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