craschworks

http://www.latimes.com/services/site/premium/access-registered.intercept

From the Los Angeles Times
SMALLER & SMARTER

IT'S ALL THEY NEED
An architect builds big for others but lives within 710 square feet himself. The quality-over-quantity ethos of the 'not-so-big' movement.
By Barbara King
Times Staff Writer

December 15, 2005

DOUG RUCKER puts on his baseball cap, slides open the back door of his house and heads toward his architectural office just a few steps off the patio. OK, then, his wife decides, time for her to get back to work too, and off she goes out the front door and down a high, rounding driveway to her art studio, clutching a mug of hot tea.

Standing before a wall of windows, Rucker flips through a set of meticulously detailed blueprints for Kris Kristofferson's new house, relatively chaste in size at 2,000 square feet, but capacious compared to his own. For 10 years, he and Marge Lewi-Rucker have lived comfortably and contentedly in a three-room structure that is just over 700 square feet.

Thirty years ago, on a dance floor in Malibu, Rucker, a residential architect, and Lewi-Rucker, an artist and therapist, both in their 40s and each in longtime, collapsing marriages, “finally found our real loves,” as he describes their meeting. By 1984, they had left behind their respective former lives, their big houses and the bulk of their belongings to be together.

If living in tiny quarters was what made the most sense at their ages, then that was that, they would do it. Scrap the plans for the larger house along with the dismaying mortgage they hadn't expected, then downsize, pare down, let go — whatever handy jargon you want to ascribe to it — and make a go of it.

After his divorce, with his split from the sale of the house he had designed and built on a Malibu promontory, Rucker managed to buy an acre of rural property choked with waist-high mustard weeds off Kanan Road, 1,700 feet up in the Santa Monica Mountains.

“I got as close to Malibu as I could afford,” he says.

Even today, with the landscape immediately surrounding the house cleared of its tangle of wildness, and a decomposed granite lawn just outside the front door raked in serene Zen-like patterns, the place has the aura of an outlying region you might stumble upon on an exotic trek.

Rucker drew up plans for an 1,800-square-foot house, but by then, he and Lewi-Rucker were in their 50s and realized they couldn't take on 30 years of hefty monthly payments.

Instead, Rucker built a 500-square-foot workspace for himself with built-in furniture, expanding it a year later with a bedroom and bathroom addition so Marge could move in.

For nine years, until he built a separate 550-square-foot office, Rucker worked at a draft board in the living area. “Returning from work was easy,” says the easily amused Rucker, laughing in his quick, vigorous way. “I'd turn off the lights and walk across the room to the couch. I was home.”

Rucker also put up a prefab greenhouse studio for Lewi-Rucker near the entry to the property, where she could create her Prismacolor drawings. To filter the sun, he lowered the floor of the makeshift art studio and suspended a shade cloth over a metal framework he designed from chain-link railing; Lewi-Rucker made panels for the ceiling out of foam board that she covered with silver-painted tar paper.

There's a built-in bed where they sleep when they have guests, who sleep in the house on the other built-in bed that calls to mind a berth on a schooner.

Two people can only pull off the tricky business of living in a condensed manner if they're willing to make a stoic assessment of what they can and can't hang on to and to be vigilant about organization.

“I tell all my clients to make three piles: the throw-out pile, the maybe pile and the keep pile. The keep pile is what tugs at your heart,” says Rucker. “Then I tell them to toss piles one and two. If you have of lots of 'maybe' stuff, you'll feel like a maybe person. Surround yourself only with things you love.”

The Rucker rule: Bring into your house only those things you absolutely do not wish to be without. You'll feel a lot better. Throw out that unsightly chair, get rid of clothes you don't wear or items that are only marginally satisfying, give away books you've read (unless you love your library, in which case make a beautiful one). Eliminate all that creates disharmony. A harmonious house contributes to a harmonious life.

Both Rucker and his wife have everything they need, they insist, and more important, what they really want: pictures of their children (she has four, he has three), his mother's books, his five volumes of a self-published autobiography (two more are on the way), “special little tchotchkes” her children made, the easel her father, a painter, brought back from his days in Paris, the drafting table used by her father and also her mother, a children's book illustrator, movie videos and CDs they store in the built-in cabinets. (Built-ins are everywhere, and key to living small.)

“I'm not that attached to things, anyway. I'm more drawn to dancing, music, reading, my work, nature,” says Lewi-Rucker, taking a sideways glance out the window toward the limpid sky brushed with loose, vapory clouds.

Having, as they do, doors and windows opening from almost every direction onto thick clusters of chaparral, the exaltation of steep mountain ranges circling all about, the lawn rising and falling on various levels, they escape the claustrophobia that, say, a city apartment of the same size might engender. A feeling of expansiveness takes over.

“We don't feel we've been denied,” adds Rucker. “I had already lost everything once before when my first Malibu house burned down in the fires in '70. It looked like a pile of steel spaghetti on the ground. It was a total houseclean. But I felt strangely liberated. Possessions possess the possessor. If all of a sudden you don't have anything, then nothing owns you.”

Since 1958, when the Illinois native set up his one-man architectural office in Southern California, he has designed more than 200 residences in the Malibu area — all unmistakably what computer systems engineer Ron Munro, a two-time client, refers to as “a Doug Rucker.” Instantly recognizable but never formulaic.

