Like good science fiction, the material collected in Do Androids Sleep With Electric Sheep? leaves us with more questions than we arrived with; if you can stomach the subject matter (which shouldn't really appall anyone but the most prudish and conservative, to be honest, though my perceptions may be somewhat skewed), this is prime fuel for your imaginatory engines. The focal character of James Tiptree, Jr.'s story "And I Awoke and Found Me Here on the Cold Hill's Side" suggests that, as humans, "we're built to dream outwards" [pp 239], to project our desire onto "the other", whoever or whatever it may happen to be. It's an insight that makes more sense each time you read it, and serves to underline the basic commonality between sex and science fiction, or indeed art in general -- they are both ways in which we try to subsume ourselves into (or control and dominate over) that which we are not.
Love makes us do strange things, after all.

Your focus on spending is pushing on thread
In the long run, my friend, it's your theory that's dead
So sorry there, buddy, if that sounds like invective
Prepare to get schooled in my Austrian perspective

In a market that is "rigged by piracy" it is non-English language music which suffers the most when the music industry tightens its belt.

The crowds who flocked to the London playhouses in the late-16th and early-17th centuries could expect to be amused, amazed and moved. Not only would they experience the drama of some courtly comedy or woeful tragedy but, in many cases, if they stayed on after the play had ended, they would also be treated to a sort of 'B-feature', a rude, lewd farce, commonly known as a 'jig'. Featuring songs, dancing and slapstick, jigs involved far more than the simple Irish folk dance that the word has come to denote. In the playhouses of Elizabethan London dramatic jigs were established as the standard ending or afterpiece to more serious theatrical fare.Not that everyone approved. The playwright Thomas Dekker wrote in 1613:

"I have often seen, after the finishing of some worthy tragedy or catastrophe in the open theatres that the scene after the Epilogue hath been more blacke -- about a nasty bawdy jigge -- than the most horrid scene in the play was."

To the literary world they were an object of disapproval. Ben Jonson (1572-1637) loathed the 'concupiscence of jigs', believing they prevented audiences from appreciating plays. Shakespeare's Hamlet, after drawing Ophelia into a particularly vulgar exchange, apologises to her by calling himself 'Your only jigmaker'. The satirical poet Everard Guilpin (born c. 1572) dismissed the 'whores, bedles, bawds and sergeants' who 'filthily chant Kemps Jigge', noting how, on leaving the playhouse fired up with lust, 'many a cold grey-beard citizen' would sneak into 'some odde noted house of sin': easy to do, as theatres, bear-baiting pits and brothels were situated in close proximity on London's South Bank, outside the formal control of Dancers perform in a circle around musicians in a masque at a banquet held in the home of the courtier Sir Henry Unton (detail, c.1596). Inset: Richard Tarlton, a popular jig-maker and clown, portrayed in a manuscript from 1588. the City authorities. Even Thomas Heywood, a dramatist and actor with the Lord Admiral's Men, felt disgust at these sub-literary dramas. While on the one hand delighting in the comic farces he called 'merry accidents', he wrote in An Apology for Actors (1612): 'I speak not in the defence of any lascivious shrews, scurrilous jeasts, or scandalous invectives. If there be any such I banish them quite from my patronage.'

A new study published in Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences rejects the theory that the origin of life stems from a system of self-catalytic molecules capable of experiencing Darwinian evolution without the need of RNA or DNA and their replication.

Argentine courts have launched an investigation into crimes committed at the ESMA Navy Mechanics School during the nation's military dictatorship. The landmark human rights trial is one of the most far-reaching attempts to bring crimes of Latin America's bloody past to justice.

For more than three decades, survivors and their families awaited the trial that finally began on Dec. 11, 2009. During Argentina's 1976-1983 dictatorship, the ESMA Navy Mechanics School served as a clandestine detention center, used to torture and disappear thousands of people. Now 17 former ESMA officers face charges of human rights abuses, torture, and murder.

E.T.A. by JUNK from Henrik Bjerregaard Clausen on Vimeo.

