The Good, The Bad, and The Awkward
Friday, April 30: 5:30 pm - 7:00 pm in Room 26-100

With Mike Bender (Awkward Family Photos), Jonathan Standefer (Lamebook), Helen Killer (Regretsy), Douglas Chernack (Awkward Family Photos), Brad O'Farrell (Play 'em off Keyboard Cat).
Johannes Grenzfurthner (monochrom) [Moderator]

While we didn't bring Goatse (sorry/you're welcome about that), ROFLCon would be remiss to not spend a moment talking about the awkward on the web. Bringing together some of the folks that have done the most to commentate and celebrate that unique kind of fail on the web in the recent year, this panel examines the role that awkward things play on the web culture.

monochrom: let's network it out
Saturday, May 1: 2:00 pm - 3:30 pm in Room 56-180

monochrom is a worldwide operating collective dealing with technology, art, philosophy, and crap. Chances are high you've seen one of their projects on the net and didn't even know they created it. Among their projects, monochrom has released a leftist retro-gaming project, eaten sausages made from their own blood, invented Massive Multiplayer Thumb-Wrestling, buried people alive, and cracked the hierarchies of the art system with the Thomann Project. Johannes Grenzfurthner will give a brief introduction in the world of monochrom, context hacking and the powerless powers of guerrilla communication.

Information processing circuits in digital computers are static. In our brains, information processing circuits -- neurons -- evolve continuously to solve complex problems. Now, an international research team from Japan and Michigan Technological University has created a similar process of circuit evolution in an organic molecular layer that can solve complex problems. This is the first time a brain-like "evolutionary circuit" has been realized.

If you are the last of your kind like the Galapagos tortoise Lonesome George, then short of a virgin birth or cloning, your species is doomed. But it ain't all doom and gloom. Humans have stepped in to save species on the edge, sometimes dramatically and with some success.

Indeed, conservationists have suggested starting a "blue list" of species that have come back from the brink, mirroring the International Union for Conservation of Nature Red List of endangered species.

Bolivia—Here in this small Andean nation of 10 million people, the glaciers are melting, threatening the water supply of the largest urban area in the country, El Alto and La Paz, with 3.5 million people living at altitudes over 10,000 feet. I flew from El Alto International, the world’s highest commercial airport, to the city of Cochabamba.

Bolivian President Evo Morales calls Cochabamba the heart of Bolivia. It was here, 10 years ago this month, that, as one observer put it, "the first rebellion of the 21st century” took place. In what was dubbed the Water Wars, people from around Bolivia converged on Cochabamba to overturn the privatization of the public water system. As Jim Shultz, founder of the Cochabamba-based Democracy Center, told me, “People like a good David-and-Goliath story, and the water revolt is David not just beating one Goliath, but three. We call them the three Bs: Bechtel, Banzer and the Bank." The World Bank, Shultz explained, coerced the Bolivian government, under President Hugo Banzer, who had ruled as a dictator in the 1970s, to privatize Cochabamba's water system. The multinational corporation Bechtel, the sole bidder, took control of the public water system.

This collection of essays is in the nature of a running commentary on some of the main aspects of the turbulent course of capitalist development in the last years of the 1970s and the first of the 1980s. The focus is on the United States, still by a wide margin the biggest of the advanced capitalist countries, but the context is the global capitalist order, including its advanced, less-developed, and underdeveloped components. The first essay in the collection is dated November 1977, the last March 1981, and the summarizing "Introduction" was written in late summer 1981.

What has happened in the year that has passed since then? The answer, essentially, is more of the same.

Our favorite Austrians are back in the USSA to celebrate the release of their newest phonebook sized collection of random text. Johannes is here in LA and along with contributors such as Jason Brown, John Wilcock and me, will be doing readings from the book on Friday night at Machine Project.

There is sure to be talk of assorted deities and assorted diets, assorted sexual practices and assorted practical sexutices. Don't know what a sexutices is? You'll just have to come and find out. There will also be all sorts of riveting international politics and possibly something about rivets.