By that he means, in part, liberal use of floor-to-ceiling glass softened by overhangs, liberal use of warm woods, post and beam construction, unusual sensitivity to the site and to the personalities of the inhabitants, a flawless fusing of indoors and outdoors, a sense of contained drama without the staginess of the architect-in-need-of-applause.

Rucker gets out of the way, just as he intends his houses to get out of the way of the inhabitants.

“A house has to stay in the background and not compete with the owner for attention,” says Rucker. “It shouldn't be an excuse for the architect's ego. In a trophy house, the house is the thing and not the people. In my architecture, the people are the thing and the house is the backdrop. I could design a structure that looks like a gorilla lying down. It would be good publicity, but it wouldn't be a good house.”

Rucker, says Louis T. Busch, a Malibu Realtor for 56 years, is known not just for the beauty of his houses, but for their function. “He makes houses livable. Some architects miss the point. They don't do a good job of taking advantage of the view, or taking into account your real needs, like closets. He does it all very well.”

After 47 years of envisioning residences, Rucker's passion and energy for his work — as distinctive, as appealing, as fresh as ever — is undiminished, his philosophy for what makes good architecture, and for how we ought to live, unwavering. He is emphatically immune to architectural fads.

A house should be indigenous, he maintains: of its time and of its place. All those still-proliferating borrowed styles you see here — Mediterranean, Colonial, Provincial, Tudor, Roman Villa, Spanish Revival — are not regional, he points out, and most are bad facsimiles of buildings meant for other ages, other places and other climates. In short, they don't belong here.

“We're in Southern California in 2005,” Rucker says and pauses, as if that has said it all. “New houses that import styles from another time and place betray the imaginative possibilities of the present day. We sell ourselves short by not building our buildings. We've missed our opportunity to make our own character.”

A house should also have integrity, and the source of that integrity, he says, is “to have integrity in your person.”

Quality, not quantity. “A 20,000-square-foot house is a tremendous slap in the face to the whole environment.” Real, not fake. “I won't build houses of false materials. Real architecture makes good ruins. Fake buildings become rubble and dust that blows away.”

In a no-nonsense “Doug Rucker,” what you see is what you get. No linoleum made to look like tile. No glued-on Styrofoam beams made to look like wood. No plasticized countertops made to look like marble. No stamped concrete made to look like cobblestone. “A house has to know what it is.”

Rucker is given to speaking of structures and materials in anthropomorphic terms, as if they were living, breathing, cognizant beings: “Stone likes to be on the ground. It gets nervous and unsettled the higher it gets. Wood loves to be high too, because it was once a tree. Wood does not like to be painted. It likes natural finishes. Brick does not like to be painted. It wants to be brick. Lay brick as a patio and it will thank you every time you walk on it. Stucco and drywall love to be painted. They are unhappy and incomplete when they are not. They mate with paint for life, like ducks and geese.”

But he is just as inclined to be plain-spoken. “I treat houses basically as a shelter. The chief purpose of a house is protection from the elements, even if the elements are as mild as here in Southern California. It's also a place to put your stuff, as George Carlin says.”

The biggest mistake architects and clients make, he says, is not thinking of architectural design as a total environment for living. Landscaping is part of the design, lot line to lot line. There should be a soft interplay between indoor and outdoor, and every room should have its own outdoor space.

“He put windows in my garage. I never had that before,” says client Carolyn Craft, a retired teacher. “Everything Doug does is thought out, beautiful, simple — cabinetry, his use of space, glass walls, beam ceilings. I lie in bed and just stare at my ceiling. You can always tell a Doug Rucker house. It's like walking into peace.”

*

BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX

Visualizing a California dwelling

Architect Doug Rucker, who has built more than 200 houses in the Malibu area, including his own 700-foot structure, has strong feelings about the right way to build a house in Southern California:

“Houses should be of their time and of their place. Indigenous houses — native to the area — are timeless houses.”

“Because we're in Southern California with its wonderful views, I visualize my houses as basically glass, with the solid parts being the cabinets, the closets, the walls to the bedroom and bathroom.”

“Houses need protective overhangs for generous glass areas to save cooling bills, prevent interior deterioration, cut glare.”

“A California indigenous house is in concert with the site. It sings the same song. It faces the right way, it yields when the land yields, it juts when the land juts, it blends, flows, capitulates. It loves the site and is married to it.”

“The indigenous house should be made of the fewest possible materials in order to create a harmony of structure. The less simple it gets, the less powerful it gets.”

“Houses should be thought out in every detail. Details are what make it work.”

“A house should be built of real materials: wood, bricks, stucco, tile, glass.”

“A house wants to be optimistic. Natural wood and off-white are two of the most optimistic colors.”

“Everyone is happier in harmony. Eliminate all that creates disharmony. Fill your house solely with what you love.”

“To create harmony, think of design within the context of the next largest entity. That is, an accessory such as a lamp should be selected considering the furniture. The furniture should be selected considering the room as a whole.”

“Living in a conflicted house, like living with a conflicted person, is difficult. A conflicted house may have one of the following: inconvenient floor plan; minimal storage; poor light [or] heat; steep, narrow stairs; bad flow.”

