, 1999 (00:24) * 1 lines
There is, in fact, no perpetual motion machine, then?!
Topic 39 of 52 [spirit]: Viridian List
Response 112 of 136: Barry Kort (moulton) * Thu, Sep 16, 1999 (00:33) * 3 lines
Not one based on thermodynamic cycles, no. They need a supply of thermal energy.
But the motion of an electron in orbit about a nucleus is a perpetual motion system. Of course like all such perpetual motion systems, you can't extract energy from it.
Topic 39 of 52 [spirit]: Viridian List
Response 113 of 136: Marcia (MarciaH) * Thu, Sep 16, 1999 (00:41) * 1 lines
Oh yes, there's the rub. That your degree says you have searched for the highest knowledge does not mean you have managed to find every bit of it...that is still out there awaiting discovery!
Topic 39 of 52 [spirit]: Viridian List
Response 114 of 136: Alexander Schuth (aschuth) * Thu, Sep 16, 1999 (13:02) * 3 lines
Barry, thank you for your patience. Hmh, I know your arguments are valid, but this idea has one thing that makes me unsure about writing it off 100% - these folks seem to be into engineering, too, and still they think they might have something there...
Not that I want to compare this to Einstein or Freud - who were nutcracks, too, for their contemporaries -, but - what if it works? Could gravitational pull or centripetal forces be the missing link?
Topic 39 of 52 [spirit]: Viridian List
Response 115 of 136: Barry Kort (moulton) * Thu, Sep 16, 1999 (21:13) * 7 lines
If you set up an engine in the ambient, you can draw energy out of it based on fluctuations in the ambient over time. For example, there is a perpetual clock that works by drawing energy from the day-to-day fluctuations in the barometric pressure. It has a sealed chamber with a diaphragm that moves in and out with changes atmospheric pressure. This motion is enough to power the clock.
An engine with a thermal mass that stayed at the average temperature could operate by sinking one side of the piston into the thermal mass and letting the other ride in the open air. If the air temperature fluctuates faster than the rate of cooling of the thermal mass, you could power a small Sterling cycle engine.
But this is not true perpetual motion. It's based on the diurnal heating of the earth between day and night, so it's a form of solar energy.
Ocean buoys can draw energy from the bobbing waves. That's how they sound their wails, for example. Air is drawn in and out of a chamber as the bob. There is lots of ambient energy that one can draw on, but only for small amounts of power, perhaps enough to power a clock or some electronics.
Topic 39 of 52 [spirit]: Viridian List
Response 116 of 136: Barry Kort (moulton) * Fri, Sep 17, 1999 (07:55) * 1 lines
By the way, if the notion of measuring energy seems inaccessible, take a look at the movie "Apollo 13." It has a great scene where the engineers are trying to figure out how to power up the capsule for re-entry without exceeding the energy budget of the available power -- something like 8 amps as I recall. Budgeting for energy is like any kind of economy. You can't spend more than you got. It's just one of God's laws.
Topic 39 of 52 [spirit]: Viridian List
Response 117 of 136: Alexander Schuth (aschuth) * Sat, Sep 18, 1999 (16:04) * 1 lines
Huh, and you went into engineering because you can't stand laws, right? ;=}
Topic 39 of 52 [spirit]: Viridian List
Response 118 of 136: Barry Kort (moulton) * Sun, Sep 19, 1999 (11:16) * 1 lines
I love discovering God's Natural Laws. I have no love for those laws of man which are instituted by algolagnic control freaks who delight in damaging people who break them.
Topic 39 of 52 [spirit]: Viridian List
Response 119 of 136: Alexander Schuth (aschuth) * Mon, Sep 20, 1999 (13:43) * 1 lines
algolagnic?
Topic 39 of 52 [spirit]: Viridian List
Response 120 of 136: Alexander Schuth (aschuth) * Mon, Sep 20, 1999 (13:46) * 3 lines
For me, the "laws" of nature and the "laws" of societies both are simply agreements on how to handle things. Compromises. And history has shown that both categories can be changed upon short notice, and that some offers are only good while supplies last.
The problem is that most people think them unchangeable. They aren't, though.
Topic 39 of 52 [spirit]: Viridian List
Response 121 of 136: Barry Kort (moulton) * Tue, Sep 21, 1999 (09:01) * 3 lines
To the best of my knowledge, no human agreed to the Inverse Square Law of Gravity, or Maxwell's Equations. Those were recently discovered, not legislated.