More info can be found here. Friday April 16, 2010, 8PM – 1200 D North Alvarado Street, Los Angeles

"A good way to describe John Wilcock is to say that he is a talented bohemian counter-culture journalist who once played a major role in the emergence of America's underground press. Born 1927 in Sheffield, England, he left school aged 16 to work on various newspapers in England, and on Toronto periodicals before moving to New York City. There in 1955 he became one of the five founders of the Village Voice in which he and co-founder Norman Mailer wrote weekly columns. Wilcock called his column "The Village Square", an intended pun. He and young Mailer were not quite friends, although Wilcock was at times annoyed, but always amused, by Mailer's monstrous ego." (From the preface of Manhattan Memories, by Martin Gardner)

The phatzine monochrom #26-34 (Goat of 1k Young) is an impossibility in an impossible universe -- an unpeculiar mixture of proto-aesthetic fringe work, pop attitude, subcultural science and political activism. 500 pages (60 ounces) of outrageous printed bestiality.

I didn't permit myself to think about anything other than the task at hand. It was necessary to steel myself, steel myself firmly and grit my teeth. In the event that I lost consciousness, I'd given Sasha Artemev a syringe and shown him how to give me an injection. I chose a position half sitting. I explained to Zinovy Teplinsky how to hold the mirror. My poor assistants! At the last minute I looked over at them: they stood there in their surgical whites, whiter than white themselves. I was scared too. But when I picked up the needle with the novocaine and gave myself the first injection, somehow I automatically switched into operating mode, and from that point on I didn't notice anything else.

In March our prolific friends at monochrom released their latest book "monochrom #26-34, Ye Olde Self-Referentiality". They are currently doing a book release tour with upcoming stops in Los Angeles on April 16th at Machine Project, San Francisco on April 21st at Noisebridge, New York City on April 27th at The Nuyorican Poets Cafe and in Munich on July 3rd at Department of Volxvergnuegen.

Bright lights, tunnels to the unknown and mysterious voices give near-death experiences an mystical air. The explanation may be something rather more mundane: plain old carbon dioxide. People who have near-death experiences during heart attacks tend to have higher levels of the molecule coursing through their veins.

Tens of thousands in Argentina recently marked the 34th anniversary of the nation's bloody military dictatorship, flooding into the historic Plaza de Mayo with cries of nunca más, or never again. On March 24, 1976 the military ceased (sic!) power and instituted one of Latin America's darkest chapters of terror. During the 1976-1983 junta, the military disappeared more than 30,000 people.

Since the 30th anniversary of the coup, in 2006, protests to repudiate the military coup have grown in size and political importance; at this year's protest more than 25,000 people overflowed the Plaza de Mayo while major human rights trials are underway. The Mothers and Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo led the march carrying a banner with photos of the disappeared. The black and white portraits extended for blocks, with thousands of photos of unionists, students, artists, intellectuals, workers, lawyers, mothers, fathers, sons, daughters and compañeros, many of whom were only in their 20s when commando groups kidnapped them to take them to clandestine detention centers, torture and later disappear this generation which dreamt of a better world. This generation was reflected in the outpouring on March 24, 2010, and in the collective screams of "30,000 disappeared—present! Now and Forever!"

Africa, the least urbanised continent, still has the highest urban growth rate, nearly 7% per year; 40% of Africans now live in towns, compared with 3% in 1900. By 2030 there will be 760 million Africans, and if current trends continue, more than 70% will live in slums or shanty housing on the outskirts of old colonial foundations (Kinshasa or Nairobi) or ancestral cities (Ibadan or Kano in Nigeria). Half of today's urban population – most of them under 25 – lives on less than $2 a day.