New year, new symbol? Dubai's new tower fits. The $1.5 billion building unveiled in downtown Dubai Monday is the world's new tallest tower. More than half a mile high, more than two Empire State buildings tall, the Dubai tower boasts 169 stories, the world's highest swimming pool, the world's highest place of worship, and the world's tallest mountain of denial.

History repeats. Like the Empire State building before it, the Dubai tower was built in a global depression when cheap labor was plentiful, as were the dreams of the ambitious and affluent.

The engineering marvel was constructed in the desert heat by low paid immigrant workers, mostly Indians and Pakistanis, paid 5-20 dollar a day. (It's a state secret how many lost their lives in the process.) While the state-owned construction operation suppressed worker demands and banned unions from the site, it catered to consumer fantasy with equal extravagance. The tower features 144 apartments and a hotel designed by Giorgio Armani, the Italian designer. In the super scraper, the super-affluent can live and vacation without leaving the brand, or the building.

On Monday, Dubai's Sheikh Mohammed and his Chicago-based architects hailed their building as a symbol of future good all things great. There's just one glitch. According to the Sunday Times, that future involves melting the equivalent of 28 million pounds of ice a day for air conditioning, and the consumption of billions of gallons of desalinated water in a city-state that already has the world's highest per-capita carbon footprint.

The climate actually changes as you ride the elevator. It's way, way hotter at the bottom. The engineers are doing everything in their power to counter physics and so far so good. But rising heat of a far less metaphorical sense already struck in the form of economics.

Researchers at Purdue University have created a magnetic "ferropaper" that might be used to make low-cost "micromotors" for surgical instruments, tiny tweezers to study cells and miniature speakers.

The material is made by impregnating ordinary paper -- even newsprint -- with a mixture of mineral oil and "magnetic nanoparticles" of iron oxide. The nanoparticle-laden paper can then be moved using a magnetic field.

"Paper is a porous matrix, so you can load a lot of this material into it," said Babak Ziaie, a professor of electrical and computer engineering and biomedical engineering.

When a defendant's DNA appears to match DNA found at a crime scene, the probability that this is an unfortunate coincidence can be central to whether the suspect is found guilty. The assumptions used to calculate the likelihood of such a fluke - the "random match probability" - are now being questioned by a group of 41 scientists and lawyers based in the US and the UK.

RepRap and other 3D printers are the future. There’s no question about it. With the proud tradition from The Pirate Bay, we want to take all of this to the next level. TPB will be TPB, but for real life objects. For now, visit Thingiverse who already understands this.

We want you to download those new jeans.
We want you to share those new shoes.

It's possible, let's make it happen.

The term "crisis," attached to the global ecological problem, although unavoidable, is somewhat misleading, given its dominant economic associations. Since 2008, we have been living through a world economic crisis — the worst economic downturn since the 1930s. This has been a source of untold suffering for hundreds of millions, indeed billions, of people. But insofar as it is related to the business cycle and not to long-term factors, expectations are that it is temporary and will end, to be followed by a period of economic recovery and growth — until the advent of the next crisis. Capitalism is, in this sense, a crisis-ridden, cyclical economic system. Even if we were to go further, to conclude that the present crisis of accumulation is part of a long-term economic stagnation of the system — that is, a slowdown of the trend-rate of growth beyond the mere business cycle — we would still see this as a partial, historically limited calamity, raising, at most, the question of the future of the present system of production.

An amazing number, but Avatar isn't exactly a business model. Hollywood can't live on a ginormous hit once a decade. And if the studios chase the success of Avatar, they're [liable] to throw a lot of bad money after good.

Part history, part ethnography, part marketing theory and part coffee memoir, Everything but the Coffee places Starbucks at the center of the hypocrisy of the American middle class. Simon has to stretch a great deal here, as he explores why, for a time, the American middle class saw Starbucks is central to its identity.

