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Wow, she was also an aunt of my father! Small world! :-) I think we might have commented on slashdot on that coincidence a few years back? But you'd have to be pretty old if she was your aunt, as opposed to, like me, a great aunt? I met her once with my father when she was still in her own home, and maybe incidentally another time or two perhaps (decades ago).

Glad that "open sourcing" runs in the family. :-) Although I might feel differently about open sourcing my body or DNA than open sourcing some software I've written. :-) Still, it is kind of a mental calculation of the risk that personal DNA sequences could be used against one or one's family somehow versus the benefits of medical breakthroughs for your own family and also everyone, and also that DNA is not that hard to get via copies of medical samples or from trash or whatever...

I've put some links in other replies to ideas about health sensemaking to help everyone live longer and healthier lives.
https://www.newschallenge.org/...

And while I was born and raised in the USA, maybe it shows some Dutch roots that I believe we can make more "land" for a growing population by reclaiming it from "space" in addition to the sea. Of course, with falling birth rated in industrialized countries, long term population growth does not seem to be one of our problems/blessings, even if many people start living a lot longer.
http://p2pfoundation.net/backu...

Health may be also be partially a function of what you do relative to your genes and environment, so her preferences, say, for orange juice and herring might have worked better for herself than for others in different situations. For health commonalities, one can read about "Blue Zones" and also I like Dr. Joel Fuhrman's work overall emphasizing eating more vegetables (but quibble about some parts).
http://www.bluezones.com/
http://www.drfuhrman.com/libra...

Attitude and "morale" is also a surprisingly big part, for many reasons including because it affects your connectedness to your community from which other good things flow. Probably easier to have higher morale in the Netherlands than in a much crazier place like the USA though. :-)

Contrast:
http://www.findingdutchland.co...
"According to Unicef's most recent Child Well Being in Rich Countries survey, Dutch kids ranked as the happiest kids in the world. Dutch kids led the way in three out of the five categories, namely- material well being, educational well being, and behavior and risks."

With:
https://www.adbusters.org/maga...
""The reason our children's lives [in the UK] are the worst among economically advanced countries is because we are a poor version of the USA," he said. "So the USA comes second from bottom and we follow behind. The age of neo-liberalism, even with the human face that New Labour has given it, cannot stem the tide of the social recession capitalism creates.""

Anyway, we're all not going to live that long unless we sort out some of the wealth inequality and distribution issues given the spread of AI, robotics, and other automation that makes most human labor less and less valuable economically. The following may sound silly in the Netherlands or other parts of Western Europe, but it sound all too plausible in the USA given current politics:
http://marshallbrain.com/manna...
"But that's stupid." I said, "What possible justification is there for a whole population of people to be living on welfare or t

More ideas here in my proposal on health sensemaking: https://www.newschallenge.org/...
"We want to improve public health through free and open source public intelligence tools for individual and collective sensemaking about health topics -- especially related to nutrition and lifestyle choices."

Wish some billionaires wold fund that. :-)

Good fats are important for health and good brain function as your brain is mostly fat ("fat makes you fat" is BS; it's more that refined carbs and sugars makes you fat). Good sleep is important. Having a sense of autonomy, master, and purpose is important (see Dan Pink's work).
"RSA Animate - Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us "
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

More inspiration by Joe Cross that health change is possible:
http://www.fatsickandnearlydea...

See also the long version of my essay here for more ideas:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/read...

We need you as one more person out there doing good stuff! :-) Sure, maybe your "best" years are behind you, I can feel that at my age too, but "the woods would be pretty quiet if no bird sang there but the best", and there can be a lot of important things still worth doing, even if not quite so well as when we were younger. Plus older people tend to have some advantages, like oftentimes more perspective and patience.

Good luck!

My suggestion: https://www.newschallenge.org/...
"When confronted with a health issue, many people turn to their doctor, the internet, or friends for advice. But then what do you and your family do with all the advice you receive? What do even health professionals do with all the often conflicting information out there when they research a patient's health issues? We want to create software that helps with that challenge by making it easier for individuals and communites to collect health information (from whatever public sources including the internet), organize it, prioritize it, reason about it, act on it, and feed back the results of action into a next iteration as a learning experience. "

To add to your list, more vegetables, fruits, and beans can help, too. See Dr. Fuhrman. He may have become too commercial and may also miss a few things (Salt vilified too much? Too low on iodine? A bit low on vitamin D? Discarding some psychological aspects? Overoptimizing a few things? Trusting too much in some studies that are still to mainstream? Ignoring some possible benefits from animal products? Ignoring genetic issues like difficulties synthesizing some things? Not enough emphasis on the microbiome?). But overall he gets a lot ("make the salad the main dish") and his approach is based on science studies -- even if there is a risk of how you interpret limited studies and conflicting studies.