Algolagnic means to derive emotional gratification by inflicting pain and suffering. It's commonly found in competitive cultures such as ours.
Topic 39 of 52 [spirit]: Viridian List
Response 122 of 136: Barry Kort (moulton) * Tue, Sep 21, 1999 (09:04) * 1 lines
I seek not merely to edit the laws of man. I seek to abolish the belief that society is well-regulated by means of rules and laws enforced by sanctions and punishments. There is good scientific reason to believe that such a regulatory mechanism is ineffective at best and counterprodutive at worst. Moreover, there are superior regulatory models which are proven to work without inflicting deliberate self-damage on the system.
Topic 39 of 52 [spirit]: Viridian List
Response 123 of 136: Alexander Schuth (aschuth) * Tue, Sep 21, 1999 (12:41) * 17 lines
By now, I know about your position re: changing the system (a bit at least), but I don't see what you believe why these things were accepted first place, and what became of these reasons.
I understand from your post above, that you don't take offense with the concept of laws themselves - perhaps they are even a valuable invention in your mind? -, but that it's the enforcement that upsets you (besides obviously ridiculous and unjust laws, of course). I feel that both the content of laws as well as consequences of not abiding these rules are subject to change by cultures. E.g. is it perfectly okay to kill people in the US or Japan that where senteced to death penalty. These cultures think de
th penalty is okay and has its place in their culture. What we know is, it's a very old tradition that's being kept up there, but has been abandoned in other countries, which have abolished the death penalty. Change is possible if a society changes their set of values. Right now there is e.g. a discussion in Germany to revise sentences for crimes against things and against people. If you steal somebody's car, here you're punished harder than if you'd beaten him up. This still reflects feudal times, where
he possessing classes were protecting their stuff, but people now feel attacks upon health and honour are worse than against possessions. More changes to come...
When I said that the laws of nature are not unchangeable and eternal, I mean e.g. that there have been many "discovered", or rather, "invented". Think of cosmology, how that changed. And at any time, scientist were sure to know the "obvious" truth, which everybody accepted until some bloke came up with Truth 1.5 or even 2.0, and Bang!, the world was not the center anymore, mankind not the crown of creation, the universe infinite or not... Nothing faster than light, or at least nearly nothing, etc.
Science interprets not "nature" or the "truth", but the subjective image of how things appear to us - filtered through our sensoric means and neurological processing, and describes them in a vocabulary agreed upon by usage within the scientific community.
These things are approximations, working models, until some fault is found, and other explanations are accepted. Science is to nature what laws are to a society's morals: Approximations that mimick observations, and either are with a time-lag revised when obvious and urgent need be, or ignored and kept unchanged, even after having survived the cause they served.
Hmh, what do you say?
Topic 39 of 52 [spirit]: Viridian List
Response 124 of 136: Barry Kort (moulton) * Fri, Oct 1, 1999 (15:38) * 1 lines
I say our system of laws is immoral, unethical, unjust, corrupt, evil and tacky.
Topic 39 of 52 [spirit]: Viridian List
Response 125 of 136: Alexander (aschuth) * Fri, Oct 1, 1999 (16:22) * 1 lines
Ok, lemme see "our system" is the problem, not the "laws", or at least the concept of laws as such?
Topic 39 of 52 [spirit]: Viridian List
Response 126 of 136: Barry Kort (moulton) * Fri, Oct 1, 1999 (23:57) * 1 lines
The concept of goals or guidelines is fine. The concept of rules, laws, or foul lines which entitle the state to visit authorized and sanctioned damage is not fine. It's an idiotic idea which doesn't work and causes a world of hurt. Whoever is praying to the god that invented that system is praying to a false god.
Topic 39 of 52 [spirit]: Viridian List
Response 127 of 136: Marcia (MarciaH) * Sat, Oct 2, 1999 (00:09) * 1 lines
Perhaps that god is the one created in his own image - the image of the worshipper, that is, rather than the reverse!
Topic 39 of 52 [spirit]: Viridian List
Response 128 of 136: Barry Kort (moulton) * Sat, Oct 2, 1999 (07:48) * 3 lines
The irony is that of all the various gods in our culture, the one who gave us rules and laws enforced by state-sponsored sanctions and punishments is one whose name we do not know. We do know the name of that god's chief prophet: Nicholas Machiavelli.