Simon shows us how we really live, and it ain't pretty. There was a time, not so long ago, Simon reminds us, that many of us wondered why people would pay so much money for a cup of coffee--even as we were edging closer in line to place our own order. Starbucks, writes Simon, "had little to do with coffee, and everything to do with style, status, identity and aspiration. ... Starbucks delivered more than a stiff shot of caffeine. It pinpointed, packaged, and made easily available, if only through smoke and mirrors, the things that the broad American middle class wanted and thought it needed to make its public and private lives better." Starbucks fed our emotional needs for status. It became our little "self-gift," an emotional pick-me-up. It allowed us to feel successful.

It also provided a safe, clean "third space" between home and work, those big chairs and couches becoming our new public sphere. It brought us exotic places and sounds, exposed us to an underground in the safety of a cushy seat: teaching us about places where our coffee came from, and new music and literary voices. It tried to be our cultural guide and helped us feel good about our environmental footprint through its green campaigns and aid to farmers, even if Starbucks did little and we did nothing but buy coffee. It did so consciously, purposefully manipulating our desires, hopes and aspirations, all the while making us feel good about ordering up a venti soy latte.

The rapid introduction of full body scanners at British airports threatens to breach child protection laws which ban the creation of indecent images of children, the Guardian has learned.

Privacy campaigners claim the images created by the machines are so graphic they amount to "virtual strip-searching" and have called for safeguards to protect the privacy of passengers involved.

Ministers now face having to exempt under 18s from the scans or face the delays of introducing new legislation to ensure airport security staff do not commit offences under child pornography laws.

With limited sound, simple graphics, and tiny amounts of computing power, the first games on home computers would hardly raise an eyebrow in the modern era of photorealism and surround sound. In a world of Quake, Half-Life and Halo, it is expected that a successful game must be loud, fast, and full of blazing life-like action.

But in the early 1980s, an entire industry rose over the telling of tales, the solving of intricate puzzles and the art of writing. Like living books, these games described fantastic worlds to their readers, and then invited them to live within them.

They were called "computer adventure games", and they used the most powerful graphics processor in the world: the human mind.

Rising from side projects at universities and engineering companies, adventure games would describe a place, and then ask what to do next. They presented puzzles, tricks and traps to be overcome. They were filled with suspense, humor and sadness. And they offered a unique type of joy as players discovered how to negotiate the obstacles and think their way to victory. These players have carried their memories of these text adventures to the modern day, and a whole new generation of authors have taken up the torch to present a new set of places to explore.

Get Lamp is a documentary that will tell the story of the creation of these incredible games, in the words of the people who made them.

Walk down any major street in Yemen in the afternoon or evening, and you'll see men with bulging cheeks, chewing qat leaves; their constituents, cathinone and cathine, produce a high. Qat — or Catha edulis — is cultivated in the Horn of Africa as well. But in Yemen, buffeted by fierce government-tribal clashes in the north, renewed secessionist strength in the south and dwindling oil revenues, the qat shrub is just about holding the Arab world's poorest country together.

Qat chewing occurs almost everywhere in Yemen, except tourist hotels (one in Aden greets visitors with a sign, "Guns and qat are not allowed"). Many private homes have a comfortable, well-ventilated room, or diwan, set aside for the purpose. But it is at street level that the pervasiveness and tempo of the activity can best be appreciated, in the qat markets, or drifting amid those chilling out on it or consuming it during their workday as a taxi driver or an attendant for kids' camel rides at a park, or just shopping for fruit and vegetables.

If it is a ritualised activity, it is a seamless one, like taking coffee after a meal is for a westerner.

Partaking of this natural amphetamine is not prohibited in the Qur'an, and the jury remains out on whether it is addictive or harmful. Accepted in Yemen, it is not in other Arab countries; and while legal in the UK and much of Europe, it is banned in France, Norway, Sweden, the US and Canada.

Loud, persistent ringing in the ears, known as tinnitus, can be vexing for its millions of sufferers. This perceived noise can be symptomatic of many different ills—from earwax to aging—but the most common cause is from noise-induced hearing loss, such as extended exposure to construction or loud music, and treating many of its underlying neural causes has proven difficult.