Also see Dr. Weil on lifestyle issues (like stress, sleep, music, community, and so on) as well as herbal remedies.

And see Bluezones for community level issues like sidewalks and walking clubs.

Vitamin D from some source to make up for indoor living is essential too.

Anyway, I'm writing other software right now for my wife (related to her free Working with Stories book) but I hope I can use the infrastructure (JavaScript/Dojo/Node.js/Pointrel) to use for other things like such tools. Probably would be an excellent life-extension choice by Peter Thiel to fund time for several developers to work on such FOSS software though. :-)

My proposals: https://www.changemakers.com/m...
https://www.newschallenge.org/...

And also advice to Larry from that my own individual sensemaking from 2012:
"Larry Page & Sergey Brin hopefully getting enough sunlight and vegetables?"
https://groups.google.com/foru...

"Eat For Health - The Anti-Cancer Diet" https://www.drfuhrman.com/libr...

Especially mushrooms as discussed there...

Also look into iodine, vitamin D, and exercise (including to keep the lymph moving so it can do its job). And good sleep and various ways to relax (friends, music, laughter, nature walks, pets,etc.-- see Andrew Weil and also Blue Zones) and put the nervous system in a health-promoting state of mind as far as controlling the immune system.

And also avoiding toxins/radiation in food and the environment (including consumer products).

We need to learn about the role of some compounds or organisms found in moldy fruit and pond water (and mushrooms, as above, and also various herbs) that may also help the body deal with cancer. Our too clean environments may have their costs, since our bodies are adapted to live in a certain context of threats and opportunities.

Fasting can also sometimes help prevent cancer, since the body can selectively get rid of problematical cells first. Fasting also makes chemotherapy less bad because normal cells go into a sort of resting phase during fasting whereas the cancer cells keep growing and are more exposed to the chemotherapy toxins (not that the benefits of most chemotherapy seem worth the costs from what I read -- although some treatments may be worth it).

People are always getting cancerous cells, and most times their immune systems get rid of them. We nee do do what we can to boost the immune system (nutrition etc.) and also reduce the frequency of cells going rogue (toxins).

That said, sure it would be good to have better treatments for when people's immune systems fail to regulate their cancer cells. As you said, it is heart breaking to watch such a progression. And as Dr. Fuhrman says, once cancer is detected as a macro scale, it is iffy to get rid of if by means known today in most cases. So yes, better magic bullets would be great. But what we can do right now is try to minimize the need for magic bullets.

My guess as to why this measles treatment works is that cancer cells have shifted so much of their cellular pathways to replication that they are unable to defend at all against the measles virus, compared to other cells. This probably either causes them to self-destruct or tags them in some way that triggers the immune system. This effect is probably not specific to the measles virus but may well apply to any of many broad classes of virus.

Good luck with your career. Maybe someday something like this will take off (my proposal for better software for medical sensemaking):
https://www.newschallenge.org/...
http://www.changemakers.com/di...
http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

Sorry to say, from the slurring of the interviewer in the video, which suggested clogged arteries throughout your body. Check out health ideas here for unclogging them through nutritional changes:
http://www.drfuhrman.com/libra...
http://www.diseaseproof.com/ar...
"Cardiovascular disease (CVD) accounted for 32.3% of deaths in the United States in 2010, but you can protect yourself. A significant number of research studies have documented that heart disease is easily and almost completely preventable (and reversible) through a diet rich in plant produce and lower in processed foods and animal products."

More in general:
http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
http://www.changemakers.com/mo...
http://www.changemakers.com/di...
https://www.newschallenge.org/...

Good luck Rob, I think we may have we met once briefly around 1999 at an Open Source conference in NYC (one where Ralph Nader spoke), and thanks for all the stories.

