PUBLICATION ANNOUNCEMENT

John Petersen wrote his newest book “to provide a framework for the next administration – or any organization, for that matter – for thinking about how to deal with the great change that appears to be on the horizon”.  Priests, shamans, and holy men have been talking about the coming decade for hundreds of years.  Many scholars, examining the recurring patterns of history, also foresee major upheaval on the horizon.
 
In the small, hard cover volume Petersen surveys the big changes that he sees converging in the next few years and presents alternative scenarios that may emerge from the confluence.   He highlights the unbelievable breakthroughs in knowledge, mindsets, and scientific capabilities that demonstrate our extraordinary capacity not just to preserve, but to evolve.
 
Former Speaker of the House of Representatives, Newt Gingrich has said that “A Vision for 2012 will stimulate you to think deeply about the challenges we face, the solutions we need, and the changes that should occur to prevent the bad changes that could occur”.  Former senator and presidential candidate Gary Hart added “Even for those of us who have known John Petersen over the years, his insights into our revolutionary age still are enlightening, and often astonishing. As the Paul Revere of the early 21st century, his message is: The Future is Here!  He is a visionary with an ethical dimension and a too little known national asset. This deceptively short essay is a primer for an explosive future that is already upon us.  It should be required reading for the next President.”

FUTURE FACTS - FROM THIS ISSUE

• Americans will soon be able to use Xbox Live to register to vote in the November presidential elections.
  
• A bold proposal to transform strip-mined lands in Appalachia into a self-sustaining community has been awarded the first annual $100,000 Buckminster Fuller Challenge Prize.
  
• Say goodbye to the tangle of cables and the wall socket and hello to powering up your electronic gizmos wirelessly.
   
  
• The U.S. Army is getting closer to mastering man-made "meta-materials" which suggests that flip-of-the-switch invisibility may be around the corner.
  

INSTITUTIONAL CHANGE

• Xbox Live in Youth Voting Drive
• Handle with Care
• The "Authenticity Crisis" In Real Evidence

Xbox Live in Youth Voting Drive – (BBC News – August 23, 2008)
Americans will soon be able to use Xbox Live to register to vote in the November presidential elections. Microsoft has signed a partnership with activist group Rock The Vote to boost interest in the upcoming election among young people. As part of the tie-up Xbox Live members will also be able to take part in polls to gauge their voting intentions. A forum on Xbox Live will also be used to gather opinions from gamers that will be shared with candidates.

Handle with Care – (New York Times – August 11, 2008)
Last year, a private company proposed “fertilizing” parts of the ocean with iron, in hopes of encouraging carbon-absorbing blooms of plankton. Researchers elsewhere are talking about injecting chemicals into the atmosphere, launching sun-reflecting mirrors into stationary orbit above the earth or taking other steps to reset the thermostat of a warming planet. These technologies might be useful, even life-saving. But they would inevitably produce environmental effects impossible to predict and impossible to undo. So a growing number of experts say it is time for broad discussion of how and by whom various technologies should be used, or if they should be tried at all.

The "Authenticity Crisis" In Real Evidence – (Law Practice Today – March, 2006)
Authenticity, in the broad sense of the word, is fundamental to litigation. One type of evidence is “real evidence.” This can be a three-dimensional object, such as a weapon or a piece of art. It can also be, and is far more commonly an “informational record,” a message or record containing language, numbers or other portable information or photographs. However, digital technology has fundamentally changed the world of real evidence, particularly regarding authentication of informational records. Equally if not more important is the fact that the cost of manipulating such records has also become extremely low. 

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NEW REALITIES

• Black Hole Star Mystery Solved
• Sloshing Inside Earth Changes Protective Magnetic Field

Black Hole Star Mystery Solved – (BBC News – August 23, 2008)
Astronomers have shed light on how stars can form around a massive black hole, defying conventional wisdom. Scientists have long wondered how stars develop in such extreme conditions since molecular clouds - the normal birth places of stars - would be ripped apart by the immense gravity of a black hole. But the researchers say stars can form from elliptical discs - the relics of giant gas clouds torn apart by encounters with black holes. They made the discovery after developing computer simulations of giant gas clouds being sucked into black holes like water spiralling down a plughole.