But many people with tinnitus might soon be able to find refuge in the very indulgence that often started the ringing in the first place: music.

A new music-based therapy has shown promise in helping reduce the ringing's volume in tinnitus sufferers within a year, according to a study published online Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "Tinnitus loudness can be significantly diminished by an enjoyable, low-cost, custom-tailored notched music treatment," wrote the researchers, who were led in part by Christo Pantev at the Institute for Biomagnetism and Biosign Alanalysis at Westfalian Wilhelms-University in Munster, Germany.

Scientists at UC Santa Barbara have made a major discovery in how the brain encodes memories. The finding, published in the December 24 issue of the journal Neuron, could eventually lead to the development of new drugs to aid memory.

The team of scientists is the first to uncover a central process in encoding memories that occurs at the level of the synapse, where neurons connect with each other.

As Congress wrestles over the parameters of a health care bill, amidst maddened catcalls of 'death panels' and 'socialism!', I am reminded of the experience of John Black, an old trade unionist, revolutionary activist and journalist.

Black, a fervent supporter of the Cuban Revolution, joined the Venceremos Brigades, an annual trek of foreigners to the island, who assisted in harvesting the sugar crop and other agricultural work.

Although he was in his mid-to-high seventies at the time, Black did his part, until the searing tropical heat, or perhaps the work (or both) took its toll.

Black was taken to a nearby hospital, and received what he called "excellent treatment." As he was leaving, he reached for his wallet, and began pulling out some bucks. The doctor looked at him quizzically -- and then told him to put his money away.

"We treated you because you were sick, Senor," the doctor explained, "Not for the money."

These words blew Black away, and this experience with socialist medicine moved him deeply.

What is even more remarkable is that Cuba was doing this during its 'Special Period:, a time of economic chaos when its biggest trading partner, the Soviet Union, stopped bartering things for things (as in oil for sugar, for example) and began demanding cold cash for trade.

As of 2006, Cuba had a Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of $45 billion dollars--about the same as the Congo, or the Sultanate of Oman ($44.1bn).

The GDP measures the market value of goods and services purchased within a nation over a given period of time -- usually a year.

Do you want to know what the U.S. GDP was for 2007?

Over 13 trillion dollars. 13 trillion.

Guess which country provides free medical care?

Videogames are no longer the preserve of adolescent males in dark bedrooms. Their emergence as a social medium is changing the way we work, learn and fight wars.

[...] the question remains: Which movie is the best of the decade? Is there any consensus among the accumulating lists? To find out, we collected all of the rankings we could find and synthesized the results using a simple scoring system: Movies got 50 points for being the No. 1 pick on a list, 49 points for a No. 2 nod, and so on, down to one point for a No. 50 slot. (Brody, who only chose 26 movies, still received 50 points for his top pick.)

To see which movies of the aughts are earning the most end-of-decade love, select the "Points" category from the drop-down menu on the left. You can also sort the films by director or by total number of appearances on best-of lists. (Some directors had more than one movie in the running; mouse over the director's name to see which of his or her movies made the cut.)

Was planning to get to announce this last week, but got caught up in some last minute finagling with MIT. But we've finally got it hammered out.

In any case, happy to announce today that we've officially decided that ROFLCon II will be on April 30th and May 1st, 2010.

Got it? Awesome. Planning to open up registration sometime in January, and we'll announce on the blog when it goes up. If you've already hit up tim AT roflcon DOT org, we've already got you covered (even if I haven't responded), and, if you haven't, definitely do drop a line if you want to be notified by e-mail when it opens up.

Johannes, an insane Austrian man we met this weekend, will be conducting a rant at Hackerspace.SG this Thursday evening.

For those who are unfamiliar with the rant: it is a tradition of performance art which was developed in Europe in the 19th century and successfully ported to the Internet in the early-to-mid 1990s. It is now being introduced to Asia by aesthetic pioneers like Johannes Grenzfurthner.

In recognition of Singapore's leading position as the financial and cultural capital of Asia, and of Hackerspace.SG as the leading hackerspace in Singapore, he has chosen Hackerspace.SG as the venue for his first Singapore performance of this artwork.