According to a 2008 UN Habitat report, this urban population has shown remarkable resilience despite living conditions that are frequently very difficult. The most dynamic proofs are the new music subcultures that have sprung up over the past 10 years, mostly in low-income communities in the main cities. Ivorian coupé-décalé, South African kwaito, Ghanaian hiplife and Angolan kuduro rework tradition using electronics and a 21st-century street attitude. But the hunger riots of the winter of 2008-9 were a reminder that this captive population, at the mercy of price rises in food and petrol, has felt neglected by central governments. Those governments have greatly contributed to the leap in property prices, helping to intensify urban gentrification.

Speakers: Johannes Grenzfurthner (founder of monochrom and Arse Elektronika), Heather Kelley (media artist and video game designer), Karen Marcelo (founder of dorkbot-sf), Bonni Rambatan (media theorist).

Date: April 1, 2010 (Thu) Time: 6pm-7pm Venue: Osage Soho; Address: G/F, 45 Caine Road, Central, Hong Kong.

Co-curated by Johannes Grenzfurthner (Austria) and Isaac Leung (HK)

From the simple electronic vibrator to the complex assemblages of cybersex, sex and technology have always intersected. The dynamic relations between sexuality and technology are constantly changing along with the ways in which human beings achieve psychological and bodily pleasure through these devices. By inviting artists who're dealing with various issues of technosexual bodies, we aim not only to examine the unexplored technicalities, functionalities and interfaces of the new technologies and sexualities, but also to formulate a broader understanding of the meanings of the "technosexual".

Participating Artists: Timothy Archibald (USA), Shu Lea Cheang (USA/France), Paul Granjon (UK), Katrien Jacobs (Belgium), Heather Kelley (USA/CAN), Kyle Machulis (USA), monochrom (Austria), Ellen Pau (HK), Stephane Perrin (Japan), Rainer Prohaska (Austria), Allen Stein (USA), Morgan Wong (HK)

Opening Reception: April 2, 2010 (Fri), 6pm
Exhibition Period: April 7-27, 2010
Opening Hour: 12pm-7pm (Tue-Sun except public holidays)
Venue: Videotage (Unit 13, Cattle Depot Artist Village, 63 Ma Tau Kok Road, To Kwa Wan, Kowloon, Hong Kong)

MEMPHIS — In the back room of a theater on Beale Street, John Renken, 37, a pastor, recently led a group of young men in prayer.

"Father, we thank you for tonight," he said. "We pray that we will be a representation of you."

An hour later, a member of his flock who had bowed his head was now unleashing a torrent of blows on an opponent, and Mr. Renken was offering guidance that was not exactly prayerful.

"Hard punches!" he shouted from the sidelines of a martial arts event called Cage Assault. "Finish the fight! To the head! To the head!"

The young man was a member of a fight team at Xtreme Ministries, a small church near Nashville that doubles as a mixed martial arts academy. Mr. Renken, who founded the church and academy, doubles as the team's coach. The school's motto is "Where Feet, Fist and Faith Collide."

Mr. Renken's ministry is one of a small but growing number of evangelical churches that have embraced mixed martial arts -- a sport with a reputation for violence and blood that combines kickboxing, wrestling and other fighting styles -- to reach and convert young men, whose church attendance has been persistently low. Mixed martial arts events have drawn millions of television viewers, and one was the top pay-per-view event in 2009.

A comparison of ancient and contemporary footprints reveals that our ancestors were strolling much like we do some 3.6 million years ago, a time when they were still quite comfortable spending time in trees, according to a study which will be published in the March 22 issue of the journal PLoS ONE.

Anatomical fossils have given scant confirmation about when our ancestors developed a fully modern gait. Although some researchers have argued that the 4.4 million-year-old ancient human Ardipithecus ramidus ("Ardi") described in October 2009 was adept at walking on her hind legs, many disagree.

So rather than quibbling over badly crushed—and often missing—fossil bones, the researchers behind the new study turned much of their focus back to the famous Laetoli footprints, which were discovered more than 30 years ago in what is now Tanzania. Likely left by Australopithecus afarensis, the same species as "Lucy," these prints show an upright gait, but it has remained controversial just how fluid and modern this creature's walk would have been.

