A Place to Stand

An idea from John McCarthy's very valuable site.

Automated home delivery systems.

An automatic delivery system is a system for the transmission of material objects between homes, stores, offices etc. with as much as possible of the convenience of the telephone system....

An apartment or home or a department of a store or an office has a port into which an object may be put (perhaps in a suitable container) and a push button system for dialing destinations. After a while the object arrives at its destination.... let me say that I have in mind a mechanical system that will transport things through tunnels under the streets.

I can send an object to a friend, and it will arrive at his port in a time comparable to the time required to deliver it by car..... I can order an object at any time of the day or night and have it delivered immediately.

I can send and receive mail by the system. Long distance transmission gets switched to other modes of transportation at suitable places.

I can get rid of trash by sending it to the trash place.

.....Home delivery of cooked meals and return of dirty dishes will be much more feasible than it is today....

First of all, we shall try to devise a system that will work with present buildings. Something that requires new buildings will be quite hard to implement.
Therefore, imagine the following: The ports are mounted in outside walls or in windows like air conditioners are today. This requires minimal modification of buildings. The carriers do most of their travelling under the streets on continuous belts or suspended from cables, but are independently powered by rechargeable batteries between the under street system and the ports. They move from the under street tunnel to the building through feeder tunnels and climb the outsides of the building to and from the ports. There are several ways this can be done having different divisions of the investment between the building modification and the carrier. If we want to put the investment in the carrier, then the building is equipped only with ``handholds'', and the carrier climbs the building with two suitable arms. If we are willing to mount cables or rails on the building, the carrier can be simpler. On the whole, it seems to me that the ``handhold''system is better, because it is more routinely adaptable to a variety of buildings and it will make the minimum change in the appearance of the building. Any version of the system requires an elaborate system for switching the carriers at the right time. This can be done by a a computer in the carrier which communicates with the central computer controlling the system.

An important characteristic of the system affecting its utility and cost is the size of object that can be transmitted. A reasonable size carrier might be rectangular with dimensions 16"x16"x48" having an internal space 12"x12"x36". The carrier would change orientation as it traveled so the contents would sometimes be upside down and accelerations of say 3g might have to be tolerated. It would be desirable to design the system as a whole to accommodate a range of sizes of carrier and so that parts of the system could be upgraded to allow larger sizes. One would probably want a lot of quite small carriers for mail and single small items, but the size mentioned above probably should be provided for in any case.

.....The system is obviously most cheaply constructed for a city full of new apartments, but it looks feasible even for present suburban areas, though at greater expense.

How can we estimate the expense?
A few man years of mechanical, civil, and electronic engineering could produce an estimate accurate within a factor of two with an uncertainty of a few years in how long it would take to get a system working and an factor of five estimate of the development costs. Clearly it won't be cheap, but I think we will be able to afford it in the next ten to twenty years. (Except for specifically designated 1995-96 notes, this essay was written in the 1970s.)Here are some very rough estimates.

The carrier is perhaps the easiest to estimate, because it can be compared to a car. It is much smaller than a car, and it spends most of its time riding. However, it will need a more complicated control system than a car. Therefore we estimate its cost at $500 taking into account expected large reductions in the cost of electronics.

The port. Adding a port to an old building, we will guess at $500 for an old building and $200 if put into a new building. The cost of the handholds will depend on the height and shape of the building but shouldn't be more than $200 per port. The cost of the feeder from the street to the building, we estimate at $1000 to $3000 depending on the need to tear up sidewalks and streets.

The communications cost is estimated at $100 per port assuming it piggybacks on the telephone system.

The central computer cost for a city at present prices might be $10,000,000, but this will go down. [1995 note: It went down. If only the political problems would go down.]