“I think of a house as an integrated part of a total environment for living. That includes all the property, lot-line to lot-line. There should be an integration between the landscaping and the house, with no sense of demarcation.”

“Every indoor room should have its own outdoor space. It's a wonderful way to increase the apparent size.”

“A California house should have a semi-enclosed outdoor transition space that will make your passage from jungle to home and from home to jungle a relaxing experience. Our climate allows for it.”

Barbara King can be reached at [email protected].

Build photos of a hobbit home

http://www.ledtronics.com/pages/pr_121405.htm

Light For Plants, Not People
LEDtronics Introduces LED Plant Light Bars for Plant Growth

TORRANCE, CA – December 14, 2005 – LEDtronics announces LED Plant Light Bars for Plant Growth.

How do plants capture and use light? This question has been studied and researched for decades, and researchers have long known that plants use different frequencies of light, or different colors of light, for different purposes. Some colors of light make plants grow and bloom, while others promote compact growth, and some aren't really used much at all. For example, the leaves of plants look green because they reflect green light. If a plant reflects a color of light instead of absorbing it, that color isn't used to help a plant grow.

Scientists used this knowledge to develop lamps that would let them raise plants without sunlight. Their new “grow lights” weren't developed from scratch. They took existing lamps, the same ones used to light our homes and factories, and modified them to produce more of the colors of light that are used efficiently for plant growth.

And they were successful.

Today we have many lamps that can be used to help grow plants without sunlight. They range from incandescent bulbs to fluorescent tubes, to the very powerful metallic vapor lamps, such as metal halide and high-pressure sodium lamps. These lamps can all be used to grow plants indoors. And they all have the same problem: they produce a lot of light that plants can't use efficiently.

The lamps we use in our homes generate a lot of light in the green and yellow part of the visible light spectrum, because the human eye is very sensitive to those colors of light. Plants, on the other hand, prefer light of other colors, colors people don't see very well. So while old-fashioned grow lights will let you grow plants indoor, they waste a lot of energy making light plants can't use efficiently.

But they sure do look bright, don't they?

The LEDtronics PlantLED Difference:

Our grow lights are designed from the ground up, optimized for plant growth, not human vision. Using light emitting diodes, or LEDs, they selected the colors of light plants use most efficiently for vigorous growth and health. The result is a plant grow light that uses very little energy yet provides all the light your plants need to thrive indoors. They also used their specialized knowledge of LEDs to make sure each bulb operates optimally, providing maximum light output and maximum bulb life.

Our patent pending technology offers other advantages over conventional artificial plant grow lighting.

Low Energy Use: LEDs are more efficient at producing light than conventional glass-envelope bulbs. Depending on configuration, a typical LED-PlantBar uses less than 2 watts of power, an important fact as energy costs continue to rise.

Targeted Light Output: Unlike “broad spectrum” plant grow lights, which produce a lot of light plants can't use efficiently, PlantLED products only deliver the light colors plants want most for vigorous, healthy growth. By leaving out light plants don't need, we provide still more energy savings over conventional plant grow lights.

No “White Light” Glare: Other plant grow lights use technologies generally used to light rooms and buildings, which makes them very bright to the human eye. PlantLED products deliver light that is very bright to plants, but relatively dim to people. Your plants get what they need without the “white light” glare you don't need.

Click here to download LED Plant Light Bar Close-up image as a zip-compressed 300 ppi 5.5×5.5in.
RGB jpeg (359KB)
(Can be converted to CMYK tif for printed publications)
Low Heat: Conventional grow lights are very hot, running from several hundred degrees to over fourteen hundred degrees Fahrenheit at the bulb's surface. Our LED grow lights are merely warm to the touch, even after operating for hours, and are safe around both children and animals. This low heat is also safer for your plants, allowing you to place the lights as close to your plant's foliage as you like, for maximum effectiveness, without fear of burning their leaves. Delicate blooms don't fade or burn at the edges, and last longer. Lower radiated heat also means a savings in room cooling costs.

Low Voltage: Our LED grow lights are low voltage devices, running typically on less than twenty volts of electricity, making them an ideal choice for homes with children or pets.
Long Life: Typical LED lifetime is 100,000 hours. This is ten to fifty times longer than typical glass grow light bulb life expectations. Replacing glass bulbs every year adds a lot to the expense of a growing system.

No Ballast: LED-PlantBars weigh just ounces, far less than conventional fluorescent and metallic vapor systems, which typically need a ballast weighing up to fifty pounds. Some manufacturers build their ballasts right into the light fixture, making the light hard to hang in your home or office. Ballasts also burn out eventually, requiring another expensive component replacement not needed with LED-PlantBars.

No Reflector: Conventional glass envelope grow lights emit light in all directions. In order to use as much of this light for plant growth as possible, these lights are generally fitted with bulky, unattractive reflectors to direct light back toward the plants. With LEDs the reflectors are built right into the LEDs themselves, so no secondary reflector is needed. Almost all of the light generated by the LEDs in the LED-PlantBars is directed straight at your plants.

LED-PlantBar is 21 inches long and 2.5 inches wide. The optimum distance from the plant for this product is 12″-18″. However the distance may vary based on the needs of the grower. For seedlings the distance should be no closer than 3″. A full-grown plant that is just being maintained inside a house or office may be as far away as 24″-36″.

