Meeting notice: 08-04-98 7:30 NE43-773 (545 Tech Sq.)

Suggested topics:    

        Technological change might be thought of as
        adding degrees of freedom to a society.  Over
        the long run the tendency of capitalism to
        erode prices pushes these choices throughout
        the society.  Examples include air travel,
        computing, printing, and so on.  To state the
        point more generally: over the long term
        technological change pushes state to the nodes
        and away from hierarchies, elites, and switches
        that think they are smart.

        This is of course good from the point of view
        of our own personal freedom of action;
        unfortunately everyone else is empowered as
        well, and sometimes they fail to use their new
        freedoms in ways that are agreeable to us.  One
        social response is to form micro-tyrannies like
        gated towns, condominiums, condos, historical
        districts, and franchises.

        These are organizations whose members accept a
        degree of control over their freedom of action
        that would be intolerable in the context of a
        government, and who are close enough to the
        lives of those members to impose such controls.
        While in theory members have the right to
        leave, in reality leaving these organizations
        often involves such high costs that most just
        accept the discipline of the order even when
        they disagree strongly.

        Given this 'law', a fully globalized NT
        development, with millions of engineers
        participating in the technology, would scale up
        the dynamics of individuation considerably.
        However, by the same token, it might
        supercharge the rate of formation and
        restrictiveness of micro-tyrannies.  Is this
        likely to happen?  Might it make them worse?
        

This week's Megananosite of the year:
http://nano.xerox.com/nano.

Nanonews:

Second International Conference on Complex Systems.
Sponsored by New England Complex Systems Institute.
http://necsi.org. Nashua, NH., October 25-30.
   
Virus transports DNA with RNA motor.
http://news.uns.purdue.edu/html4ever/9808.Guo.RNA.html

Superconducting fullerenes.
http://www.eurekalert.org/releases/lbnl-c36f.html

Slashing chip fabrication costs by 90%.
http://www.eurekalert.org/releases/ns-futcomsh.html

Rotation of a Single Molecule Within a Supramolecular Bearing 
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/281/5376/531

Researchers discover men with erectile dysfunction are
twice as likely to be depressed as men without such
symptoms.
http://www.cfah.org/website2/newsrelease/980723a.htm

Announcement Archive:
http://world.std.com/~fhapgood/nsgpage.html.

hapgood@pobox.com