The biggest cost is likely to be the under street system. It includes a tunnel whose size determines the possibilities for expansion in size of object and volume of flow. It has to provide for two way traffic and to carry this traffic suspended from a cable, on a moving belt, on cars on rails, or simply to provide a right of way for the carriers if these are independently mobile. We shall suppose that the carriers contain the information and computer facilities for deciding when to switch paths.
The cost ought to be considerably less than the cost of the streets themselves in new districts since the carriers will be more efficiently loaded than the cars that now provide delivery services. Suppose we guess $1,000,000 per mile, but a civil engineering cost study could make this more precise.....

How can an automatic delivery system come into existence?
The system will be a public utility and a natural monopoly like the telephone system, electric power, gas, water, sewage, and roads. It could come into existence either by a sequence of engineering studies by the government and establishment of a government operated system or it could come into existence as a regulated utility operated by private enterprise. No important public utilities have been established recently, so it will be a new political issue. As I see it, it is more important to society that the system be built than who builds it. However, it seems more likely to be built by private enterprise, because if it is to be built by the public, there must be overwhelming agreement that this is the right way to spend government money, and such agreement will be hard to come by in the current competition for public money. The older utilities were built by private enterprise, because they thought people would be willing to pay for the service. This requires giving or selling franchises to companies formed to provide the service. It is not clear that private enterprise is as adventurous as it was in the nineteenth century. The development costs are likely to be hundreds of millions, perhaps even a few billion.

Note that if the central tunnel/cable/monorail system were made human sized (& the programming was run to keep cars the same way up & not accelerating at above 1 g) we also have a door to door personal transport system. Indeed Professor McCarthy does develop this as well;

Throughout the city there are poles a few hundred feet high. I don't know the best height. Between the poles are strung cables. Hanging from the cables are wires capable of carrying 400 kg. There are motors capable of moving the wires along the cables and up and down. Mechanisms are provided for transferring a wire from one cable to another so it can travel about the city. Hanging from the wires are carriers; the most obvious kind is a cabin that can hold two to four people, but there are also one person open carriers. The whole system is computer controlled.

A person wanting to travel requests a carrier with his cell phone. When the cabin descends at his location, he or they get in and enter the destination.:

While the cost of retrofitting current buildings & cities would be high, probably 2 or 3 orders of magnitude higher than cabling for TV they would be very much lower if installed as they are being built. I can therefore see that if new towns or arcologies are being built that is the place to try it out. I would suggest that an X-Prize for introducing the first such systems would kick start the process. Also that a legal right to, I suggest, 50% of any postage paid for delivery to places (100% if posted within the area served) using automated systems should be established which would ensure investors of a minimum calculable return.

This article comes from Orson Scott Card, a registered Democrat but who did the ultimate article on how the Hockey Stick was faked. Once again he eviscerates the media on how they have censored any adverse reporting of the role of the Democrats in the crunch:

{The housing crisis22n11} direct result of the political decision, back in the late 1990s, to loosen the rules of lending so that home loans would be more accessible to poor people. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were authorized to approve risky loans....

One political party, in Congress and in the executive branch, tried repeatedly to tighten up the rules. The other party blocked every such attempt and tried to loosen them. Furthermore, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae were making political contributions to the very members of Congress who were allowing them to make irresponsible loans....

Alan Greenspan warned them four years ago. So did the Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers to the President. So did Bush's Secretary of the Treasury."

These are facts. This financial crisis was completely preventable. The party that blocked any attempt to prevent it was ... the Democratic Party. The party that tried to prevent it was ... the Republican Party.

Yet when Nancy Pelosi accused the Bush administration and Republican deregulation of causing the crisis, you in the press did not hold her to account for her lie. Instead, you criticized Republicans who took offense at this lie and refused to vote for the bailout!

What? It's not the liar, but the victims of the lie who are to blame?

Now let's follow the money ... right to the presidential candidate who is the number-two recipient of campaign contributions from Fannie Mae.....

If that presidential candidate had been John McCain, you would have called it a major scandal and we would be getting stories in your paper every day about how incompetent and corrupt he was.

But instead, that candidate was Barack Obama, and so you have buried this story,...