For a minute or so, it looks like the protagonist of Inglourious Basterds is going to be Perrier LaPadite, a humble French dairy farmer just trying to eke his way through World War II in the French countryside with his daughters. Into LaPadite's island of relative calm comes Col Hans Landa. The opening scene of Inglourious Basterds is over 15 minutes long, which is extraordinary in and of itself. 15 minutes is a huge amount of screen time to spend on a scene, especially an opening scene, especially a two-handed opening scene where one of the characters will never be seen again. That's just the beginning of the daring and audacity of Quentin Tarantino's screenplay.

The scene is one long suspense beat, a pattern that will be repeated throughout the movie. Over and over, Tarantino slowly ratchets up the tension until is is almost a relief when the tension explodes into violence. Which is, as it turns out, one of the things that elevates Basterds to the level of high art -- Tarantino repeatedly uses the audience's desire for release against it. The movie doesn't merely use violence, it's about violence, particularly violence in movies, or in popular culture anyway, and the way it can be used to manipulate an audience, or a populace. It repeatedly gets you longing for violence and then, by the time it shows up, it's not what you wanted or expected it to be. The movie as a whole doesn't offer up easy answers, rather it asks extremely uncomfortable questions.

Shortly into the first scene, it becomes clear that LaPadite isn't the protagonist, Landa is. LaPadite is reactive, Landa is the one driving the scene every step of the way. The performances in Basterds are extraordinary, and Christoph Waltz as Landa is extraordinary even by the standards of the rest of the movie, but the performance, if I may be so bold, rises from the ingenuity of the screenplay.

To stress one's own love of peace is always the close concern of those who have instigated war. But he who wants peace should speak of war. He should speak of the past one ... and, above all, he should speak of the coming one.

A remarkable consensus appears to have emerged on the Left: that in the context of the war on terror the distinction between war and peace has been destabilized. Alain Badiou suggests that the category of 'war' has become so obscured that ancient capitals can be bombed without serving notice to anyone of the fact that war has been declared. 'As such, the continuity of war is slowly established, whereas in the past declaring war would, to the contrary, have expressed the present of a discontinuity. Already, this continuity has rendered war and peace indistinguishable.' 'In the end', notes Badiou, 'these American wars ... are not really distinguishable from the continuity of "peace".' Antonio Negri and Eric Alliez likewise comment that 'peace appears to be merely the continuation of war by other means', adding that because peace, 'otherwise known as global war ... is a permanent state of exception', war now 'presents itself as peace-keeping' and has thereby reversed their classical relationship. Their reference to a concept made popular following Agamben's State of Exception is far from unusual in this new consensus. 'We no longer have wars in the old sense of a regulated conflict between sovereign states', notes Zizek. Instead, what remains are either ‘struggles between groups of Homo sacer ... which violate the rules of universal human rights, do not count as wars proper, and call for "humanitarian pacifist" intervention by Western powers', or 'direct attacks on the USA or other representatives of the new global order, in which case, again, we do not have wars proper, merely "unlawful combatants" criminally resisting the forces of universal order. Hence 'the old Orwellian motto "War is Peace" finally becomes reality.'

The crisis of 2007-9 was a systemic upheaval rather than just the result of poor regulation, or of speculative excesses of finance. It was a crisis of financialised capitalism. Financialisation is a structural transformation of advanced capitalist economies, resulting in asymmetric growth of the circulation of money relative to production and allowing finance to penetrate even minor niches of social and personal life. Hence a systemic failure of private banking could become a global crisis.

Low-income workers, for instance, are heavily concerned about pensions, savings, and insurance. The burden of debt – both mortgage and personal – has become a permanent fixture of modern working-class life. Meanwhile, inequality has been exacerbated by bankers and financiers earning astronomical bonuses while shifting the costs of crisis onto society.

