January 18, 1998Minutes from the eighteenth meeting of Tri-State Chapter held on January 18, 1998Members Present
Eugenia Criss
We opened as often, with excitement sharing, things in our own lives that have been exciting. Dmitri agreed to facilitate the meeting, and Gale to take notes. Sam had prepared a preliminary agenda, and no changes were made to it. Sam and Gale reviewed the FMF Board of Directors meeting of December 13, 1997. One project discussed at the FMF Board meeting was getting copies of TMP into libraries. 200 copies of TMP have been purchased for this purpose. Dave Cunningham expects that the forming Front Range Chapter will take on distribution as a project, and 100 of the copies have been sent to him. In discussing which libraries to aim for with his daughter (experienced in library work), Gale found that many books donated to libraries are simply sold without going on the shelves. Avoiding this takes personal contact. She also suggested looking for counties which have a county wide electronically accessible data base of books in each library. For instance, this is available in Morris County, but not Essex in NJ. Dmitri will find out the acceptance policies for a local library and for the University of Connecticut. Sam will find out acceptance policies for some NY libraries. Gale will inquire of Maplewood. We continued an ongoing project of outlining parameters for possible future colonies. We see Aquarius as an inspiration, but still not one that FMF has the resources to work on directly. Some steps between where we are and Aquarius are needed. Previous thought had given some major headings on a categorization as:
To this we added the additional major headings of
We focused on deepening some of the outline resulting in:
work on other major headings was left for future meetings. We continued a discussion of business basics with an article from Wired by Julian Simon. The article presented the last five years (the Wired issue was a 5th anniversary issue.) as the best that humans have known. It argued that changes in the last two hundred years have been highly positive and irreversible because (a) they have affected tens of percents of the human population, not just a percent or two, and (b) the knowledge on which they are based is very widely distributed. Although Gale presented a Devil’s Advocate list of opposing considerations (the rise in atmospheric CO2, the 1o rise in world wide temperature in the last 100 years, a fairly wide agreement [though not very wide] that human activity has raised the CO2 and that the CO2 has raised the temperature; the lack of agreement on a means of disposing of radioactive waste; species extinctions), our group favors the positive view. For business, the implication is that there are many opportunities for new businesses, possibly more than there have ever been before. Gale handed out copies of the SEE status report recently posted on fmf-lbc, and went over the changes from the report at the previous meeting: legal drafting on Articles, Bylaws, and Lease is now completed. Furthermore, the real estate lawyer has said that the Lease appears to him to be a conventional document. We are short on financial backers, but will put out a new call for backers soon. The name of the road, "Millennial Way", and our address, 135 Millennial Way are official. There will be a time during which we have no phone wires; we can use cellular phones to cover this month (estimated time). We plan to use aerobic digestion as opposed to septic tanks (anaerobic digestion) because it gives waste conversion to water usable for plants as opposed to waste disposal with the septic effluent not legal for use even to water a tree whose fruit will be consumed. The cost of either is about the same. Outreach continues at a low level. Sam hands out brochures at conventions. We look forward to the library effort as an outreach. We will look for literature racks in likely places to put brochures. No old business was brought up. No new business was brought up. The next meetings are tentatively scheduled for:
Feb 8, Prepared by Gale. contact the author of this home page: Dmitri Donskoy  Last modified: Wednesday, January 21, 1998  Home |