And the shift does not have to be that unpleasant as your tastes will adapt after six weeks:
https://www.drfuhrman.com/libr...
"Scientific evidence suggests that the re-sensitization of taste nerves takes between 30 and 90 days of consistent exposure to less stimulating foods. This means that for several weeks, most people attempting this change will experience a reduction in eating pleasure. This is why modern foods present such a devastating trap--as most of our citizens are, in effect, "addicted" to artificially high levels of food stimulation! The 30-to-90-day process of taste re-calibration requires more motivation--and more self-discipline--than most people are ever willing to muster.
Tragically, most people are totally unaware that they are only a few weeks of discipline away from being able to comfortably maintain healthful dietary habits--and to keep away from the products that can result in the destruction of their health. Instead, most people think that if they were to eat more healthfully, they would be condemned to a life of greatly reduced gustatory pleasure--thinking that the process of Phase IV will last forever. In our new book, The Pleasure Trap, we explain this extraordinarily deceptive and problematic situation - and how to master this hidden force that undermines health and happiness."

Another good health resource if you are willing to take one week to do a medically supervised water-only fast in Santa Rosa, CA for a quick reboot of your taste buds. Compared to a heart bypass operation or years of physical therapy for a stroke, you won't even have to stop posting to Slashdot the whole time during a fast. Posting would help keep you busy and distracted as your body re-calibrates itself and goes into "garbage collection" mode and shifts to new biological pathways during the fast. See:
http://www.healthpromoting.com...
"TrueNorth Health Center was founded in 1984 by Drs. Alan Goldhamer and Jennifer Marano. The integrative medicine approach they established offers participants the opportunity to obtain evaluation and treatment for a wide variety of problems. The staff at TrueNorth Health Center includes medical doctors, osteopaths, chiropractors, naturopaths, psychologists, research scientists, and other health professionals. The Center is now the largest facility in the world that specialize

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...
"The Marriage of Sense and Soul: Integrating Science and Religion is a 1998 book by American author Ken Wilber. It reasons that by adopting contemplative (e.g. meditative) disciplines related to Spirit and commissioning them within a context of broad science, that "the spiritual, subjective world of ancient wisdom" could be joined "with the objective, empirical world of modern knowledge". The text further contends that integrating science and religion in this way would in turn, "have political dimensions sewn into its very fabric"."

And see also stuff by Charles Tart:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...

The mystery of consciousness (where it come from, what it means if anything, where is goes, how it changes, and so on) remains a fundamental unknown and maybe unknowable of our lives on this plane of existence. The uncertainty ranges across all sorts of religious ideas to also include things like whether we are living in a computer simulation or computer game of some sort. That mystery is intertwined with the great mystery of everything.

Both links above are Wikipedia links to show Wikipedia can be useful as a starting point, if you go to it aware of its limits including expecting bias. Here is another example of an article on economics which it seems to me is being aggressively policed for years by a "deletionist" who won't let anything but pro-mainstream-Capitalist economics be on the page regardless of whether the other material includes a citation from a notable published source:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J...

To avoid being misled by Wikipedia, especially on health issues or economic issues, one must be aware that Wikipedia does suffer from some sort of mainstream bias most areas. Looking at past versions of the pages or related discussion can sometimes help overcome those biases. Example including a recent edit war of reversions in the last month or two:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/inde...

One alternative to Wikipedia was Google Knol. Aside from being owned by a for-profit with a history of abandoning projects, there was something good to the now-defunct Google Knol with the notion of articles from a point-of-view authored by either one person, a small group, or everyone. Peer review is a form of censorship (several essays on on it on the web), PhD training produces "Disciplined Minds" (the name of an enlightening book), and peer review is getting more problematical with increased competition for funding (see Dr. David Goodstein on "The Big Crunch"),

Related things I've written:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/to-j...

And also, on trying to think more deeply together about health and other issues:
https://www.newschallenge.org/...
http://opengov.newschallenge.o...
http://www.changemakers.com/mo...
http://pcast.ideascale.com/a/d...

More on the important of discussion by Hugo Mercier:
http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes....
"We do not claim that reasoning has nothing to do with the truth. We claim that reasoning did not

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...
"The Marriage of Sense and Soul: Integrating Science and Religion is a 1998 book by American author Ken Wilber. It reasons that by adopting contemplative (e.g. meditative) disciplines related to Spirit and commissioning them within a context of broad science, that "the spiritual, subjective world of ancient wisdom" could be joined "with the objective, empirical world of modern knowledge". The text further contends that integrating science and religion in this way would in turn, "have political dimensions sewn into its very fabric"."

And see also stuff by Charles Tart:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...