Radical activists have long sought to raise demands for improvements in the conditions of workers here and now. In the case of the financial system, such demands could raise broader issues of controlling the economy as a whole. Reorganising the financial system under contemporary conditions could pose a direct challenge to capitalist relations.

First we sent data through wires, then the air, now the human body is becoming a communications conduit.

Researchers at Korea University in Seoul have transmitted data at a rate of 10 megabits per second through a person's arm, between two electrodes placed on their skin 30 centimetres apart.

The thin, flexible electrodes use significantly less energy than a wireless link like Bluetooth. That's because low-frequency electromagnetic waves pass through skin with little attenuation, a route that also shelters them from outside interference.

Doesn't Nathan Myhrvold get enough attention? The guy is the former chief technology officer of Microsoft, a multimillionaire, a gourmet chef, a prize-winning photographer and keeper of multiple higher degrees from prestigious institutions. As the CEO and founder of Intellectual Ventures, a private outfit that invests in "pure inventions," he frequently finds himself in the news.

And yet, at the annual techno-hip TED conference in February, Myhrvold decided to up the ante, tapping into the misery of millions of rural African women and their families to wrap his business in a cloak of moral urgency. "Every 43 seconds a child dies of malaria," he told the crowd. And current anti-malaria interventions, many of which target the rural African women and children who are malaria's main victims, don't work that well, he said. Insecticides can be environmentally dangerous and some people use anti-mosquito bednets to catch fish instead.

That's why Myhrvold came up with his latest invention: A mini-"Star Wars" weapons system that tracks mosquitoes in the air and shoots them down mid-flight–with lasers, of course. Like a Death Ray. All you need to make one is a Blu-ray player and a laser printer, plus a few months of processing time on a supercomputer, and voila!: you're on your way to eradicating malaria in Africa for good.

Oh. My.

After a year-long investigation, court-appointed bank examiner Anton Valukas has produced a deadly 2,200 page report which details the activities that led to the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy. The report is a keg of dynamite. The question now is whether anyone in government has the nerve to light the fuse. Valukas provides powerful evidence that Lehman executives were involved in "balance sheet manipulation" by implementing an arcane accounting procedure called "Repo 105" which masked the bank's true financial condition from investors and regulators.

According to Valukas, Lehman was "Unable to find a United States law firm that would provide it with an opinion letter permitting the true sale accounting treatment" using Repo 105. So, Lehman executives went outside of the country in an effort to enlist the support of a London law firm that would approve the procedure.

It is impossible to overstate the significance of Valugas's findings. The report exposes the opaque but central role of the repo market which provides essential short-term loans for financial institutions. (Lehman used repos to conceal the full extent of its collapse, by dint of the amount of leverage it was using, meaning the pitiful asset anchor tethered to a vast zeppelin of debt) More importantly, it shows the cozy and, very probably criminal relationship between the country's main regulatory bodies and the Wall Street behemoths. The activities of the New York Fed (NYFRB), which at the time was headed by Timothy Geithner, is particularly suspect in this regard. The report should trigger an immediate Congressional investigation, probing the whole affair and most importantly the role of the Fed.

Reading this story requires you to willfully pay attention to the sentences and to tune out nearby conversations, the radio and other distractions. But if a fire alarm sounded, your attention would be involuntarily snatched away from the story to the blaring sound.

New research from Vanderbilt University reveals for the first time how our brains coordinate these two types of attention and why we may be temporarily blinded by surprises.

The research was published March 7, 2010, in Nature Neuroscience.

"The simple example of having your reading interrupted by a fire alarm illustrates a fundamental aspect of attention: what ultimately reaches our awareness and guides our behavior depends on the interaction between goal-directed and stimulus-driven attention. For coherent behavior to emerge, you need these two forms of attention to be coordinated," René Marois, associate professor of psychology and co-author of the new study, said. "We found a brain area, the inferior frontal junction, that may play a primary role in coordinating these two forms of attention."