Your job, as journalists, is to tell the truth. That's what you claim you do, when you accept people's money to buy or subscribe to your paper.

But right now, you are consenting to or actively promoting a big fat lie — that the housing crisis should somehow be blamed on Bush, McCain, and the Republicans. You have trained the American people to blame everything bad — even bad weather — on Bush, and they are responding as you have taught them to....

Meanwhile, you have participated in the borking of Sarah Palin, reporting savage attacks on her for the pregnancy of her unmarried daughter — while you ignored the story of John Edwards's own adultery for many months.....

If you do not tell the truth about the Democrats — including Barack Obama — and do so with the same energy you would use if the miscreants were Republicans — then you are not journalists by any standard.

&

Barack Obama is just another politician, and not a very wise one. He has revealed his ignorance and naivete time after time — and you have swept it under the rug, treated it as nothing.
Which is not a savage attack on Obama but a difficult one to dispute. I have been no fan of Bush but one problem with 2 party systems is election can be like exorcism of somebody with a genuine illness. The party in power gets kicked out, ignoring the fact that the other one is worse, their unspecific promises of change merely PR & that the real problems have not been faced.

Professor Colin McInnes head of Space Dynamics research at Strathclyde University lecture on Weds 7.30 at the John Anderson Building, Strathclyde University on on the means by which large-scale engineering ventures can offer a route to future prosperity. In particular, the delivery of long-term energy security will be explored, as will so-called geoengineering schemes to mitigate future climate change. It will be argued that the apparent near-term bottleneck in human development can be overcome by considering engineering on both visionary length-scales and time-scales.

The Royal Phil lecture last night was everything I had hoped for. Professor Colin McInnes didn't actually say catastrophic global warming was bull but he did start by saying that the last 10,000 years had been an unusually warm period & that "climate change had always been happening.

He was scathing about the ability of windmills to provide a serious amount of power & strong on the need for nuclear. He particularly criticised government for their resolute failure to sponsor research on improving nuclear over the last 40 years. In particular this has prevented the development of Thorium reactors. Thorium is 4 times more common than Uranium & it's cycle does not include the production of Plutonium & thus would not risk nuclear proliferation. More money would also have brought fusion closer by now. Active research would also have made nuclear reactors working on energy amplification more quickly available. Describing nuclear as not intermittent & as compact and scalable & that the French production of CO2 from generating electricity is 10% of ours.

He suggested the Severn Barrier as a useful addition to our power supplies.

He was also scathing about the "environmentalists" ("a powerful secular orthodoxy that says modern society must repent its ways") desire to prevent us flying on our holidays. The proper thing to do if we want to cut resource use is to improve aircraft efficiencies with designs like flying wings like this.

He also proposed that much of the oil problem could be solved by using the off peak power nuclear reactors to take hydrogen from water & use it as we now use petrol. In the Q&A question this produced some interesting technical questions since hydrogen is obviously far more difficult to store & produces less power per unit volume than oil (though it is also weighs less for the power produced which might actually make it better for aircraft). He did describe an experiment the USSR did years ago in fitting out 1/3rd of an aircraft as a hydrogen tank & flying it successfully.

Instead of subsidising windmills in underdeveloped countries we should encourage them to use coal, possibly with carbon capture. Trying to get them to use windmills merely guarantees their continued poverty.

Ways of cutting CO2 suggested were fertilizing the oceans with nitrogen, putting SO2 crystals in the atmosphere as happened naturally when the 1991 Mount Pinatubo eruption did, reducing temperature by 1/2 a degree worldwide. A longer term option is orbital reflectors which would cost 0.2 of annual GDP, which is affordable spread over a century, & which would use 20 million tons of material, same as the 3 Gorges dam.

An arguably greater risk to our environment is asteroid strike & in this instance he mentioned the Aphosis asteroid which runs no risk of hitting us in 2030 when it next returns but might then be deflected to do so next time. To change its orbit now would use far less energy than to do so after 2030 - should we act now or wait & see whether it is necessary to do so.