We invite all members of hackerspace.sg and the related community to attend this rant.

There is no fee, though we wish to thank in advance all the wonderful people who consume beer, wine, or soft drinks, for their cash donations into the little glass that says "your donations are welcome."

For the purposes of licensing under Chapter 257 Section 319, this is an exempt entertainment as defined by the Public Entertainments and Meetings (Specified Arts Entertainment) (Exemption) Order 2005.

monochrom and the East: Some stories about Context Hacking and Asia
A tour-de-farce by Johannes Grenzfurthner of monochrom

monochrom is a worldwide operating collective dealing with technology, art and philosophy and was founded in 1993. So to sum up, monochrom is an unpeculiar mixture of proto-aesthetic fringe work, pop attitude, subcultural science, political activism and technological disaster.

Johannes wants to tell us stories about monochrom's "context hacking" projects that specifically deal with our focus on contemporary Asian topics.

The term context hacking—like its mimetic sibling "communication guerrilla"—refers to unconventional forms of communication and/or intervention in more conventional processes of communication. Context hacking is a specific style of political action that observes and makes visible the paradoxes and absurdities of power. Context hacking uses absurdities as the starting point for interventions by playing with representations and identities, with alienation and over-identification.

With all the talk about failing, one interesting speaker that managed to get all our attention was Johannes Grenfurthner who runs Monochrom – an art-technology-philosophy group in Vienna. With his stage presence and use of different yet interesting metaphors conveyed why it's important to fail and had interesting points on why sometimes competition isn't the right way to create something that people need.

The numerous parallels between modern linguistics and computer science may come as a surprise to the audience and their notion of language may change significantly. Language is a system of signs and we adjust it every day. Especially new forms of communication (Twitter, instant messaging etc.) change the way we perceive and use language. Many people use the same abbreviations in texting and instant messaging, and social networking websites. Acronyms, keyboard symbols and shortened words are often used as methods of abbreviation in Internet slang. Laccetti, a professor of humanities at Stevens Institute of Technology and Molsk, criticizes that acronyms, predicting reduced chances of employment for students who use such acronyms, stating that, "Unfortunately for these students, their bosses will not be 'lol' when they read a report that lacks proper punctuation and grammar, has numerous misspellings, various made-up words, and silly acronyms." Fondiller and Nerone, in their style manual, assert that "professional or business communication should never be careless or poorly constructed" whether one is writing an electronic mail message or an article for publication, and warn against the use of smileys and these abbreviations, stating that they are "no more than e-mail slang and have no place in business communication".
But this is of course a very conservative way to see the subject matter. This talk is meant to explore the many ways in which speakers 'hack' and re-interpret their language based on the various definitions of the term 'hacking'.

Hackers love knowledge. They try to find out how stuff works. And that's great. Experimentation is a major part of hacking. It is in the most philosophical sense a deconstruction of things.

A specific use is never inherent to an object, even though technical demagogues like to claim that it is. Just compare the term "self-explanatory" and the term "archeological find". It's a pretty hard task to find out what technology is and what it should do if you don't have a clue about the context. Usually the use is connected with the object through definition ("instructions for use"). Turning an object against the use inscribed in it means probing its possibilities.

Science and Technology Studies (especially Langdon Winner and Bruno Latour) have convincingly demonstrated that the widespread inability to understand technological artifacts as fabricated entities, as social and cultural phenomena, derives from the fact that in retrospect only those technologies that prove functional for a culture and can be integrated into everyday life are "left over." However, the perception of what is functional, successful and useful is itself the product of social and cultural, and last but not least political and economic processes. Selection processes and abandoned products (developmental derailments, sobering intermediary results, useless prototypes) are not discussed.

Well. What can we do?
We can fail. Beautifully.

Santa: "HO HO HO! Wien is MY turf now, Christkindl. I've been making a list, checking it twice, and I know who's been naughty or nice... and who's going to get their skinny white angel butt kicked if they don't get out of my way. It's time to work for me or leave for China, baby boy."