But more people pray to that unnamed god and practice that god's religion than follow the alternative (and logically superior) models of Moses, Buddha, or Jesus.
Topic 39 of 52 [spirit]: Viridian List
Response 129 of 136: Marcia (MarciaH) * Sun, Oct 3, 1999 (23:22) * 1 lines
too true to argue with you on that point! ( also pertinent point about Machiavelli and his results...we are still contending with them, are we not!
Topic 39 of 52 [spirit]: Viridian List
Response 130 of 136: Barry Kort (moulton) * Mon, Oct 4, 1999 (10:21) * 1 lines
I just wish we could get Machiavelli's religion designated as one, so that we could then invoke separation of church and state, and outlaw that pernicious brand of state-sponsored religion. Perhap's the name of Machiavelli's god is Molokh. That god once held sway in Gey-Hinnom, the rubbish dump south of the old city of Jerusalem, where worshippers of Molokh sometimes sacrificed their disobedient children by burning them in the hellfires of the rubbish dump.
Topic 39 of 52 [spirit]: Viridian List
Response 131 of 136: Marcia (MarciaH) * Tue, Oct 5, 1999 (19:38) * 1 lines
What a brilliant idea (not the Molokh one)...I am delighted with the idea.
Topic 39 of 52 [spirit]: Viridian List
Response 132 of 136: Barry Kort (moulton) * Thu, Oct 7, 1999 (08:51) * 1 lines
The neat thing about Machiavelli's religion is that, unlike other theologies, this one can actually be disproven by scientific research. There is overwhelming empirical evidence and theoretical analysis to show that his method of social regulation is ineffective at best and counter-productive at worst, leading to a world of suffering. But we kinda knew that, now, didn't we?
Topic 39 of 52 [spirit]: Viridian List
Response 133 of 136: Marcia (MarciaH) * Thu, Oct 7, 1999 (13:34) * 2 lines
It would seem that we should have been aware of this long ago. It is counter-productive, indeed, but his followers blindly procede in the direction in which he pointed them all those years ago. As we spiral downward we seem unable to do anything about it...or, worse, accept it as the way things must be!
(And, yes! We did kinda knew that all along...)
Topic 39 of 52 [spirit]: Viridian List
Response 134 of 136: Barry Kort (moulton) * Fri, Oct 8, 1999 (14:41) * 4 lines
The interesting part of this analysis is that it ties together deep thinking from systems science, theology, psychology, and literary analysis. I tumbled onto this confluence of thought by way of a book by Gil Bailie, _Violence Unveiled: Humanity at the Crossroads_. I had just finished reading it when the Columbine school shootings occurred, so I took the opportunity to apply the theory to that tragedy. But it actually applies more broadly to competition, conflict, drama, and violence throughout the cu
ture.
Anyway, my first essay is called Thinking About Violence In Our Schools.
Topic 39 of 52 [spirit]: Viridian List
Response 135 of 136: Maggie (sociolingo) * Tue, Jul 3, 2001 (13:39) * 63 lines
This subject is still on going ....I found the following of which I will put the synopsis here and leave you to follow the link to get the whole article.
http://www.gorp.com/gorp/interact/guests/viridi.htm
The Manifesto of January 3, 2000
Part 4
By Bruce Sterling
A brief sketch may help establish some parameters.
Here I conclude with a set of general cultural changes that a Viridian movement would likely promulgate in specific sectors of society. For the sake of brevity, these suggestions come in three parts. (Today) is the situation as it exists now. (What We Want) is the situation as we would like to see it. (The Trend) the way the situation will probably develop if it follows contemporary trends without any intelligent intervention.
The Media
Today. Publishing and broadcasting cartels surrounded by a haze of poorly financed subcultural microchannels.
What We Want. More bandwidth for civil society, multicultural variety, and better-designed systems of popular many-to-many communication, in multiple languages through multiple channels.
The Trend. A spy-heavy, commercial Internet. A Yankee entertainment complex that entirely obliterates many non-Anglophone cultures.
The Military
Today. G-7 Hegemony backed by the American military.
What We Want. A wider and deeper majority hegemony with a military that can deter adventurism, but specializes in meeting the immediate crises through civil engineering, public health and disaster relief.