He also describes Solar Power Satellites, a Space Elevator & terraforming Mars describing them either as hubris or manifest human destiny (depending on whether you believe there are Things Man Was Not Meant To Do).

The role of government in financing this was discussed & he pointed out that in engineering & cost terms developing North Sea oil was as big a project as the Moon landings.

The future can also hold life extension, self aware computers & individual desk top manufacturing centres.

However all this depends on the sort of individual freedom of thought & action that the Enlightenment was about. The greatest risk to the human future is the rising tide of bureaucracy & government control. We in Britain are particularly far down that road having a government of scientific illiterates, unlike France where they achieve major engineering feats because they have a government which respects such things. I understand that the entire Chinese Praesidium are engineers of one sort or another whereas if you look at Britian & America's Parliaments they seem to be mostly lwyers or people who have never had a job outside politics - or both.)

My former MP Maria Fyfe asked an apparently sincere question - How do we get scientifically literate leaders, to which there was no readily available answer. While I have previously dealt with her & she proved to be an even more enthusiastic genocide supporting corrupt Nazi than the average Labour Party member (letter 12/10/1) it was a good question which I may address in future.

Short back up letter from me in today's Scotsman
Good to see that, due to the efficiency of all these nice wind-farm builders, and the £1 billion a year Scotland subsidises them by, it will be possible to cut the price from 9p to 8p a kilowatt hour (your report, 22 October).

Compare this with nasty French nuclear power, whose price is staying at 1.3p per kwh.

The previous article said "Under the £30 million Offshore Wind Accelerator (OWA) scheme, designed by the Carbon Trust, the cost of transforming wind into usable energy should be reduced by 10 per cent.

The savings would mean the cost of every kilowatt hour of electricity produced by offshore wind farms would drop from 9p to 8p."

The theoretical ability of a telescope to resolve images is directly proportional to its size. The largest is a 11.4m aperture one in the Mount Graham International Observatory. It is built of segmented mirrors because the larger the mirror the more distortions that are inevitable if it is created in a gravity field.

Another problem is that on Earth we are looking through atmosphere. This is why all the wonderful pictures recently have come from the Hubble Space Telescope despite its 2.4m aperture. Like this

But what is the maximum size of a telescope built in space?

I have no idea. A perfectly circular shape can be achieved in zero G simple by spray painting a balloon since a balloon has no other forces acting on it other than gas pressure if there is no gravity & can thus be a perfect sphere. I can see no near term size limits on such mirrors. A mirror with a 1km diameter will collect 10,000 times as much light as a 10m one, or 16,000 times more than the Hubble.

Beyond that, because photons can be collected with an accuracy of timing that is truly unbelievable, it is now possible to correlate images from more than one telescope & putting them together producing together an image that cann be resolved as if the diameter of the telescope was the distance between the 2 of them, though obviously without any more light photons being received.
The telescopes can work together, in groups of two or three, to form a giant ‘interferometer’, the ESO Very Large Telescope Interferometer, allowing astronomers to see details corresponding to a much larger telescope. Of course on Earth weather makes that less useful & in any case they cannot get more than 8,000 miles apart.

Earth's orbit has a diameter of 200,000,000 miles.

At that level there is nothing we could not observe from the start of the universe to the planet a mere 4 light years away. I am not dealing with spacecraft beyond the solar system in these articles because they, probably, need theoretical breakthroughs in science & are therefore well beyond engineering which applies the science we already know. Nonetheless when such a time comes we will already have photographs of anywhere we want to visit.

Letter in the Scotsman yesterday though apparently not online:

Is it not hypocrisy when leaders of the SNP, LibDems & Greens try to make political capital by saying how opposed they are to fuel poverty? All 3 parties must know that electricity prices in france are 1/4 of ours because they are 80% nuclear & the rest hydro. Nonetheless all 3 are committed, for purely ideological reasons, to increasing Scotland's current £1 billion spend yearly on subsidising windmills & other "renewables." That is the equivalent of 3p off our income tax.