Sloshing Inside Earth Changes Protective Magnetic Field – (Live Science – August 18, 2008)
Something beneath the surface is changing Earth's protective magnetic field, which may leave satellites and other space assets vulnerable to high-energy radiation. A new model uses satellite data from the past nine years to show how sudden fluid motions within the Earth's core can alter the magnetic envelope around our planet. This represents the first time that researchers have been able to detect such rapid magnetic field changes taking place over just a few months.

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DISCOVERIES ENABLED BY NEW TECHNOLOGY

• Last Ice Age Happened in Less than Year
• Make Any Item 100% Waterproof
• Fly's Brain Senses Swat Threat

Last Ice Age Happened in Less than Year – Scotsman – August 2, 2008)
THE last ice age 13,000 years ago took hold in just one year, more than ten times quicker than previously believed, scientists have warned. Rather than a gradual cooling over a decade, the ice age plunged Europe into the deep freeze, German Research Centre for Geosciences at Potsdam said. Cold, stormy conditions caused by an abrupt shift in atmospheric circulation froze the continent almost instantly during the Younger Dryas less than 13,000 years ago – a very recent period on a geological scale.

Make Any Item 100% Waterproof – (Register Hardware – August 27, 2008)
UK company Plasma Product Innovations (P2i) today demonstrated a chemical process it claims can render any material 100 per cent waterproof. Journalists were shown how a material normally very absorbent, such as household kitchen paper, can, if treated with P2i's ion-masking process, be submerged in a tank of water and be lifted out totally dry. P2i has already produced the first consumer application of the technology. Together with sportswear manufacturer Hi-Tec, it has produced a new range of totally waterproof hiking boots and running shoes.

Fly's Brain Senses Swat Threat – (BBC News – August 28, 2008)
Over the years there have been different theories put forward to explain the fly's uncanny ability to outwit our whacking endeavors. Scientists at the California Institute of Technology say it is down to quick-fire intelligence and good planning. They filmed a series of experiments with fruit flies and a looming swatter. The researchers discovered that long before the fly leaps it calculates the location of the threat and comes up with an escape plan. Within 100 milliseconds of spotting the swatter they can position their center of mass so that a simple extension of their legs propels them away from any threat.

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GENETICS/HEALTH TECHNOLOGY

• Broken Leg Bones Healed in Stem Cell First
• How Snoozing Makes You Smarter
• Hope for Arthritis Vaccine Cure
• Testing a New Way to Kill Cancer Cells

Broken Leg Bones Healed in Stem Cell First – (The Age – August 7, 2008)
In a pioneering trial at the Royal Melbourne Hospital, patients with serious leg fractures have regrown thigh and shin bones, recovering quickly with very little pain. Bone marrow stem cells are harvested from the pelvis in a non-invasive day procedure using a needle. The cells are then grown in a laboratory, reproducing countless times to create 15 billion cells in six weeks. This allows surgeons to conduct an operation to administer the stem cells to the fracture sites, where they began to form bone.

How Snoozing Makes You Smarter – (Scientific American – August 7, 2008)
The latest research suggests that memory processing seems to be the only function of sleep that actually requires an organism to truly sleep—that is, to become unaware of its surroundings and stop processing incoming sensory signals. This unconscious cognition appears to demand the same brain resources used for processing incoming signals when awake. The brain, therefore, might have to shut off external inputs to get this job done.  It combs through recently formed memories, stabilizing, copying and filing them, so that they will be more useful the next day. A night of sleep can make memories resistant to interference from other information and allow us to recall them for use more effectively the next morning. And sleep not only strengthens memories, it also lets the brain sift through newly formed memories, possibly even identifying what is worth keeping and selectively maintaining or enhancing these aspects of a memory.

Hope for Arthritis Vaccine Cure – (BBC News – August 14, 2008)
Rheumatoid arthritis is one of a family of autoimmune diseases, in which the body's defense systems launch attacks on its own tissues. The precise trigger for these attacks is not known, but the latest technique, so far tested only on cells in the laboratory, aims to "reset" the immune system back to its pre-disease state. A sample of the body's white blood cells is taken and treated with a cocktail of steroids and vitamins which transforms a particular type of immune cell called a dendritic cell into a "tolerant" state. These cells are then injected back into the joint of the patient.