Christkindl: "Santa, du Oaschsau! Gemma auf die Bluatwiesn!"

monochrom presents:
++TAUGSHOW #20++
Roboexotica Special

Friday, Dec 4, 2009 / 9:00 PM @ Roboexotica, Drinkomat-Halle, Missindorfstrasse 21, Vienna (presented by Johannes Grenzfurthner und Roland Gratzer)

But who are our guests?

----------------------------------------------

/// AARON "SFSLIM" MUSZALSKI

/// ROSE WHITE

/// KYLE MACHULIS

/// METALAB

/// BAR2D2

----------------------------------------------

The philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce used the term "index" to describe things like Ellie's note, things that stand as physical remnants of the causes of their existence. A footprint is the index of a foot, just as a scrape on a fender might be the index of another car or of a guardrail. Ellie's writing, a sign of her physical being, connects Carl to her through this sort of relationship.

In fact, the film characterizes Carl in part through a collection of indexical objects. His most prized remembrance of Ellie is an old photograph; many theorists and philosophers of film have claimed photography and motion pictures to be the pinnacle of indexicality, based on the relationship between the subject of a photograph and the resulting image. The scrapbook, full of photographs and other memorabilia, reads as a kind of collective index of Ellie’s life with Carl. It may also be worth noting here that Carl steers his house with a weathervane, which Peirce himself famously identifies as evidence of the blowing wind.

In its almost nine years of existence, Wikipedia has achieved unequivocal success: as the fifth most visited website in the world, it features more than 14.3m articles in 270 languages contributed by more than 100,000 volunteers.

Given that this has been done on a shoestring budget, Wikipedia easily puts to shame all other efforts to create and disseminate digital knowledge.

The debates about the truthfulness of entries have also subsided — perhaps a sign that most of us have discovered there are plenty of other lies on the internet. Wikipedia has become the lazy man's Google: why bother sifting through 100 search results if chances are that someone has already done this job for you in a Wikipedia entry?

Most projects would be comfortable with gaining so much power in so little time, but Wikipedians are an ambitious bunch. Their commitment, as codified in the vision statement of the Wikimedia foundation, the legal entity behind the project, is to create a world where "every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge".

A new NASA study of a Martian meteorite that made headlines 13 years ago strengthens the original claim that the rock contains evidence of life on ancient Mars. Researchers at the Johnson Space Center used advanced electron microscopes that weren't available in 1996 to re-examine the magnetite crystals on the meteorite.

Computer scientists designed a program that can analyze a photograph to identify where it was taken. The program scans the scene on the photo, noting colors, textures and lines, and uses these elements to compare it to more than six million images previously tagged with locations on online databases. The program has an average success rate of 16 percent, which is better than random chance or a human guess.

Many of us who grew up with comic books noticed those books growing with us. A literate observer of those transitions is Danny Fingeroth, who began his comics-centered life as youthful fan, became a creator as a young man, and has recently emerged as an important interpreter of the medium. His first job at Marvel assigned him the humble task of 'translating' comics for the UK market – making 'color' into 'colour', 'center' into 'centre', 'while' into 'whilst' etc. He left such mundane tasks behind when he became editor for the Spider-Man character and consultant to the Fox Kids Network for Animated Spider-Man. During his Marvel years he earned writing credits for Avengers, The Deadly Foes of Spider-Man, The Hulk, Iron Man, as well as the entire fifty book run of Darkhawk (1991-1995). His awareness of principles and choices in the world of superheroism has permitted him to become an interpreter for grown-up audiences who want a better understanding of the narrative meanings of the comics world. His interpretive books are Superman on the Couch (2004), Disguised as Clark Kent (2007), and The Rough Guide to Graphic Novels (2008, illustrated by Roger Langridge), which includes a new thirty page graphic novel written by him.