The white light equivalent output of one LED Plant Light-Bar is approximately 100-watts. This is a good rule-of-thumb to follow when sizing up how many bars will be needed to grow plants that have been growing under traditional white light sources, e.g. high pressure sodium (HPS) or metal halide (MH) type lights. The approximation for fluorescent grow lights is about one bar per 250-watts. LED based grow lights present a challenge when replacing traditional grow lights. LEDs are low energy devices (like fluorescent lights), this means that they must be closer to the plants than high energy sources (like HPS or MH lights).

But there's a tradeoff between closeness and coverage. Because LEDs output a “cone” of light, closer means a decrease in coverage. So a balance must be attained between desired energy at the plant and coverage in square feet. Some plants require higher energy (plant closer to bar) and thus for coverage you'll need to use more bars in an offset stagger multiple bar configuration to increase coverage. Some plants require low energy to grow; so fewer bars at a greater distance are possible. PlantLED may also be hung vertically within the foliage of a dense plant for additional energy (a big selling point as traditional lights cannot do this).

Founded in 1983, LEDtronics® leads where others only follow when it comes to designing, manufacturing and packaging state-of-the-art LEDs to meet the world's constantly changing lighting needs. Our inventive product line encompasses an array of direct incandescent lamp replacement Based LEDs, low-cost snap-in and relampable Panel Mount LEDs, high intensity sunlight-visible Discrete LEDs, PCB LEDs circuit board status indicators, surface mount diodes SMT LEDs, full-spectrum rainbow RGB LEDs, Ultraviolet (UV) and Infra-Red (IR) LEDs.

Pricing for one PlantLED and one 120 volt Ac to 12 volt DC power plug is $159.95 each, quantity discounts and larger 2, 4 and 8 LED plant bar systems are available. Contact LEDtronics toll free at 1-800-579-4875, telephone 310-534-1505, fax at 310-534-1424 or mail at LEDtronics Inc., 23105 Kashiwa Court, Torrance, CA 90505. Visit our website at www.ledtronics.com.

The direct web link to the on-line datasheet is as follows:
www.ledtronics.com/ds/plantled/default.asp

For Technical Information Contact:
Jordon Papanier at 310-534-1505
E-Mail: [email protected]

- You have emergency rations for your pets, and view your pets as
potential emergency rations.

- You can't put your groceries in the trunk of the car because its
already jammed full with emergency kits, first aid supplies, and
fully-stocked BOBs.

- You know the news three days before it hits the mass media.

- You have back-up plans for your back-up plans.

- You're convinced you've been exposed to so many chem-trails, you
consider it a form of birth control.

- You've ever repressed the urge to bleat “BAAAAAAAAAA” as your
neighbor
earnestly asks, “What war? Where?”

- You've ever bought antibiotics for human use through a vet, or
grains
for human consumption through a feed store.

- You've got more than one grain mill.

- You've ever wondered how you might filter the used water from your
washing machine to make it fit for human consumption.

- You have a kerosene lamp in every room

- Your living room coffee table is actually a board with pretty cloth
over it to disguise your food storage underneath.

- Your box springs are Rubber Maid containers filled with rice and
beans.

- You save dryer lint to make fire starters.

- Your most commonly-used fuel additive is 'Stabil', instead of
'Gumout'.

- You automatically choose the heavy duty flatbed cart upon entering
Sam's or Costco.

- If you know the shelf life of tuna fish, but don't know how long
you've had an open jar of mayo in the frig.

- Your basement walls are insulated with crates of toilet paper, from
floor to ceiling, all the way around.

- While other people are saving money for new furniture, or vacations,
you are desperately saving to get solar panels put on your house.

- You were excited beyond all reason when they came out with cheddar
cheese in a can.

- You've ever served MREs at a dinner party.

- You can engage in a spirited debate on chemical vs. sawdust toilets
for hours on end.

- You've ever considered digging an escape tunnel from your basement
to
the nearest stand of trees.

- You know how to use a vacuum cleaner in reverse to filter air in
your
designated bio-chem attack safe room.

- You've ever considered buying an above-ground pool for water storage
purposes.

- You know what things like 'TSHTF', 'BOB' and 'TEOTWAWKI' mean.

- You have different grades of BOB's.

- You know the names, family histories, locations, and degree of
readiness of over a thousand fellow doomers on the net…. but you've
never met your neighbors.

- The best radio in the house is a wind-up.

- You have better items in storage than you use everyday.

- When the SHTF, you would eat better than you eat now.

- Your significant other gave you a sleeping bag rated -15 degrees for
Christmas…. and you were moved beyond words.

- You've sewn a secret mini-BOBs into the bottom of your children's
school backpacks.

- Local food pantries have come to depend on donations from your
larder
when you rotate stock in the spring and fall.

- You're still using up your Y2K supplies.

- You have enough army surplus equipment to open a store.

- The local army surplus store owner knows you by your first name.

- You fill up when your gas tank is 3/4 full.

- You call Rubber Maid for wholesale prices.

- You have several cases of baby wipes and your kids are all grown.

- Bert from 'Tremors' is your favorite movie character.