Testing a New Way to Kill Cancer Cells – (China View – August 20, 2008)
Czech scientists are examining a new method of fighting against tumor cells, based on a vitamin E analog, which has given promising results when tested on mice. The vitamin E analog, effective via mitochondria, causes the death of cancer cells without damaging healthy ones according to Veronika Kratochvilova from the Biotechnological Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences. The scientists said that the effective target for killing tumor cells are mitochondria, small intracellular elements in which cells produce most of the energy they need for their life and growth. Any damaging of mitochondria may kill the respective cell.

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ENVIRONMENTAL ISSUES

• Venomous Lionfish Prowls Fragile Caribbean Waters
• Mysterious Honey Bee Disorder Buzzes into Court
• Real-World Recycling Puts U.S. to Shame
• Texas Homes Use Recycled Paper for Blocks

Venomous Lionfish Prowls Fragile Caribbean Waters – (Chicago Tribune – August 14, 2008)
The red lionfish, a tropical native of the Indian and Pacific oceans that probably escaped from a Florida fish tank, is showing up everywhere — from the coasts of Cuba and Hispaniola to Little Cayman's pristine Bloody Bay Wall, one of the region's prime destinations for divers. Wherever it appears, the adaptable predator corners fish and crustaceans up to half its size with its billowy fins and sucks them down in one violent gulp. Research teams observed one lionfish eating 20 small fish in less than 30 minutes. "This may very well become the most devastating marine invasion in history," said Mark Hixon, an Oregon State University marine ecology expert.

Mysterious Honey Bee Disorder Buzzes into Court – (Environment News Service – August 19, 2008)
The nonprofit Natural Resources Defense Council has filed a lawsuit in federal court in Washington DC to force the federal government to disclose studies on the effect of a new pesticide on honey bees. Studies on the pesticide, clothianidin, were ordered by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency from the pesticide's manufacturer, Bayer CropScience, in 2003 when the federal agency granted the company a registration for the chemical. An NRDC bee researcher and the organization's attorneys believe that the EPA has evidence of connections between pesticides and the mysterious honey bee die-offs reported across the country called "colony collapse disorder" that it has not made public.

Real-World Recycling Puts U.S. to Shame – (Live Science – August 23, 2008)
In Western culture, we think recycling is all about putting your newspapers and bottles in the right bins, and maybe using recycled paper in the printer or Xerox machine. But in other countries, ones that are not so awash in material goods, anything and everything has a second, third and maybe a fourth life. In most other countries, used car tires don't just stack up. They are cut into pieces and crafted into flip flops, becoming sandals with "all weather" tread. In East Africa, people also make good use out of discarded tins. I've seen bright yellow Penzoil cans cut and reformed into votive lamps and palm oil cans flattened and used for roofing material.

Texas Homes Use Recycled Paper for Blocks – (Austin News – August 25, 2008)
Mason Greenstar, in Mason, Texas is mixing recycled paper with water and cement to create home building blocks to use in place of the conventional wood framing and cement cinder blocks. Each block weighs about 17 pounds and is made of 65 percent recycled paper. When they stack up and are cemented down, they create a monolithic wall. The material does more than cut down on landfill waste. With a Santa Fe style look, the walls keep the heat out in the summer retain heat in the winter and do not succumb to termites.

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ENERGY DEVELOPMENTS

• The Visionary Thinking of John Todd
• A Plastic that Chills
• Water Refineries?
• Flush With Energy
• US Geothermal Power Has Grown by 20% This Year
• Hot Asphalt as Better Energy Collector than Solar Panels?

The Visionary Thinking of John Todd – (Metropolis – July 10, 2008)
John Todd, a renowned biologist and pioneer in the field of sustainable design, has been awarded the first annual $100,000 Buckminster Fuller Challenge Prize for a bold proposal to transform strip-mined lands in Appalachia into a self-sustaining community. His proposal outlines a way to restore the one million plus acres of lands in Appalachia that have been devastated by surface coal mining through a process that remediates the soil, reclaims the forests, and develops a new economy based in renewable energies.

A Plastic that Chills – (Technology Review – August 11, 2008)
Materials that change temperature in response to electric fields could keep computers - and kitchen fridges - cool. Thin films of a new polymer developed at Penn State change temperature in response to changing electric fields. The researchers say that it could lead to new technologies for cooling computer chips and to environmentally friendly refrigerators. Changing the electric field rearranges the polymer's atoms, changing its temperature. In a cooling device, a voltage would be applied to the material, which would then be brought in contact with whatever it's intended to cool. The material would heat up, passing its energy to a heat sink or releasing it into the atmosphere. Reducing the electric field would bring the polymer back to a low temperature so that it could be reused.