The Trend. Nuclear and biological proliferation among minor powers.
Business
Today. Currency traders rule banking system by fiat; extreme instability in markets; capital flight but no labor mobility; unsustainable energy base
What We Want. Nonmaterial industries; vastly increased leisure; vastly increased labor mobility; sustainable energy and resources
The Trend. commodity totalitarianism, crony capitalism, criminalized banking systems, sweatshops
Industrial Design
Today. very rapid model obsolescence, intense effort in packaging; CAD/CAM
What We Want: intensely glamourous environmentally sound products; entirely new objects of entirely new materials; replacing material substance with information; a new relationship between the cybernetic and the material
The Trend: two design worlds for rich and poor comsumers; a varnish on barbarism
Gender Issues
Today: more commercial work required of women; social problems exported into family life as invisible costs
What We Want: declining birth rates, declining birth defects, less work for anyone, lavish support for anyone willing to drop out of industry and consume less
The Trend: more women in prison; fundamentalist and ethnic-separatist ideologies that target women specifically.
Entertainment
Today: large-scale American special-effects spectacle supported by huge casts and multi-million-dollar tie-in enterprises
What We Want: glamour and drama; avant-garde adventurism; a borderless culture industry bent on Green social engineering
The Trend: annihilation of serious culture except in a few non-Anglophone societies
International Justice
Today: dysfunctional but gamely persistent War Crimes tribunals
What We Want: Environmental Crime tribunals
The Trend: justice for sale; intensified drug war
Employment
Today: MacJobs, burn-out track, massive structural unemployment in Europe
What We Want: Less work with no stigma; radically expanded leisure; compulsory leisure for workaholics; guaranteed support for people consuming less resources; new forms of survival entirely outside the conventional economy
The Trend: increased class division; massive income disparity; surplus flesh and virtual class
Education
Today: failing public-supported schools
What We Want: intellectual freedom, instant cheap access to information, better taste, a more advanced aesthetic, autonomous research collectives, lifelong education, and dignity and pleasure for the very large segment of the human population who are and will forever be basically illiterate and innumerate
The trend: children are raw blobs of potential revenue-generating machinery; universities exist to supply middle-management
Public Health
Today: general success; worrying chronic trends in AIDS, tuberculosis, antibiotic resistance; massive mortality in nonindustrial world
What We Want: unprecedently healthy old people; plagues exterminated worldwide; sophisticated treatment of microbes; artificial food
The Trend: Massive dieback in Third World, septic poor quarantined from nervous rich in G-7 countries, return of 19th century sepsis, world's fattest and most substance-dependent populations
Science
Today: basic science sacrificed for immediate commercial gain; malaise in academe; bureaucratic overhead in government support
What We Want: procedural rigor, intellectual honesty, reproducible results; peer review, block grants, massively increased research funding, massively reduced procedural overhead; genius grants; single-author papers; abandonment of passive construction and the third person plural; "Science" reformed so as to lose its Platonic and crypto-Christian elements as the "pure" pursuit of disembodied male minds; armistice in Science wars
The Trend: "Big Science" dwindles into short-term industrial research or military applications; "scientists" as a class forced to share imperilled, marginal condition of English professors and French deconstructionists.
I would like to conclude by suggesting some specific areas for immediate artistic work. I see these as crying public needs that should be met by bravura displays of raw ingenuity.
But there isn't time for that. Not just yet.
Bruce Sterling (bruces@well.com)
Topic 39 of 52 [spirit]: Viridian List
Response 136 of 136: Culcha (terry) * Thu, Aug 30, 2001 (17:21) * 120 lines
For release: 29 August 2001
SOLUTIONS FOR SUSTAINABLE URBAN CENTERS TO BE EXPLORED AT PARADOX
CONFERENCE
21-23 SEPTEMBER
New Ideas About Energy Consumption, Cultural Values and Reinventing the
"American Dream" to Challenge Policies of the Bush Administration
Phoenix...24 August...Sustainable alternatives to the "short-sighted"
steps of the Bush administration will be explored at the 21-23 September
Paradox Conference by Paolo Soleri, Ph.D., philosopher and pioneer of more
livable, environmentally-intelligent cities; Joe Firmage, scientist and
technology entrepreneur; and Paul H. Ray, Ph.D., co-author of the
influential book The Cultural Creatives: How 50 Million People Are
Changing the World.