Labour & the Conservatives have nothing to be proud of but at least, though in the past equal sinners, they are now partly repenting.

This was based on the Times article I spotlighted on 11th October.

Another reminder of Professor Colin McInnes head of Space Dynamics research at Strathclyde Universitylecture on Weds 7.30 at the John Anderson Building, Strathclyde University on on the means by which large-scale engineering ventures can offer a route to future prosperity. In particular, the delivery of long-term energy security will be explored, as will so-called geoengineering schemes to mitigate future climate change. It will be argued that the apparent near-term bottleneck in human development can be overcome by considering engineering on both visionary length-scales and time-scales.

Neil Clark has a good post on Martti Ahtisaari's receipt of the Nobel Peace Prize. He considers him unfit for being considered a peacemaker because during the negotiations over ending the Kosovo war he threatened the Serbs that “Belgrade will be like this table. We will immediately begin carpet-bombing Belgrade.” Repeating the gesture of sweeping the table, Ahtisaari threatened, “This is what we will do to Belgrade.” A moment of silence passed, and then he added, “There will be half a million dead within a week.” . Of course it could have been argued that he was overstating the genocidal ambitions of western leaders. Or at least it could until he won the prize, awarded by Norway's politicians in a way that clearly always has the approval of western politicians, since had he not been speaking for them he clearly wouldn't have got the gong.

On the other hand looking through past winners it seems that he is very much in accord with many previous recipients:

2007
INTERGOVERNMENTAL PANEL ON CLIMATE CHANGE (IPCC) and AL GORE for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change.
The IPCC are a political organisation pushing the warming scam to make the world's populations more manageable. Gore's film & most of what he says has been proven to a deliberate pack of lies.

2006
MUHAMMAD YUNUS and GRAMEEN BANK for their efforts to create economic and social development from below. Runs a grassroots bank which actually only survives because of western "aid". Very politically correct, of more marginal usefulness.

2005
INTERNATIONAL ATOMIC ENERGY AGENCY and MOHAMED ELBARADEI Political agency & its Director which has, at least, not encouraged the use of commercial nuclear power & promotes the fear inducing LNT theory of radiation damage when all the scientific evidence is for the hormesis theory, that minute levels of radiation are actually beneficial.


2004
WANGARI MAATHAI
For planting trees in Africa - this may have done some good though it is hardly heroic

2003
SHIRIN EBADI
Iranian ex-judge & government opponent. May indeed be on the side of justice but definitely a foe of America's chosen enemy "rogue state".

2002
JIMMY CARTER JR.,former President of the United States of America,

2001
UNITED NATIONS, New York, NY, USA KOFI ANNAN, United Nations Secretary General In effect a New World Order controlled organisation which provides a pretext for western interventions. Annan became boss because the US was so impressed by the way he lied & twisted to help the NATO/Nazi cause in Bosnia & Hercegovina.

2000
KIM DAE JUNG Former South Korean President. Did come to power by opposing the previous dictatorship & despite western approval probably a worthy candidate.

1999
DOCTORS WITHOUT BORDERS (MÉDECINS SANS FRONTIÈRES) As proven by Bernard Kouchner's lies & assistance to the Bosnian Moslem ex-Nazi leader this is a nominally charitable body but actually a Nazi & NATO propaganda organisation actively involved in promoting NATO imperialism & genocide


1998
JOHN HUME and DAVID TRIMBLE for their efforts to find a peaceful solution to the conflict in Northern Ireland. Obviously assisting British wishes in Northern Ireland but nonetheless worthy. On the other hand their electors didn't think so & got rid of both of them & both of their parties.

1997
INTERNATIONAL CAMPAIGN TO BAN LANDMINES (ICBL) and JODY WILLIAMS for their work for the banning and clearing of anti-personnel mines. Worthy winner, not least because this campaign, while becoming politically sexy enough to attract Princess Di, was actually opposed by the western military who don't like having their toys taken away.