- You carry a pocket survival kit, a sturdy folding knife, a SureFire
flashlight and a small concealed handgun on you to church every
Sunday.

- You start panicking when you are down to 50 rolls of toilet paper.

- You keep a small notebook to write down any edible plants you happen
to see along the road.

- You shop yard sales, store sales, and markdown racks for barter
goods
for ATSHTF.

- You own a hand-operated clothes washer and a non-electric carpet
sweeper.

- You have at least two of every size of Dutch oven (the ones with the
legs on the bottom), and 20 bags of charcoal, although you have a gas
grill.

- You have rain barrels at each corner of your house, although you
have
a city water hookup, and a Big Berkey to purify the water.

- You have sapphire lights, survival whistle, and a Swiss Army knife
on
every family member's keychain.

- The people in line at Costco's ask you if you run a store or
restaraunt.

- You require a shovel to rotate all your preps properly.

- You no longer go the the doctor's because you can either fix it
yourself, make it at home, or know and understand the physicians desk
reference better than he does, and can get the goods at the vets or
pet
store for MUCH less moolah anyway.

- You know that a 'GPS' has nothing to do with the economy.

- You track your preps on a computer spreadsheet for easy reordering,
but have hardcopies in a 3-ring binder 'just in case'.

- You've thought about where the hordes can be stopped before entering
town.

- You start evaluating people according to 'skill sets'.

- You view the nearest conservation area as a potential grocery store
if
TSHTF.

- You know *all* the ways out the building where you work.

- You have enough pasta stockpiled in your basement to carbo-load all
the runners in the New York marathon.

- You know that you have 36 gallons of extra drinking water in the hot
water tank and your 2 toilet tanks.

- You know which bugs are edible.

- You have a handpump on your well.

- You have #10 cans of 'stuff' that the labels fell off of, but you
won't throw it out or open it because it 'may be needed later', even
though you haven't a clue as to the contents.

- You know where the best defensive positions and lines of fire are on
your property.

- You've made a range card for your neighborhood.

- Your toenail clipper is a K-BAR.

- The Ranger Handbook is your favorite 'self help' book.

- You've numbered the deer romping in the yard by their order of
consumption.

- You must move 50 cases of food for the plumber to get to that leaky
pipe, but you have your own hand truck in the basement to do it.

- You own more pairs of hiking boots than casual and dress shoes
combined.

- You have more 55gal blue water drums than family members.

- Your UPS system has more than 6 Deep cycle batteries.

- You have a backup generator for your backup generator, which is a
backup for your solar system.

- You go to McDonalds and ask for one order of fries with 25 packs of
ketchup and mustard.

- You have ever given SPAM as a serious gift.

- You've had your eye out for a good deal for a stainless steel
handgun
to conceal in the bottom of the magazine rack next to the toliet.

- You are single male over 40, but you still have an emergency
childbirth kit, just in case you have to deal with that possibility.

- You have two water heaters installed in your basement, but one is a
dummy that's been converted to hideaway safe.

- You've made bugout cargo packs for your dogs.

- You have a walking stick with all sorts of gadgets hidden inside.

- Your koi pond is stocked with catfish.

- As a stand-in scoutmaster, you taught your son's troop to set
mantraps
and punji pits, and haven't been asked to stand in since.

- You're on your fifth vaccum sealer, but you keep at least one of the
worn out ones because you can still seal up plastic bags with it.

- You haven't bought dried fruit in years, but you buy fresh bananas,
apples, peaches and pears by the case and have three dehydrators.

- Your UPS man hates you because of all the cases of ammo he's had to
lug from his truck to your front door.

- You have duplicates of all your electronics gear, solar panels and
generator parts in your EMP-shielded fallout shelter.

- You have set aside space for your live chickens in the fallout
shelter.

- When the power goes out in your neighborhood, all the neighbor's
kids
come over to your place to watch TV on generator power.

- You must open the door to your pantry *very* carefully for fear of a
canned goods avalanche.

- You have a 'Volcano', you know you can cook anything, and you cast
evil glances at your neighbor's annoying, yappy poodle, muttering
“your
day will come, hotdog” under your breath.

- You've learned to knap flint, make twine from plant fibers for
snares
and use an atl-atl, because you fear that all of your preps and hard
work will be confiscated by FEMA troops or destroyed by earthquakes,
tsunamis, nuclear blasts, ravening hordes of feral sheeple or
reptiloids
from 'Planet X'

http://deseretnews.com/dn/view/0,1249,635174444,00.html

Shall we enhance?

Transhumanism says we're a species in flux

By Elaine Jarvik

Deseret Morning News

Stupidity and sadness, cancer and bad golf scores. In the world
according to transhumanism, these and other human frailties will
eventually go the way of scurvy. Also on the horizon: immortality.
Photo
Jessica Berry, Deseret Morning News
The possibilities are either tantalizing or terrifying, depending
on your point of view. Transhumanists embrace a future in which everyone
has the right to live a life beyond current biological limitations.
Their detractors argue that all these radical enhancements will make us
less human.
That depends on what you mean by “human,” say transhumanists,
whose very name suggests a species in flux.