Water Refineries? – (Water Online – August 4, 2008)
Using a surprisingly simple, inexpensive technique, chemists have found a way to pull pure oxygen from water using relatively small amounts of electricity, common chemicals and a room-temperature glass of water. Because oxygen and hydrogen are energy-rich fuels, many researchers have proposed using solar electricity to split water into those elements - a stored energy source for when the sun goes down. One of the chief obstacles to that green-energy scenario has been the difficulty of producing oxygen without large amounts of energy or a high-maintenance environment. Now, MIT chemists have discovered an efficient way to solve the oxygen problem.

Flush With Energy – (New York Times – August 9, 2008)
Unlike America, Denmark, which was so badly hammered by the 1973 Arab oil embargo that it banned all Sunday driving for a while, responded to that crisis in such a sustained, focused and systematic way that today it is energy independent. Danes imposed on themselves a set of gasoline taxes, CO2 taxes and building-and-appliance efficiency standards that allowed them to grow their economy — while barely growing their energy consumption — and gave birth to a Danish clean-power industry that is one of the most competitive in the world today.

US Geothermal Power Has Grown by 20% This Year – (Tree Hugger – August 22, 2008)
The latest US Geothermal Power Production and Development Update (link in article) from the Geothermal Energy Association shows just how much geothermal power has grown so far this year. According to the new report, geothermal power has grown by 20% since January of this year, with 103 project currently underway in 13 states for a combined capacity of nearly 4,000 megawatts. The GEA says when completed these projects will be able to meet the electric needs of about 4 million homes.

Hot Asphalt as Better Energy Collector than Solar Panels? – (Eco Geek – August 22, 2008)
Researchers in Massachusetts are working on a technique to turn heat gathered by asphalt into useable energy via water pipes. They say that all the parking lots and roads that sit there baking in the sun all day are basically already solar energy collectors, and that the sheer amount of useable asphalt offsets the lower efficiency factor. We just need a way to transfer that heat into energy on a large scale. A system of heat exchangers could become part of road construction projects and improvements, and the system could help out the issue of heat islands.

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INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY

• An End to Spaghetti Power Cables
• Poor Earning Virtual Gaming Gold
• 3D Printing for the Masses by Shapeways

An End to Spaghetti Power Cables – (BBC News – August 22, 2008)
Say goodbye to the tangle of cables and the wall socket and hello to powering up your electronic gizmos wirelessly (in about five years). This picture of a world without wires came a step closer following significant progress made by Intel. Intel's technology relies on an idea called magnetic induction. It is a principle similar to the way a trained singer can shatter a glass using their voice; the glass absorbs acoustic energy at its natural frequency. At the wall socket, power is put into magnetic fields at a transmitting resonator - basically an antenna. The receiving resonator is tuned to efficiently absorb energy from the magnetic field, whereas nearby objects do not.

Poor Earning Virtual Gaming Gold – (BBC News – August 22, 2008)
Nearly 500,000 people in developing nations earn a wage making virtual goods in online games to sell to players. Research by Manchester University shows that the practice, known as gold-farming, is growing rapidly. The industry, about 80% based in China, employs about 400,000 people who earn 4145 per month on average creating a global market worth about $500m. Some gold-farming operations offer other services such as "power levelling" in which they assume control of a player's character and turn it into a high-powered hero far faster than the original owner could manage themselves.

3D Printing for the Masses by Shapeways – (Smart Economy – July 31, 2008)
Easy-to-post blog technology has turned consumers into amateur journalists and Pagemaker and Adobe have helped people to become DIY  graphic designers. The next stage of this evolution is A new online service aims to bring customized manufacturing to the masses by allowing consumers to submit digital designs of products that are then printed, using 3-D printers, and shipped back at cost effective rates.

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TERRORISM, SECURITY AND THE FUTURE OF WARFARE

• Army Eyes Invisibility Cloak
• Solar Plane Makes Record Flight
• Uncle Sam Wants Your Brain
• Hackers Prepare Supermarket Sweep
• Bank Customer Data Sold on eBay

Army Eyes Invisibility Cloak – (Wired – August 20, 2008)
After two years of rapid scientific progress, the U.S. Army is getting closer to mastering man-made "meta-materials" that can bend light around an object, according to one military researcher. That's right: flip-of-the-switch invisibility is around the corner. According to Dr. Richard Hammond from the Army Research Office, the military is two or three years away from being able to manufacture devices using meta-materials that allow "unprecedented extreme control over the flow of light." And not just that: in theory the materials could deflect radar and other sensors, too.