1996
CARLOS FELIPE XIMENES BELO and JOSE RAMOS-HORTA for their work towards a just and peaceful solution to the conflict in East Timor. Yes - the western powers initially happy to have the somewhat leftist Timorese regime exterminated by Indonesia were, half a million deaths later, shamed into supporting independence.

1995
JOSEPH ROTBLAT and to the PUGWASH CONFERENCES ON SCIENCE AND WORLD AFFAIRS for their efforts to diminish the part played by nuclear arms in international politics and in the longer run to eliminate such arms. Worthy though their effectiveness may be questioned.


1994
YASSER ARAFAT , Chairman of the Executive Committee of the PLO, President of the Palestinian National Authority.
SHIMON PERES , Foreign Minister of Israel.
YITZHAK RABIN , Prime Minister of Israel.
No comment needed

1993
NELSON MANDELA Leader of the ANC.
FREDRIK WILLEM DE KLERK President of the Republic of South Africa
Like the Northern Ireland one - for reducing the embarrassment of western leaders.

1992
RIGOBERTA MENCHU TUM, Guatemala. Campaigner for human rights, especially for indigenous peoples. A worthy winner & almost alone in not supporting what western governments wanted done.

1991
AUNG SAN SUU KYI, Burma. Oppositional leader, human rights advocate. Worthy

1990
MIKHAIL SERGEYEVICH GORBACHEV , President of the USSR, helped to bring the Cold War to an end. Worthy in the same way that Trimble & Hume were & like them repudiated by his own people. Still they did give it to him but not to Reagan as well which is something. How much he was the actor & how much merely the guy in place when an inevitable collapse came may be debated.

1989
THE 14TH DALAI LAMA (TENZIN GYATSO) , Feudal overlord who kept serf in Tibet. When the Chinese displaced him he reinvented himself as both a western front man & religious icon for westerners bored with traditional religion.

1988
THE UNITED NATIONS PEACE-KEEPING FORCES New York, NY, U.S.A. There is no such force. There is a UN flag used as a flag of convenience by western or western supported forces from Korea to Kosovo.

1987
OSCAR ARIAS SANCHEZ , Costa Rica, President of Costa Rica, initiator of peace negotiations in Central America. Probably worthy.

k1986
ELIE WIESEL , U.S.A., Chairman of 'The President's Commission on the Holocaust'. Author, humanitarian. Wrote a book on the Holocaust which became Oprah's book club selection. Seems a decent guy despite the adulation. The President's Commission seems to be the result not the cause of his importance & it is interesting that the prize committee chose to single it out.

1985
INTERNATIONAL PHYSICIANS FOR THE PREVENTION OF NUCLEAR WAR Boston, MA, U.S.A.
Who can be against preventing nuclear war. Everybody knows doctors are respectable folk which is why Bin Men Against Genocide never won.

1984
DESMOND MPILO TUTU , South Africa, Bishop of Johannesburg, former Secretary General South African Council of Churches (S.A.C.C.). for his work against apartheid. Bishops are respectable folk too.

1983
LECH WALESA , Poland. Founder of Solidarity, campaigner for human rights. Not the saint he was portrayed as when he was so very useful to NATO but nonetheless the cause was just.

1982
The prize was awarded jointly to:
ALVA MYRDAL , former Cabinet Minister, diplomat, delegate to United Nations General Assembly on Disarmament, writer.
ALFONSO GARC�A ROBLES , diplomat, delegate to the United Nations General Assembly on Disarmament, former Secretary for Foreign Affairs . 2 diplomats

1981
OFFICE OF THE UNITED NATIONS HIGH COMMISSIONER FOR REFUGEES Geneva, Switzerland. The UN again

1980
ADOLFO PEREZ ESQUIVEL , Argentina, architect, sculptor and human rights leader. Worthy

1979
MOTHER TERESA , India, Leader of the Order of the Missionaries of Charity. On the one hand clearly a saintly woman on the other hand whether, with her active opposition to birth control, she actually did more harm or good in India is questionable.