As the World Transhumanist Association notes on its Web site,
transhumanism is based on the premise that “the human species in its
current form does not represent the end of our development but rather a
comparatively early phase.” Eventually, say transhumanists, we may
indeed become “posthuman” – such an amalgamation of nanotechnology and
neuropharmaceuticals, so changed by our interface with microchips and
nanorobots, so much smarter, happier and healthier, that we hardly would
be recognizable to early 21st century eyes.
It's science fiction based on science fact, a trajectory that
begins with emerging technologies like cyberkinetic chips and gene
therapy, says James Hughes, president of the World Transhumanist
Association and author of “Citizen Cyborg.” Actually, says Hughes, that
trajectory began as soon as our Paleolithic ancestors started taking
care of everyone who was toothless, a point at which we first
transcended natural selection, he says. We have relied on technologies
of one sort or another for millennia – from eye glasses to antibiotics -
to continually make ourselves better than we naturally are.
But where do we draw the line? Or should we draw a line at all?
How smart should we be allowed to be? How tall? How happy? If we
can make depressed people less depressed, should we make happy people
more happy? If we can make our children healthier and smarter, if we can
eliminate much of the suffering in the world through technology, do we
have a moral responsibility to do so? Or do we have a moral
responsibility to speak out against it?
These questions and hundreds of others will face humanity in the
decades to come. There will likely come a time in the not-so-distant
future when we will look back on simpler issues – steroid use by
baseball players, for example – with a certain nostalgia for simpler
times.
Jeremy Jones, a University of Utah senior majoring in philosophy,
is writing his honors thesis on the fuzzy distinction between treatment
and enhancement. A treatment, for example, would be a drug to help
Alzheimer's patients improve their failing memories. “Of course we would
say 'Let's let Grandpa use it, to bring him back so he can be a
functioning part of society,' ” Jones says.
But what if the same drug could help a college student, as Jones
says, “catch an edge”? At what point is the drug the mental equivalent
of muscle-building steroids? “These conditions exist on a continuum,” he
says. “That's why it's so hard to draw the line.”
The same dilemma will exist when we figure out how to give people
a genetic tweak so they won't ever get dementia,” says “Citizen Cyborg”
author Hughes. On the one hand, it's a medical therapy. On the other,
it's a way of fiddling with the natural aging process.
“Bio-Luddites” is what Hughes calls people who want to ban the
technologies and drugs that would help humans live beyond their current
potential. “There are people who are mobilizing to ban these
technologies; we would do well not to underestimate them,” says Hughes,
who also teaches health policy at Trinity College in Hartford, Conn.
“Bioconservatives are very attached to four score and six, and the
IQ, as definitions of what it means to be human,” he says. “But what it
means to be human is to push all those boundaries.” Just look how far
we've come from our agricultural ancestors, who “were flea-bitten and
had short lives,” he adds.
Critics of pushing boundaries come from both the political right
and left, he says, pointing to conservatives such as Francis Fukuyama of
the President's Council on Bioethics (which in 2003 published a critical
report called “Beyond Therapy: Biotechnology and the Pursuit of
Happiness”) and liberal activists such as Jeremy Rifkin, president of
the Foundation on Economic Trends.
The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary's R. Albert Mohler Jr.
is another vocal opponent of radical enhancements. It's one thing, he
says, to try to give a person with bad eyesight 20/20 vision, and it's
another to try to create humans whose eyesight is superhuman. The
latter, he says, uses science “to redefine the species.”
“From a Christian worldview perspective,” he says, “there are two
problems with this. First, you have the normative definition of what it
means to be a human being made in the image of God.” To try to exceed
normal human capacities, he says, “is to open, quite literally, a
Pandora's Box of moral problems.”
The second problem, Mohler says, is the transhumanist desire to
prolong life beyond normal aging. “The tranhumanists increasingly see
death as an oddity that is to be overcome. Christians certainly do not
embrace death as a good in itself, but we understand that death is a
part of what it means to be human, and that, indeed, the effort to
forever forestall death is itself an act of defiance that will be both
unworkable and morally suspect.”
Richard Sherlock takes a different view. Sherlock is a philosophy
professor at Utah State University, one of only several Utah members of
the World Transhumanist Association – and also a practicing member of
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
“We ought to be able to look at the future as an opportunity, not
a threat,” says Sherlock, who is also a board member of the Journal of
Evolution and Technology. “I don't think you can say God has said 'this,
but no more.' All these technologies are ways in which we become more
like our Creator,” he adds. In fact, he says, the idea of a continually
advancing human “fits better within a Mormon context that sees humanity
as a developing structure, aspiring to be more like God.”
Not that technology doesn't present potential challenges, he says.
But “we can't put our head in the sand and hope they go away. They need
careful thought in light of the moral and religious traditions of the
West.”
“The really important question that transhumanists themselves
worry about,” he adds, “is how to make the future equitable.”
What happens, for example, if the rich have access to nanorobots
that can rid the body of cancer cells, but the poor don't? What happens
if only developed countries can provide their citizens, or maybe just
their wealthiest citizens, the latest in gene therapy? Hughes calls the
solution “democratic transhumanism.”
“Our agenda is not just 'rahrah technology,' ” he says, “but the
creation of a society that is egalitarian in the use of those
technologies.”
But even in that best of all worlds, the potential dilemmas are
staggering. Take the case of Parker Jensen – the Utah boy whose parents
were charged with kidnapping when they refused to let their son undergo
chemotherapy – and think about what happens if a hospital decides that
an unborn baby must undergo genetic engineering so he won't ever get
cancer in the first place.
What happens when parents decide they want their children to be
genetically altered to be tall? Will shortness become a disability when
buildings and furniture and cars all are redesigned for the burgeoning
population of tall people? Will governments decide that tallness is not
in the community's best interest, since tall people take up more room?
Will tallness no longer be an asset, anyway, if everyone is the same
height?
And these are the easy questions. What about the scenario Hughes
presents in “Citizen Cyborg”: the fictitious case of a woman named
Grace?
The hypothetical Grace has an auto accident that destroys the
right half of her brain, at which time her remaining brain is suffused
with nanoelectrodes hooked up to a computer that has the same power as
the human brain. At the same time, a bath of neural growth factors and
cloned neural stem cells stimulate her remaining brain cells to grow new
connections to the brain prosthesis. As time goes by, the brain
prosthesis assumes an increasing role in Grace's head.
In her 80s, though, Grace is diagnosed with an incurable form of
neurological deterioration, which makes her organic brain slowly shut
down. No problem, though, since Grace's computer self has kept her
mentally sharp, and has preserved her memories, emotions and personality
via computer- a process known as uploading. As her organic brain
deteriorates, Grace asks to have her computer self removed from her
dying body and attached to the World Wide Web, or whatever the Web has
morphed into by then. She builds herself a virtual body “with virtual
simulations of neurochemistry, hormonal ebbs and flows, and a sense of
embodiment,” writes Hughes. “She edits her body image back to a vigorous
20-year-old, and jacks up her self-confidence and becomes a successful
politician campaigning for cheaper electricity and cyborg rights.”
Is Grace still human? “So long as we continue to talk with her and
we feel the presence of another mind with which we can empathize, we are
compelled to grant her the rights and responsibilities of membership in
society regardless of whether she is still 'human,' ” says Hughes.
And what about machine minds that aren't uploads of human brains?
Do they have rights? And what about creatures that are part animal, part
human?
“There is no intrinsic value in being human, just as there is no
intrinsic value in being a rock, a frog or a posthuman,” say the
founding documents of the World Transhumanist Association. “The value
resides in who we are as individuals and what we do with our lives.”
“Bio-Luddites,” Hughes argues, “advocate human-racism.” Instead he
focuses on what he calls “personhood.”
All of which makes U. student Jones understand people who say
“Whoa!” to technological progress. But the good news, he says, is that
“we're not there yet . . . . We have a little bit of time to figure it
out.” We shouldn't try to institutionalize restrictions on enhancement
technologies yet, he says, “or try to create a society that doesn't stop
to think about the ethics. We can't let the capitalist market rule or
the conservative drive to restrict everything.” The solution, likely, is
somewhere in the middle.
“We just don't know now what it is.”