Solar Plane Makes Record Flight – (BBC News – August 24, 2008)
A UK-built solar-powered plane has set an unofficial world endurance record for a flight by an unmanned aircraft. The Zephyr-6 stayed aloft for more than three days, running through the night on batteries it had recharged in sunlight. The flight was a demonstration for the US military, which is looking for new types of technology to support its troops on the ground.
Craft like Zephyr might make ideal platforms for reconnaissance. Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) offer advantages over traditional aircraft and even satellites. A satellite goes over the same part of the Earth twice a day - and one of those is at night - so it's only really getting a snapshot of activity. The Zephyr could be watching all day.

Uncle Sam Wants Your Brain – (Wired – August 13, 2008)
Drugs that make soldiers want to fight. Robots linked directly to their controllers' brains. Lie-detecting scans administered to terrorist suspects as they cross U.S. borders. These are just a few of the military uses imagined for cognitive science – and while it's not yet certain whether the technologies will work, the military is certainly taking them very seriously.  Here are reports on four areas: mind reading, cognitive enhancement, mind control and brain/machine interfaces.

Hackers Prepare Supermarket Sweep – (BBC News – August 28, 2008)
Self-checkout systems in UK supermarkets are being targeted by hi-tech criminals with stolen credit card details. With the help of computer security experts the BBC found a discussion on a card fraud website in which hi-tech thieves debated the best way to strip money from the US accounts. The thieves claim to have comprehensive details of US credit and debit cards passed to them from an American gang who tapped phone lines between cash machines and banks. The supermarkets targeted said there was little chance the fraudsters would make significant gains with their plan.

Bank Customer Data Sold on eBay – (BBC News – August 26, 2008)
A computer, bought for £77, contained information on several million bank customers. Details of customers of three companies, including the Royal Bank of Scotland were involved. The information is said to include account details and in some cases customers' signatures, mobile phone numbers and mothers' maiden names. A spokeswoman for data processing company Mail Source, which is part of the archiving firm Graphic Data, said it was investigating how the computer equipment had been removed from a secure location. "The IT equipment that appeared on eBay was neither planned nor instructed by the company to be disposed," she said.

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AUGMENTED/ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

• Rise of the Rat-brained Robots
• Freakishly Human Android Created

Rise of the Rat-brained Robots – (New Scientist – August 18, 2008)
This is no ordinary robot control system - a microchip connected to a circuit board. Instead, the controller nestles inside a small pot containing a pink broth of nutrients and antibiotics. Inside that pot, some 300,000 rat neurons have made - and continue to make - connections with each other. As they do so, the disembodied neurons are communicating, sending electrical signals to one another just as they do in a living creature. Researchers know this because the network of neurons is connected at the base of the pot to 80 electrodes, and the voltages sparked by the neurons are displayed on a computer screen.

Freakishly Human Android Created – (Sync – August 19, 2008)
This short video is about a Japanese robotics professor who developed "The Geminoid" that looks and talks like the professor himself. It can react to touch as well as show facial expressions.

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GLOBAL EPIDEMIC

• Superbugs
• Drugs Slash Malawi AIDS Deaths

Superbugs – (New Yorker – August 11, 2008)
“Klebsiella pneumoniae was literally resistant to every meaningful antibiotic that we had,” according to Dr. Roger Wetherbee, an infectious-disease expert at New York University’s Tisch Hospital. The microbe was sensitive only to a drug called colistin, which had been developed decades earlier and largely abandoned as a systemic treatment, because it can severely damage the kidneys. Klebsiella is in a class of bacteria called gram-negative, based on its failure to pick up the dye in a Gram’s stain test. (Gram-positive organisms, which include Streptococcus and Staphylococcus , have a different cellular structure.)

Drugs Slash Malawi AIDS Deaths – (BBC News – August 26, 2008)
Malawi is among the countries worst affected by Aids, with about 7% of the 13m population affected. Aids is the leading cause of death for adult Malawians, according to Reuters. The World Health Organization estimates that 35% of those infected with HIV in Malawi are now taking ARV drugs, which were rolled out in 2004. As of March this year, the government had put 159,111 people on ARVs and 106,547 of those are still alive, representing a 67% survival rate.