1978
The prize was divided equally between:
MOHAMED ANWAR AL-SADAT , President of the Arab Republic of Egypt.
MENACHEM BEGIN , Prime Minister of Israel.
for jointly negotiating peace between Egypt and Israel.
I'd forgotten that Beguin, who was undeniably a terrorist leader before the founding of Israel had got it twice.

1977
AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL London, Great Britain. A worldwide organization for the protection of the rights of prisoners of conscience. Who publicised every lie told by NATO/the KLA/the ex-Nazi Bosnian Moslems etc to promote their genocidal wars. Generally to be found pushing any human rights story against people the New World Order want to bomb. To be fair they did, quietly, release a report about kidnapping & selling women in Kosovo.

1976
BETTY WILLIAMS and MAIREAD CORRIGAN Founders of the Northern Ireland Peace Movement (later renamed Community of Peace People). As with Trimble & Hume they did good.

1975
ANDREI DMITRIEVICH SAKHAROV , Soviet nuclear physicist. Campaigner for human rights. Another western favourite. Only inventor of the Hydrogen Bomb to get a Nobel Peace Prize.

1974
The prize was divided equally between:
E�N MAC BRIDE , President of the International Peace Bureau, Geneva, and the Commission of Namibia, United Nations, New York.
EISAKU SATO , Prime Minister of Japan. Diplomats

1973
The prize was awarded jointly to:
HENRY A. KISSINGER , Secretary of State, State Department, Washington.
LE DUC THO , Democratic Republic of Viet Nam. (Declined the prize.)
for jointly negotiating the Vietnam peace accord in 1973.
No further comment necessary

1972
The prize money for 1972 was allocated to the Main Fund.

1971
WILLY BRANDT , Federal Republic of Germany, Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany, initiator of West Germany's Ostpolitik, embodying a new attitude towards Eastern Europe and East Germany. Western diplomat whose Ostpolitik did defuse tensions. A major statesman & worthy.

1970
NORMAN BORLAUG , Led research at the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center, Mexico City. Major figure in the real Green revolution (ie increasing agricultural yields. Not a politician & the most worthy recipient. GRAND Mughal Akbar once remarked he would venerate the person who could grow two blades of grass where one grew previously - this scientist qualifies.

1969
INTERNATIONAL LABOUR ORGANIZATION (I.L.O.) Geneva. Another UN agency

1968
REN� CASSIN , President of the European Court for Human Rights . We have seen recently how corrupt western controlled international "courts" can be.

The difference between what political lobbying achieves & what real evidence & achievement based science does is plain. The "Peace" prize should be ended since it denigrates the real Nobels.

Arcology, from the words "ecology" and "architecture,"[1] is a set of architectural design principles aimed toward the design of enormous habitats (hyperstructures) of extremely high human population density'

Basically a town in one enclosed building. The cost is obviously very high & any such project would, as a single investment, have a higher risk than several separate projects. Dubai is talking about building one able to hold 1 million people but then they are addicted to massive structures & not seriously constrained by cost.

Previously I mentioned how Richard Rogers had said the actual cost of building the Dome cost £46 million to actually build. Thus we have a possible structure 365m in diameter, 50m high in the centre & just over 100,000 square meters.
Under a structure like that, probably with a transparent awning one could theoretically house 50,000 people but there is no need for anything remotely like that. I am thinking of something rather closer to the 6,000 Prince Charles's Poundbury is aimed to house. Despite my doubts about his architectural designs he does seem to have produced an attractive community atmosphere at that size.

I can forsee developers being allowed to put a structure of that volume of land with full rights, without further planning permission, to put what they want inside. I suspect with this limited amount of control they would be very commercially viable & the environmental impact would be geographically very limited & much less than a windfarm. In particular if the Scottish Tunnels Project is implemented there are very many Highlands & Islands sites which are currently inaccessible but would become about an hour's drive from Glasgow & which would become desirable as primary or holiday homes, situated, probably as a gated community, in some of the most beautiful parts of Scotland but out of the weather.