Readers who look at superhero comics will immediately notice the constant physical conflict between extreme-bodied protagonists. But beneath the surface violence, the dialogue expresses moral perspectives that often go beyond the trite 'crime does not pay'. The good-evil polarities are often ambiguously shaded. We see heroes tempted to do ill (The Punisher constantly goes over the edge) and the villains sometimes wonder whether to switch sides (Rhino wants to get out of his thuggish roles, and even prevents the murder of Spiderman). In the spirit of post-World War II existentialism, Marvel's heroes conduct their lives in extreme situations that require hard choices. As Fingeroth told me, as a writer for youthful audiences he has always sought to convey that 'actions have consequences' and that heroes, unlike villains, are persons who channel the impulse for revenge into doing good. He admits his conception of this is at odds with some comics characters aimed at an older audience, where the violence has become "more extreme and vivid." Before exploring Fingeroth's ideas, I will set the conceptual stage for the philosophy of superheroes.

WTO+10: Before 1999, the momentum of globalization seemed to sweep everything in front of it, including the truth. But in Seattle, ordinary women and men made truth real with collective action.

Roboexotica 2009, an annual festival for cocktail robotics organized by SHIFZ, monochrom and Bureau of Philosophy, takes place December 3-6 at Drinkomat in Vienna, Austria.

Middle of the night and your head teems with half-formed thoughts: Did I pay the car insurance? Where did I park the car? Is my best dress shirt at the dry cleaners? What time's the wedding on Saturday? Need a map of Vermont to get there. I should frame my vintage maps one of these days. Maybe start with that bird's-eye view of New Amsterdam, or the blue-tinted mariner's chart ...

How stop this ceaseless ticker tape? The mind's associative reflex is as rapid as it is circuitous, myriad things and things-to-do always unspooling in the brainpan. If you get out of bed, though, and grab a pen, you can at least slow it down by making a list. You can rank items in importance, annotate, categorize, and subcategorize—in short, you can give some material shape to and make some order of what Samuel Beckett dubbed "the big blooming buzzing confusion." So somewhere between penciling "Pick up prescription" and "Live a more examined life," a portion of calm might be found.

The notion that unwieldy consciousness can best be tamed by enumerative form has beguiled more than a few writers and artists. Umberto Eco, in The Infinity of Lists: An Illustrated Essay (Rizzoli, $45), recounts his own fascination with lists, lists of lists, and the infinite regress of adding up and counting down any- and everything. In compiling this roster—its own sort of metacollection—Eco ranges widely through Western civilization to include lists verbal (from Homer to Pynchon) and visual (from a fifth-century Greek shield to an installation by Christian Boltanski). Like any good cataloguer, Eco subdivides: His big two kinds of lists are those that evidence the "poetics of 'everything included'" and those that express the "poetics of the 'etcetera.'" The first aims for completeness and closure (provisionally so); the latter takes its cue from the mind's perpetual-motion association machine. It's the difference between a New York telephone directory and, say, J. A. S. Collin de Plancy's nineteenth-century Dictionnaire infernal, which offers a census of demons ("Aamon, Abigor, Abraace, Adramelech ... Xafan, Zagam, Zaleos, Zebos, Zepar"). The phone book includes the more or less fixed number of names of actual phone owners; the roster of devils is limited only by the imagination's disinclination to invent more.

Patterns in brain activity can be used to determine whether someone is looking at a surrealist landscape by Salvador Dali or the cubist lines of Pablo Picasso.

Yukiyasu Kamitani of ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories in Kyoto, Japan, and colleagues showed 12 students dozens of Picassos and Dalis while scanning their brains using functional MRI. A program then identified patterns in activity that were unique to each artist.

When fed brain scans produced by students looking at fresh paintings by the same artists, the program correctly identified the painter better than chance alone: it was correct 83 per cent of the time among the six students who were art majors and 62 per cent of the time among the others.

One winter morning in 1996, Border Patrol agents charged into a Los Angeles street-corner clinic where 40 day laborers had lined up to be tested for AIDS. One worker, Omar Sierra, had just taken his seat, and a nurse had inserted the needle for drawing the blood. As agents of the migra ran across the street and sidewalk, Sierra jumped up, tore off the tourniquet, pulled the needle out of his vein and ran.
Sierra escaped and made it home. Shaken by his experience and determined never to forget his friends who were deported, he wrote a song.