The third in the biannual Paradox series, the September program continues
the ongoing inquiry into the paradoxes in the increasing interplay between
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cyberspace and new forms of community. New- and old-economy business
executives, architects and urban planners, cybernauts and students are
expected to attend.
Dr. Soleri to Address the Need to Redefine the "American Dream"
Paolo Soleri, Italian-born architect and associate of Frank Lloyd Wright,
is hosting Paradox III at his Arcosanti habitat 65 miles north of Phoenix.
A self-contained community in the Arizona desert, Arcosanti embodies Dr.
Soleri's theory of "arcology," or the marriage of architecture and ecology
to create urban habitats that conserve resources and blend harmoniously
with the environment.
"Unless we moderate, unless we reinvent the 'American dream,'" Soleri
explained in a 26 July interview with The New York Times, "then it's not
going to be a dream. It's going to be doomsday." Soleri estimates that if
the standards of the American dream were applied to every nation, the
resources of 19 earths would be required to maintain the resulting levels
of consumption and pollution. "The American Dream physically embodied in
the single family house has to be reinvented in terms which are coherent
with the human biospheric reality."
Mr. Firmage to Explore Alternative Energy Resources
"Technologies are possible that could make daily use of energy nearly free
within perhaps 20 years, but they receive almost no R&D funding" states
Mr. Joe Firmage, a panelist who has made significant investments in the
development of alternative energy resources. "The Bush administration's
energy plan does little to address efficiency and renewable programs; yet,
it includes a two-billion-dollar subsidy for the coal industry."
"In short, capitalism does not see the value in innovations that would
drop prices to nearly zero, since such prices would decimate revenue lines
of P&Ls," says Firmage, who will discuss potential breakthroughs in
green-energy technologies. "Energy-generation industries have been
controlling supply to prop up profits for decades; meanwhile, the price of
subsistence-level energy consumption exceeds the earning power of much of
the world's population."
Firmage is founder of Motion Sciences Organization and co-founder and
chairman of International Space Sciences Organization (ISSO), established
in 1998 to sponsor research and development of new technologies derived
from the emerging principles of modern physics. In 1995, Firmage founded
USWeb, the world's largest Internet professional-services company. Until
1998, he served as CEO and chief strategist of the three-billion-dollar
company and received recognition as Ernst & Young's 1997 "Young
Entrepreneur of the Year."
Dr. Ray to Examine the Values of a New Civilization
"Our civilization is in the midst of an epochal change, caught between
globalization, accelerating technologies and a deteriorating planetary
ecology," concludes Dr. Paul H. Ray in his book, The Cultural Creatives,
which examines the growing number of people who want to see deep changes
in the cultures that have evolved in industrialized nations. "A creative
minority can have enormous leverage to carry us into a new renaissance
instead of a disastrous fall."
Ray will lead a panel discussion on the need to develop shifting cultural
values. He explains: "Seventy percent of all Americans and 70 percent of
all homebuyers in America are unhappy with suburbs as they are. They ask,
'Why can't we have good, sustainable urban places that we want to live
in?'"
Ray, who is CEO of Integral Partnerships LLC consulting firm, started his
career in urbanism: sociology, planning and policy analysis. As former
chief of policy research on energy conservation for the Canadian
Government, he headed the largest evaluation-research project conducted in
Canada on home energy conservation. He has led over 100 values-oriented
research projects in such areas as housing, ecological sustainability,
energy, cars, food, recreation vacation travel, finances, health, good
causes, media, altruism, and innovation. Project sponsors have been mostly
foundations, state and national governments, and Fortune 500 corporations.
Paradox III will feature many leaders in sustainable development and
ecological urban design. The conference fee is $195 and will increase to
$295 on 1 September. For complete conference information, call 415 865
0481 or 520 632 7135 or see www.arcosanti.org/paradox.
Co-directors are Ron Anastasia (rjon@direcpc.com) and Michael Gosney
(mg@verbum.com).
Contact:
Linda Roby
Arcosanti
520 632 7135
pr@arcosanti.ws
Judi Skalsky
The Jerde Partnership International
310 459 6361
judiskalsky@earthlink.net
Verbum, Inc.
285 Ninth Street
San Francisco, CA 94103
415-865-0481 fax 415-865-0509
spirit conference 
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