Hans plays with Lotte, Lotte plays with Jane
Jane plays with Willi, Willi is happy again
Suki plays with Leo, Sacha plays with Britt
Adolf builds a bonfire, Enrico plays with it
-Whistling tunes we hid in the dunes by the seaside
-Whistling tunes we’re kissing baboons in the jungle
It’s a knockout
If looks could kill, they probably will
In games without frontiers-war without tears
Games without frontiers-war without tears

Jeux sans frontieres

Andre has a red flag, Chiang Ching’s is blue
They all have hills to fly them on except for Lin Tai Yu
Dressing up in costumes, playing silly games
Hiding out in tree-tops shouting out rude names
-Whistling tunes we hide in the dunes by the seaside
-Whistling tunes we piss on the goons in the jungle
It’s a knockout
If looks could kill they probably will
In games without frontiers-wars without tears
If looks could kill they probably will
In games without frontiers-war without tears
Games without frontiers-war without tears

Jeux sans frontieres

I'm not particularly musical but I do like lyrics with deep meanings & if they aren't easily understandable they must be deep - right.

This is a slightly edited response giving, what I take to be the meaning of this song which I put on another site but hasn't been published yet so presumably the owner has moved on. Everybody agrees it is about the futility of war - I have interpreted which particularly futile ones it is about:

Hans plays with Lotte (2 Germanic names representing Austria & Germany - the WW1 alliance between Germany & Austria), Lotte plays with Jane ( Jane's Fighting Ships, written originaly by Fred T. Jane d 1916, is the original compendium of the world's navies & a major cause of WW1, or at least Britain's entry in it, was that the Germany was building a big & unnecessary navy)
Jane plays with Willi (Kaiser Bill - WW1 again), Willi is happy again (he was an obnoxious militaristic idiot who particularly loved having a navy to impress other monarchs)
Suki (Japan) plays with Leo (Lion symbol of Britain - Britain & Japan were allies before & through WW1), Sacha (Russian) plays with Britt (Sweden - Russia first became a European power in war with Sweden in the 18thC)(Altenately Britt is Britain & this is the 10thC competition between Britain & Russia over who would have most influence in the Ottoman Empire, Persia & Afghanistan - these being the boundary states protecting Insia from a Russian takeover & Kaakhstan & Georgia from a British takeover - indeed Kipling & others referred to it as "The Great Game" & although fighting is still going on in Afghanistan & Georgia it seems to have been a game with no winner)
Adolf (yup him) builds a bonfire (of Europe), [Enrico (Mussolini Hitler’s Italian ally) plays with it} as has been pointed out in connents this was wrong Italian born physicist Enrico Fermi "playing" with atomic theory did as much as anybody to encourage America to develop the Bomb used at the end of the WW2 "bonfire".

Andre (Andre Deutscher was a Marxist writer) has a red flag, Chiang Ching’s (wife of Mao & ruled China till overthrown by Deng) is blue
They all have hills to fly them on except for Lin Tai Yu (a character in a Medieval Chinese novel - representing traditional Chinese culture having no voice in the arguments about who was the better communist which almost came to war between the USSR & China - this seems even more futile now than when Gabriel wrote it)
Dressing up in costumes, playing silly games
Hiding out in tree-tops shouting out rude names (Marxists in particular were always calling each other rude names)
-Whistling tunes we hide in the dunes by the seaside (D-Day, Dardanelles campaign?)
-Whistling tunes we piss on the goons in the jungle (European Empires in Africa)
It’s a knockout (war, particularly European empires waring)
If looks could kill they probably will (war propaganda for example the stories about WW1 German soldiers raping nuns which were used to recruit British boys)
In games without frontiers-wars without tears (all wars are initially promised to be easy ie WW1 to be over by Christmas)