----- Original Message -----
From: "Harry Veeder" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: [Vo]: New Segway Products
Mike Carrell wrote:
----- Original Message -----
From: "Philip Winestone" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: [Vo]: New Segway Products
"If the goal is a combination of stability and instability that is a
disgusting mix
of opportunism and pragmatism."
Nope - it's called "life".
==========================
Exactly so. There is an excellent book, "At Home in the Universe", which
persuasively argues that Life, as a dynamic biochemical process, exists
in
the non-equilibrium zone between statsis and chaos. If you want order,
try
prison. A gun-toting Segway has an ancestor celebrated by a statue in
Ukraine, three rearward-pointing guns mounted on a horse-drawn carriage,
which was a decisive weapon in some war or other.
Living orgasnisms are in continual contest with the unfolding Universe.
No
static, "safe" solution exists, even for a nation, for the external world
continually changes and that which does not change with it will die.
Mike Carrell
Wow, Does the author of that book actually use language like "Living
organisms are in continual contest with the unfolding Universe"?
======================================
No, that phrase is my own, but it conveys the thrust of the argument in the
book. To me it is obvious that organisms from bacteria to men cannot each
get all they want all the time, so there is a 'contest' of sorts. Nor does
the universe we all live in remain constant but evolves, or unfolds, what
ever word you want. Amid this 'contest' there is also mutual dependency and
cooperation, for no member of the ecosystem can exist apart from it, so
altruism wins in the end. It is dynamic, and any attempt to freeze it into
some kind of idealized utopia will result in death of some sort. A surfer
riding a tube, a bubble of froth on a breaking wave are apt metaphors for
Life in the Universe.
Mike Carrell