Via :

Light saber dancing.

Via :

A tribute to Ray Harryhausen..

Via flutterby

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/02/AR2006010201513_3.html

Bundles Of . . . Misery
Parenting Got You Down? You're Not Alone, Says Study
By Elizabeth Agnvall
Special to The Washington Post
Tuesday, January 3, 2006; HE01

Just as we're taking down the tree, organizing the new toys and stepping onto the scale comes a study finding that may make us wonder why we do it all: Parents are more likely to be depressed than people who do not have children.

Published last month in the Journal of Health and Social Behavior, the study of 13,000 U.S. adults found that parents, from those with young children to empty nesters, reported being more miserable than non-parents. The researchers analyzed data from a national survey of families and households that asked respondents how many times in the past week, for example, they felt sad, distracted or depressed.

Unlike earlier studies, this one found moms and dads equally unhappy.

So: After all the sleepless nights and drowsy mornings, the cycles of feeding and throwing up, the American Girl doll accessories bought on credit, the toothpick models of the solar system and the algebra tutors . . . we would have been happier without it all?

In a word, says study author Robin Simon, an associate professor of sociology at Florida State University, yes.

“Parents don't do as well as non-parents,” she said.

Simon's own kids — she has an adult daughter and a teenage son — were unimpressed by the study results. “They're like 'Whatever,' ” she said.

For her part, Simon felt oddly cheered: “It's validating and consoling to know that you're not alone.”

But how can the findings stand? Politics, culture and history — to say nothing of those annoying Baby Gap ads — all reinforce the message that having children is the greatest pleasure in life.

Michael Lewis, professor of pediatrics and psychiatry and director of the Institute for the Study of Child Development at the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School in New Brunswick, N.J., says that the idea of parenthood as pure joy “was always a bit of a wonderful myth.” He said he's surprised the study findings were not even more negative.

Over the last 150 years, he said, children have moved from being an economic advantage to an economic burden in the United States. We used to be able to send children to work in the fields; older kids tended to the babies. When not pressed into service, they mostly stayed out of the way.

With the advent of Dr. Spock, the parenting industry, obligatory music and soccer lessons and a colossal marketplace that propels kids to desire and parents to guilt, children have become the center of the household.