The Coens have raised the bar with A Serious Man, a sledgehammer allegory delivered in a blizzard of wordplay and imagery so subtle I still don't know what hit me. Nevertheless, I feel reasonably comfortable that, in a big way, the film is an assault upon its intended audience.

As a cine-masochist, I am plum delighted.

A survey of the criticism on imdb suggests three main readings.

1. Political--ASM is a biting take on the foibles of a Hebraic tradition that has become hollow—equated textually to the erosion of the American Dream.
2. Postmodern--The movie is a loving send-up of the same tradition. A moral fable, wherein the existential conundrum is absolved through the proper apprehension of Love and its purported source, Hashem. A fancy turn on the axiomatic 'God is Love', built upon a Kafkaesque reading of the Book of Job.
3. Magical--A parabolic parable upon the nature of uncertainty.

A Serious Man is all of these, I reckon, and more. At once an apparently impossible riddle or Gordian Knot, an emo one-liner and a sort of magic trick, complete with a dazzling punch provided by the use of in situ music by Jefferson Airplane. So to start us off, we have three solid interps, which taken together ought to provide enough fodder for a good variety of critique and analysis well into the future.

But I deduce another and much tougher meaning. A Serious Man is a message, loud and clear and in no uncertain terms: there is a God and he is fucking pissed-off. See, folks have pretty much given up on him, Hashem, God, though some don't know it or won't admit it. The Coens take serious lengths to establish Hashem's unique problems, going so far as to a hint of his ultimate identity.

For those concerned with the fate of the earth, the time has come to face facts: not simply the dire reality of climate change but also the pressing need for social-system change. The failure to arrive at a world climate agreement in Copenhagen in December 2009 was not simply an abdication of world leadership, as is often suggested, but had deeper roots in the inability of the capitalist system to address the accelerating threat to life on the planet. Knowledge of the nature and limits of capitalism, and the means of transcending it, has therefore become a matter of survival. In the words of Fidel Castro in December 2009: "Until very recently, the discussion [on the future of world society] revolved around the kind of society we would have. Today, the discussion centers on whether human society will survive."

Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay: two names that have become synonymous in many people's minds with torture and abuse of human rights by American interrogators. When Barack Obama entered the White House in January 2009, he set out to erase the stain such practices have left on America's image. The High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group established later that year has as one of its stated aims to interrogate without brute force and to employ "scientifically proven" techniques - though without saying what these might be.

It seems like a noble goal, but on closer inspection it raises a host of questions. Can science validate interrogation techniques - and if so, how? What is the effect on the human mind of coercive interrogation that stops short of physical torture? And, crucially, are there any interrogation techniques that can be shown to be both effective and humane?

Speakers: Johannes Grenzfurthner (founder of monochrom and Arse Elektronika), Heather Kelley (media artist and video game designer), Karen Marcelo (founder of dorkbot-sf), Bonni Rambatan (media theorist).

Date: April 1, 2010 (Thu) Time: 6pm-7pm Venue: Osage Soho; Address: G/F, 45 Caine Road, Central, Hong Kong.

Co-curated by Johannes Grenzfurthner (Austria) and Isaac Leung (HK)

From the simple electronic vibrator to the complex assemblages of cybersex, sex and technology have always intersected. The dynamic relations between sexuality and technology are constantly changing along with the ways in which human beings achieve psychological and bodily pleasure through these devices. By inviting artists who're dealing with various issues of technosexual bodies, we aim not only to examine the unexplored technicalities, functionalities and interfaces of the new technologies and sexualities, but also to formulate a broader understanding of the meanings of the "technosexual".