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NANOTECHNOLOGY

Nanoantennas Envisioned as Possible Replacement for Solar Cells – (TG Daily – August 11, 2008)
Imagine the possibilities of harvesting waste heat and converting it into electricity. Computer processors could be the source of power for their own cooling devices and solar cells could become dramatically more efficient by leveraging energy that is not being used today. Scientists from the U.S. Department of Energy's Idaho National Laboratory believe that plastic sheets containing billions of nanoantennas that collect heat energy generated by the sun and other sources could dramatically improve the use of a type of energy we are all aware of, but have no use for so far – heat.

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TRENDS OF GOVERNMENT

Warning on Voting Machine Reveals Oversight Failure – (Truth Out – August 24, 2008)
Disclosure of an election computer glitch that could drop ballot totals for entire precincts is stirring new worries that an unofficial laboratory testing system failed for years to detect an array of flaws in $1.5 billion worth of voting equipment sold nationwide since 2003. Texas-based Premier Elections Solutions last week alerted at least 1,750 jurisdictions across the country that special precautions are needed to address the problem in tabulation software affecting all 19 of its models dating back a decade.

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ECONOMIC INDICATORS

• Dr. Doom
• Big Debt on Campus

Dr. Doom – (New York Times – August 15, 2008)
Nouriel Roubini, an economics professor at New York University is a respected but formerly obscure academic who has become a major figure in the public debate about the economy. What economic developments does Roubini see on the horizon? And what does he think we should do about them? The first step is to acknowledge the extent of the problem. “We are in a recession, and denying it is nonsense,” he said. Though he is confident that the economy will enter a technical recovery toward the end of next year, he says that job losses, corporate bankruptcies and other drags on growth will continue to take a toll for years.

Big Debt on Campus – (Chicago Tribune – August 17, 2008)
A recent survey by U.S. Public Interest Research Groups found that two-thirds of college students have at least one card, 70 percent pay their own monthly bills and 24 percent have used their cards to help pay tuition. That helps explain why the average survey respondent will graduate with more than $2,600 in credit card debt, and those with student loans will owe nearly $3,000. Of particular concern are exclusive agreements in which card companies and banks pay millions of dollars to schools or alumni associations for preferential treatment with their card-marketing efforts. Three hundred of the nation's largest universities collectively pocket more than $1 billion a year on these marketing deals,

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DEMOGRAPHICS

• Global Food Crisis May Be Ending as Plantings Gain
• Fattest Children to be Taken Away from Their Parents

Global Food Crisis May Be Ending as Plantings Gain – (Bloomberg – August 20, 2008)
A worldwide food crisis that sent prices of wheat, rice and corn to records and sparked riots from Haiti to Ivory Coast may be over after farmers boosted plantings, a top official in India's food ministry said. Farmers from Australia to China increased sowings to benefit from higher prices, helping stockpiles gain from 30-year lows. An end to the shortages may help countries including India and Egypt ease trade barriers and cool inflation. Record soybean crops in China and India, an almost doubling of wheat production in Australia, and bigger rice harvests in Thailand and Vietnam have eased shortfalls this year.

Fattest Children to be Taken Away from Their Parents – (Independent – August 16, 2008)
One million children in the UK will be clinically obese within four years on current trends. The Local Government Association (LGA), which represents 400 councils in England and Wales, warned that social services might have to treat very fat children as victims of "parental neglect" – just as malnourished children are. The LGA said the increasing weight of the average citizen was pushing up tax bills due to the need for bigger furniture in classrooms, canteens and gymnasiums to cope with larger pupils. Crematoria furnaces are being widened at a cost of tens of thousands of pounds for heavier corpses. Ambulances are being re-equipped with extra-wide and strengthened stretchers and winches. Fire services are called in to winch obese people out of dangerous buildings.

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JUST FOR FUN

Dance of 1000 Hands – (YouTube – 2004)
The dance is called the Thousand-Hand Guan Yin. All 21 of the dancers are complete deaf-mutes, members of the Chinese Disabled People's Performing Art Troupe. Relying only on signals from trainers at the four corners of the stage, these extraordinary dancers deliver an extraordinary performance. Its first major international debut was in Athens at the closing ceremonies for the 2004 Paralympics.

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A FINAL QUOTE...

I look to the future because that's where I'm going to spend the rest of my life.  -  George Burns