The mystery of consciousness (where it come from, what it means if anything, where is goes, how it changes, and so on) remains a fundamental unknown and maybe unknowable of our lives on this plane of existence. The uncertainty ranges across all sorts of religious ideas to also include things like whether we are living in a computer simulation or computer game of some sort. That mystery is intertwined with the great mystery of everything.

Both links above are Wikipedia links to show Wikipedia can be useful as a starting point, if you go to it aware of its limits including expecting bias. Here is another example of an article on economics which it seems to me is being aggressively policed for years by a "deletionist" who won't let anything but pro-mainstream-Capitalist economics be on the page regardless of whether the other material includes a citation from a notable published source:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J...

To avoid being misled by Wikipedia, especially on health issues or economic issues, one must be aware that Wikipedia does suffer from some sort of mainstream bias most areas. Looking at past versions of the pages or related discussion can sometimes help overcome those biases. Example including a recent edit war of reversions in the last month or two:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/inde...

One alternative to Wikipedia was Google Knol. Aside from being owned by a for-profit with a history of abandoning projects, there was something good to the now-defunct Google Knol with the notion of articles from a point-of-view authored by either one person, a small group, or everyone. Peer review is a form of censorship (several essays on on it on the web), PhD training produces "Disciplined Minds" (the name of an enlightening book), and peer review is getting more problematical with increased competition for funding (see Dr. David Goodstein on "The Big Crunch"),

Related things I've written:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/to-j...

And also, on trying to think more deeply together about health and other issues:
https://www.newschallenge.org/...
http://opengov.newschallenge.o...
http://www.changemakers.com/mo...
http://pcast.ideascale.com/a/d...

More on the important of discussion by Hugo Mercier:
http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes....
"We do not claim that reasoning has nothing to do with the truth. We claim that reasoning did not

My entry to make better software tools: https://www.newschallenge.org/challenge/healthdata/feedback/health-sensemaking-software-tools

We could connect the dots based on approaches pioneered by the intelligence community.

Yet another funny one from 1980: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Government_(Yes_Minister)

I feel part of what is happening at the big picture level is that examples like Debian and Wikipedia and Linux and GNU are reminding us that people can govern themselves in various ways. Example:
http://linux.slashdot.org/story/08/04/14/1349202/study-reports-on-debian-governance-social-organization

We are also seeing how people can improve things by participating in a "gift economy" related to those sorts of projects and others. Government making free stuff for everyone (like public domain code from NASA or your local government staffers) is a potential big win for society, where a relatively small investment can yield big dividends by avoiding using "artificial scarcity" as a business model for important software tools or data sets.

As Lawrence Lessig writes in Code 2.0, behavior can be shaped through norms, rules, prices, and architecture. Government bureaucracies can affect all of those, but so can individuals, civic groups, and businesses. Maybe the internet is letting some of the lines blur a bit more these days?

We're also seeing that exchanging emails and IMs and twitters can replace some of the movement of monetary currency to signal "demand".

The internet has also made a lot of alternatives, if not easier, than at least "discoverable":
"The Dictionary of Alternatives: Utopianism and Organization"
http://books.google.com/books?id=IKZVKMPEQCEC
"This dictionary provides ammunition for those who disagree with the early twentieth-first century orthodoxy that 'There is no alternative to free market liberalism and managerialism'. Using hundreds of entries and cross-references, it proves that there are many alternatives to the way that we currently organize ourselves. These alternatives could be expressed as fictional utopias, they could be excavated from the past, or they could be described in terms of the contemporary politics of anti-corporate protest, environmentalism, feminism and localism. Part reference work, part source book, and part polemic, this dictionary provides a rich understanding of the ways in which fiction, history and today's politics provide different ways of thinking about how we can and should organize for the coming century."

A Knight News Challenge on Open Government is just ending ($5 million to be given out). My wife and I put together one of the 828 entries (did not make the final cut though):
https://www.newschallenge.org/open/open-government/submission/civic-sensemaking-by-working-with-stories-using-rakontu/

There are many other interesting suggestions there:
https://www.newschallenge.org/open/open-government/applause-feedback/

The O'Reilly book on open government is online, and I put up a link to it as an "inspiration" part of that challenge:
https://www.newschallenge.org/open/open-government/inspiration/o-reilly-releases-open-government-book-for-free/

Anyway, as you imply, we have yet to see how all these visions of "open government" play out.

