None yet...just a quick note from his cubicle at work. Will try to pry more out of him over the weekend.

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?

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...

BTW, THAT Sterling was only a pastor, Austin's is Pope-Emperor of a world-wide movement. Just FYI.

Geez, you don't get much higher in the order on this Earth that the Pope-Emperor. I AM impressed!

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

There is, in fact, no perpetual motion machine, then?!

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.

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!

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?

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.

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.

Huh, and you went into engineering because you can't stand laws, right? ;=}

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.

algolagnic?

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.

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.

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.

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?

I say our system of laws is immoral, unethical, unjust, corrupt, evil and tacky.

Ok, lemme see "our system" is the problem, not the "laws", or at least the concept of laws as such?

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.

Perhaps that god is the one created in his own image - the image of the worshipper, that is, rather than the reverse!

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.

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!

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.

What a brilliant idea (not the Molokh one)...I am delighted with the idea.

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?

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...)

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.

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)

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 physical and cyber reality. This year's conference focuses on "Third-Millennium Habitats" that integrate sustainable habitats, 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