I'm going to sing you a story, friends
that will make you cry,
how one day in front of K-Mart
the migra came down on us,
sent by the sheriff
of this very same place ...

We don't understand why,
we don't know the reason,
why there is so much
discrimination against us.
In the end we'll wind up
all the same in the grave.

With this verse I leave you,
I'm tired of singing,
hoping the migra
won't come after us again,
because in the end, we all have to work.

Sierra states an obvious truth about people in the US without immigration papers: "We all have to work." Yet, work has become a crime for the undocumented. That Hollywood raid took place 13 years ago, but since then immigration enforcement against workers has grown much more widespread, with catastrophic consequences. In the last eight years of the Bush administration in particular, a succession of raids treated undocumented workers as criminals.

Barack Obama once described the operations in Afghanistan as a "necessary war". That war has lasted eight years and General Stanley McChrystal, the commander of the US forces there, appointed by Obama, is urging him to deploy 40,000 more troops.

In Indochina, the US supported corrupt and illegitimate puppet governments, to no avail. In Afghanistan, Britain and the Soviet Union failed to subdue the country, despite all their efforts. US military losses have been relatively small (880 since 2001, compared with 1,200 a month in Vietnam in 1968) and anti-war protests have been low-key, but have the western armies any chance of winning, lost in mountains, surrounded by drug traffickers (1), and suspected of crusading against Islam?

The French foreign minister Bernard Kouchner still hopes to "win hearts and minds with a bullet-proof vest" and McChrystal assures the world that "the American goal in Afghanistan must not be primarily to hunt down and kill Taliban insurgents but to protect the population". Apart from their cynicism, these statements are based on a common assumption that social development can be combined with military operations in a country where it is impossible to distinguish between insurgents and civilians. In Vietnam, the US journalist Andrew Kopkind summed up this kind of "counter-insurgency" in 1966 as "candy in the morning, napalm in the afternoon".

Levon Aronian likes to sleep late. But at 11am on a weekday in August this year, his dreams were disturbed by what sounded like people chanting his name. In a semi-conscious state he got up, looked out of the window and saw a large group of people outside where he was staying. "You must win for Armenia!" shouted the crowd. They were there because in his native country, Levon Aronian is a megastar. He is 27 years old, charming, handsome, wealthy and the best in his nation at chess. And his countrymen take chess very seriously. The patriotic zeal focused on him during the August tournament was more intense than usual. If Aronian did well, he might one day become world champion.

Try looking objectively at biotech firm Monsanto, a company that only ever seems to receive a negative press, and see if you can find any redeeming features – any ray of light emanating from this seeming black hole of corporate misanthropy. You will struggle. Monsanto is the exemplar of all that is wrong with the world's corporate-controlled food system.

Monsanto has a damning history. It worked on the atomic bomb in the 1940s and produced the chemical weapon Agent Orange during the Vietnam war. More recently its herbicides have been used to devastating effect against coca-producing peasant farmers in Colombia.

But nightmarish weapons have never been the company's primary money-spinner. The big bucks come from industrialised agriculture. When it comes to food, never before has so much been controlled by so few – a situation that is worsening as genetically modified (GM) crops and patents are pushed further into agriculture.

Leaf-cutter ants, which cultivate fungus for food, have many remarkable qualities.

Here's a new one to add to the list: the ant farmers, like their human counterparts, depend on nitrogen-fixing bacteria to make their gardens grow. The finding, reported Nov. 20 in the journal Science, documents a previously unknown symbiosis between ants and bacteria and provides insight into how leaf-cutter ants have come to dominate the American tropics and subtropics.

What's more, the work, conducted by a team led by University of Wisconsin-Madison bacteriologist Cameron Currie, identifies what is likely the primary source of terrestrial nitrogen in the tropics, a setting where nutrients are otherwise scarce.