An indirectly related book:
http://www.amazon.com/Policy-Paradox-Political-Decision-Making/dp/0393976254
"Unlike most texts, which treat policy analysis and policy making as different enterprises, Policy Paradox demonstrates that "you can't take politics out of analysis." Through a uniquely rich

Yet another funny one from 1980: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Government_(Yes_Minister)

I feel part of what is happening at the big picture level is that examples like Debian and Wikipedia and Linux and GNU are reminding us that people can govern themselves in various ways. Example:
http://linux.slashdot.org/story/08/04/14/1349202/study-reports-on-debian-governance-social-organization

We are also seeing how people can improve things by participating in a "gift economy" related to those sorts of projects and others. Government making free stuff for everyone (like public domain code from NASA or your local government staffers) is a potential big win for society, where a relatively small investment can yield big dividends by avoiding using "artificial scarcity" as a business model for important software tools or data sets.

As Lawrence Lessig writes in Code 2.0, behavior can be shaped through norms, rules, prices, and architecture. Government bureaucracies can affect all of those, but so can individuals, civic groups, and businesses. Maybe the internet is letting some of the lines blur a bit more these days?

We're also seeing that exchanging emails and IMs and twitters can replace some of the movement of monetary currency to signal "demand".

The internet has also made a lot of alternatives, if not easier, than at least "discoverable":
"The Dictionary of Alternatives: Utopianism and Organization"
http://books.google.com/books?id=IKZVKMPEQCEC
"This dictionary provides ammunition for those who disagree with the early twentieth-first century orthodoxy that 'There is no alternative to free market liberalism and managerialism'. Using hundreds of entries and cross-references, it proves that there are many alternatives to the way that we currently organize ourselves. These alternatives could be expressed as fictional utopias, they could be excavated from the past, or they could be described in terms of the contemporary politics of anti-corporate protest, environmentalism, feminism and localism. Part reference work, part source book, and part polemic, this dictionary provides a rich understanding of the ways in which fiction, history and today's politics provide different ways of thinking about how we can and should organize for the coming century."

A Knight News Challenge on Open Government is just ending ($5 million to be given out). My wife and I put together one of the 828 entries (did not make the final cut though):
https://www.newschallenge.org/open/open-government/submission/civic-sensemaking-by-working-with-stories-using-rakontu/

There are many other interesting suggestions there:
https://www.newschallenge.org/open/open-government/applause-feedback/

The O'Reilly book on open government is online, and I put up a link to it as an "inspiration" part of that challenge:
https://www.newschallenge.org/open/open-government/inspiration/o-reilly-releases-open-government-book-for-free/

Anyway, as you imply, we have yet to see how all these visions of "open government" play out.

An indirectly related book:
http://www.amazon.com/Policy-Paradox-Political-Decision-Making/dp/0393976254
"Unlike most texts, which treat policy analysis and policy making as different enterprises, Policy Paradox demonstrates that "you can't take politics out of analysis." Through a uniquely rich

Yet another funny one from 1980: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Government_(Yes_Minister)

I feel part of what is happening at the big picture level is that examples like Debian and Wikipedia and Linux and GNU are reminding us that people can govern themselves in various ways. Example:
http://linux.slashdot.org/story/08/04/14/1349202/study-reports-on-debian-governance-social-organization

We are also seeing how people can improve things by participating in a "gift economy" related to those sorts of projects and others. Government making free stuff for everyone (like public domain code from NASA or your local government staffers) is a potential big win for society, where a relatively small investment can yield big dividends by avoiding using "artificial scarcity" as a business model for important software tools or data sets.

As Lawrence Lessig writes in Code 2.0, behavior can be shaped through norms, rules, prices, and architecture. Government bureaucracies can affect all of those, but so can individuals, civic groups, and businesses. Maybe the internet is letting some of the lines blur a bit more these days?

We're also seeing that exchanging emails and IMs and twitters can replace some of the movement of monetary currency to signal "demand".

The internet has also made a lot of alternatives, if not easier, than at least "discoverable":
"The Dictionary of Alternatives: Utopianism and Organization"
http://books.google.com/books?id=IKZVKMPEQCEC
"This dictionary provides ammunition for those who disagree with the early twentieth-first century orthodoxy that 'There is no alternative to free market liberalism and managerialism'. Using hundreds of entries and cross-references, it proves that there are many alternatives to the way that we currently organize ourselves. These alternatives could be expressed as fictional utopias, they could be excavated from the past, or they could be described in terms of the contemporary politics of anti-corporate protest, environmentalism, feminism and localism. Part reference work, part source book, and part polemic, this dictionary provides a rich understanding of the ways in which fiction, history and today's politics provide different ways of thinking about how we can and should organize for the coming century."