Participating Artists: Timothy Archibald (USA), Shu Lea Cheang (USA/France), Paul Granjon (UK), Katrien Jacobs (Belgium), Heather Kelley (USA/CAN), Kyle Machulis (USA), monochrom (Austria), Ellen Pau (HK), Stephane Perrin (Japan), Rainer Prohaska (Austria), Allen Stein (USA), Morgan Wong (HK)

Opening Reception: April 2, 2010 (Fri), 6pm
Exhibition Period: April 7-27, 2010
Opening Hour: 12pm-7pm (Tue-Sun except public holidays)
Venue: Videotage (Unit 13, Cattle Depot Artist Village, 63 Ma Tau Kok Road, To Kwa Wan, Kowloon, Hong Kong)

The "Digital Communities" category focuses on the wide-ranging social and artistic impact of the Internet as well as on the latest developments in social software, user generated content, mobile communications, mash-ups and location based services. Digital Communities" focuses on innovation in human coexistence, efforts to bridge the geographical as well as gender-based digital divide, overcoming cultural conflicts and fostering cultural diversity and the freedom of artistic expression. Consideration is also given to projects that advance the practice of sharing and the formation of a "Cloud Intelligence", and that facilitate access to technological-social infrastructure. Digital Communities spotlights the political and artistic potential of digital and networked systems and is thus designed to singled out for recognition a broad spectrum of projects, programs, artworks, initiatives and phenomena in which social and artistic innovation is taking place, as it were, in real time. A Golden Nica, two Awards of Distinction and up to 12 Honorary Mentions will be awarded in the Digital Communities category in 2010.

"It left a huge impression on us. For example, the movies are almost real. It's an example that makes us think a lot because the indigenous are defending their rights. We have to defend just as the indigenous so clearly defended in the movie. We had an uprising we had a confrontation with gases; it's the same as what we just saw in the movie."

"This is a Hollywood movie, so it's practically a given that a mestizo comes to the defense and leads (the people) to triumph in the end."

"A simple rule of robotic personality seems to be: don’t make things the most efficient way," said Magnus Wurzer, who has been running the Vienna-based Roboexotica, a festival where scientists have gone to build, showcase and discuss "cocktail robots" since 1999.

One entry, Beerbot, detects approaching people and asks for beer money. When it acquires enough, it "buys" itself a beer. Bystanders can watch it flow into a transparent bladder. As for other humanizing behaviors, "like a robot that doesn’t stop short at lighting a cigarette but actually goes ahead and smokes it?" Mr. Wurzer says, "We had that.

Roboexotica has inspired a stateside version as well, which just had its third annual celebration in San Francisco.

And in at least one case in Europe, a robot actually got behind a bar. From 1999 to 2002, a scarlet-eyed metal robot named Cynthia poured drinks at Cynthia's Bridge Bar and Lounge in London. But according to Mr. Wurzer, "she was too costly to maintain once the bar was sold by the robot's maker."

Pomona College (Pomona, California) at 10:30am on Thursday, February 25th.

What can you do with one button? In an age of ever-more-complex touch interfaces, we'd like to imagine what a single, tangible, hardware button can mean for a design.

[...]

This call seeks to inspire unique hardware/software hacks that integrate playful, one-button interaction within a standalone machine or device. The curators are seeking circuit-bent gadgets, retro-fitted consoles, mechanical constructions, custom electronics, and other one-off creations. During the week of the Game Developers Conference, the Game Objects will be featured in an exhibit at the Gray Area Foundation, a new collaboration and exhibition venue revitalizing the Tenderloin, near the Moscone Center. A selection of these Objects will be shown at the opening night Gamma party, alongside the software-based Gamma4 one-button games, on March 10th at the Mezzanine in SoMa.

In a world where robots and humans struggle together in the fight against boredom...
Only one event ends up with the robots dancing "The Human" while the meat puppets (you) end up singing the praises of RoboBartenders.
This February, come hang out with some alternate life-forms at BarBot 2010.

"Other than the benefit of having more time, what will happen is a reduction in inequality and the potential to be better-quality friends, partners and parents engaging more with communities."

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.