Consider the “Mom's Letter to Santa” e-mail that went zapping around just before Christmas: the mom is hiding in the laundry room using a crayon to write her wish list on the back of a receipt while the laundry is between cycles: She wants a car with fingerprint-resistant windows, a radio that plays only adult music, a television that won't broadcast programs with talking animals and a place where she can talk on the phone in peace.

“It would be helpful if you could coerce my children to help around the house without demanding payment as if they were the bosses of an organized crime family,” she writes to St. Nick.

It's Not You — Really
Lewis himself has somehow worked through all of this with his four kids.

While he's sure he had the messiest children in town — he once found the skeleton of a decayed mouse under his son's bed — he's raised a doctor and a lawyer. One child is in college and the fourth is in high school.

Still, he notes, even when children are doing well, “there are always issues to deal with. One hopes that it gets better. Parenting is never done. It's an endless task. Lots of pleasure, but a lot of pain.”

His advice: If life as a parent leaves you gloomy, realize that it's not you. It's your . . . situation.

“Don't think you are crazy” for feeling low, he said. This study shows that “lots of people are feeling the same way.”

Meredith Small, a Cornell University anthropologist and author of “Kids: How Biology and Culture Shape the Way We Raise Our Children,” sees cultural forces conspiring to make life lousy for parents.

“Western culture is the worst place to be if you want to be a parent,” she says. “If you look at any other culture, people would think that this is nutty.”

She said parents have never been as alone as they are in the United States today. In places like India, lots of people sleep in one big house. When the baby wakes up at 2 a.m., six people are available to help. Higher birth rates mean there are older children to take care of the younger ones. Worldwide, she says, 90 percent of child care is done by other children.

Even in many European countries, things are better; working mothers — and sometimes fathers — are paid a portion of their salaries to stay home during the first year or more with their young children. Parents get six weeks of vacation and extra time off to take care of sick kids. Good child care is subsidized by the government. College and graduate schools are paid for by the government.

Here, Small said, nuclear families aren't large enough. “Parents are tired, they are overworked, they are extended, they are irritated and they've got nobody to help them.”

A Dissenting Voice
So short of sending the kids back into the fields, having more babies, inviting the neighbors to live with us or charging the kids rent, what's an overwhelmed parent to do?

Family therapist Neil Bernstein, who has offices in the District and Virginia, offers this simple advice: “Get a life.”

For the record, he doesn't necessarily accept the study's conclusion that people with children are more depressed. Still, “What parents need to know and should take away from this is that it's important to look after your own mental health, not to live vicariously through your child,” he said.

People should have their own interests and look after their relationships the same way they look after their children. And if it all seems too overwhelming, it's worth seeking help from a professional.

“Being a good parent does not mean being totally absorbed in your children,” he said.

Bernstein, who has been treating Washington area children and families for 25 years and has grown children, cites his own experience.

“Not only did parenting not make me depressed, but it was without question the happiest years of my life,” he says. “I wouldn't trade them for anything, and I couldn't imagine being anywhere near as comfortable or happy with myself had I not been a parent.”

And for those who have chosen not to have children? Simon said her study validates that their choice might just be the healthiest one of all.

“At least if you're going to do it,” she says to those contemplating parenthood, “know what you're getting into.”

Elizabeth Agnvall is a regular contributor to the Health section. E-mail:[email protected]

© 2006 The Washington Post Company

“There was once a cholera epidemic in Russia. The government, in an effort to stem the disease, sent doctors to the worst-affected areas. The peasants of the province of S_____ discussed the situation and observed a very high correlation between the number of doctors in a given area and the incidence of cholera in that area (i.e. more doctors were observed in cholera areas than elsewhere). Relying on this hard fact, they rose and murdered their doctors.”

Franklin M. Fisher, The Identification Problem in Econometrics,
(New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966) pp. 2-3.

http://www.reason.com/hitandrun/2006/01/the_educated_ma.shtml

New York Times columnist John Tierney has an interesting op/ed today on the looming crisis of too many edumacated uppity wimmin chasing after a dwindling supply of eligible (edumacated and white collar) males. The “crisis” stems from the fact that nearly 3 women graduate from college for every 2 men who do. Tierney points out that under 35 year old men say in polls that they have no big problem marrying women who make more money than they do. However, women who have gone to the trouble of getting a college degree do not want to marry a guy whose pint-sized paycheck would occasion malicious gossip among her friends.

Tierney seems to be onto something. A year or so ago, a professor in a graduate political science program at a leading state university told me that his department was beginning to think about an affirmative action plan for males. Why? Because his department could fill all its classes with qualified women, but women wouldn't apply to the program unless there are some eligible bachelors alongside them in the classrooms.

Tierney writes:

The women surveyed were less willing to marry down–marry someone with much lower earnings or less education–than the men were to marry up. And, in line with Jane Austen, the women were also more determined to marry up than the men were.
You may think that women's attitudes are changing as they get more college degrees and financial independence. A woman who's an executive can afford to marry a struggling musician. But that doesn't necessarily mean she wants to. Studies by David Buss of the University of Texas and others have shown that women with higher incomes, far from relaxing their standards, put more emphasis on their mate's financial resources.

I would link to the op/ed except that the New York Times wants you to pay for seeing it.