A Knight News Challenge on Open Government is just ending ($5 million to be given out). My wife and I put together one of the 828 entries (did not make the final cut though):
https://www.newschallenge.org/open/open-government/submission/civic-sensemaking-by-working-with-stories-using-rakontu/

There are many other interesting suggestions there:
https://www.newschallenge.org/open/open-government/applause-feedback/

The O'Reilly book on open government is online, and I put up a link to it as an "inspiration" part of that challenge:
https://www.newschallenge.org/open/open-government/inspiration/o-reilly-releases-open-government-book-for-free/

Anyway, as you imply, we have yet to see how all these visions of "open government" play out.

An indirectly related book:
http://www.amazon.com/Policy-Paradox-Political-Decision-Making/dp/0393976254
"Unlike most texts, which treat policy analysis and policy making as different enterprises, Policy Paradox demonstrates that "you can't take politics out of analysis." Through a uniquely rich

From 2011: http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2368162&threshold=0&commentsort=0&mode=thread&cid=37016386
"Twirlip: Towards a 21st Century Worldwide Public Intelligence Desktop Platform for Collaborative Sensemaking, Analysis, Risk Assessment, and Horizon Scanning"

Around them, I also put together another proposal to collect and organize stories about security issues as a modernized "Risks Digest" using software like my wife desiged my wife wrote called "Rakontu":
http://www.rakontu.org/

Another spin on that from this month:
https://www.newschallenge.org/open/open-government/submission/civic-sensemaking-by-working-with-stories-using-rakontu/

With some more code links and a video here:
http://twirlip.com/

See also:
http://www.phibetaiota.net/2011/09/paul-fernhout-open-letter-to-the-intelligence-advanced-programs-research-agency-iarpa/

From 1999 to NASA, some ideas about rethinking our manufacturing infrastructure systematically and in an open source way:
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/

And also to DARPA in 1999:
"DARPA Progam Manager Position on Self-Replicating technology"
https://groups.google.com/forum/?hl=en&fromgroups=#!msg/virgle/feS-LaqnFyM/z0sqkvvCx2QJ
"We of course need to minimize military tensions around the world through arms control, international aid, and setting a good example. This delays the culmination of these other trend to war, but in my opinion will not prevent them because of ever-present potential for a small group of unstable people to use weapons of mass destruction. ... I also don't think we have a significant choice. Such self-replicating and self-repairing systems will be developed eventually anyway, if only from commercial competitive pressures. The only thing we can do is slow down their development. Yet that has its own risks of our current infrastructure being overwhelmed by current weapons of mass destruction or sophisticated terrorism. Also, should such self-replicating technology be developed first clandestinely by an oppressive regime, the consequences for the United States could be disastrous."

From 1987 for grad studies on improving security via self-replicating space habitats:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/princeton-graduate-school-plans.html

A long string of failed proposals. :-)

Well, at least I can still try to promote great ideas by others that have met with more success: :-)
"A Conceptual Framework for System Fault Tolerance"
http://hissa.nist.gov/chissa/SEI_Framework/framework_1.html

And I can keep on working towards those other ideas as very limited spare time permits.

I guess I am mostly just a creation of 1960s-1970s TV about our future in space -- to keep banging my head against the wall of space and security for decades? :-) Star Trek, The Starlost, Space 1999, Silent Running, Battlestar Galactica, Buck Rogers, Lost In Space, Thunderbirds, and so on... And way too many sci-fi novels. :-)

Just wanted to thank you for the encouragement, bbelt, which contributed to my submitting this entry to the current Knight News Challenge on Open Government:
https://www.newschallenge.org/open/open-government/submission/civic-sensemaking-by-working-with-stories-using-rakontu/

WikiLeaks didn't win that challange yet and I think it would be a good idea to support them by commenting on and rating their application here: http://generalapp.newschallenge.org/SNC/ViewItem.aspx?pguid=6aee8166-fb7c-4a2e-8581-fa6f6ff036dd&itemguid=3decc665-ebd1-46f0-95f4-f5fa57311062