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The human genome is about 3,120,000,000 base pairs long, so half of that is in each spermatozoa -- 1,560,000,000 base pairs. Each side of these base pairs can either be an adenine-thymine or a guanine-cytosine bond, and they can be aligned either direction, so there are four choices. Four possibilities for a value means it can be fully represented with two bits; 00 = guanine, 01 = cytosine, and so forth.

The figures that I've read state the number of sperm in a human ejaculation to be anywhere from 50 to 500 million. I'm going to go with the number 200,000,000 sperm cells, but if anyone knows differently, please tell me.

Putting these together, the average amount of information per ejaculation is 1.560*109 * 2 bits * 2.00*108, which comes out to be 6.24*1017 bits. That's about 78,000 terabytes of data! As a basis of comparison, were the entire text content of the Library of Congress to be scanned and stored, it would only take up about 20 terabytes. If you figure that a male orgasm lasts five seconds, you get a transmission rate of 15,600 tb/s. In comparison, an OC-96 line (like the ones that make up much of the backbone of the internet) can move .005 tb/s. Cable modems generally transmit somewhere around 1/5000th of that.

If you consider signal to noise, though, the figures come out much differently. If only the single sperm cell that fertilizes the egg counts as signal, you get (1.560*109 * 2 bits) / 5 s = 6.24*108 bits/s, or somewhere in the neighborhood of 78 Mb/s. Still a great deal more bandwidth than your average cable modem, but not nearly the 5,000,000 Mb/s of the OC-96.

Science has become an unreliable epistemological resource for several reasons. First, the assumptions of science are suspect. Second, the scientific method exhibits narrow limits to the acquisition of universal knowledge. Third, the conclusions of the scientific community at large are questionable and inadequate. Fourth, the practice of science has developed a particular perspective about its place in the world of knowing that diminishes all other avenues of knowledge, to its detriment. Finally, the practice of science involves a philosophical approach which makes scientism and "pure science" hard to differentiate. Thus, science itself, as an epistemological discipline, has been discovered to be unworthy of the extreme admiration granted it by the present technology-loving world.

All flying insects that walk on all fours are to be detestable to you. There are, however, some winged creatures that walk on all fours that you may eat: those that have jointed legs for hopping on the ground. Of these you may eat any kind of locust, katydid, cricket or grasshopper.

This time with MAXIMUM ARTSCUM from Europe, USA, Japan and Australia - Evil & Subversive Paintings, Drawings, Collages, Stories, Poems, Reports from Naoto Hattori (JAP), J.K. Potter (USA), Jan Off (GER), Marcel Ruijters (NL), Microbo (ITA), Karl Persson (AUS), Mike Bohatch (USA), Fabrice Lavolley (BEL), Urs Böke (GER) & many other weirdos....
+++++ "Are you still playing with dolls?!" - Dolls & Sculptures,
+++++ "R'leih Cthulhu" - Interviewtrip with H.P. Hutter
+++++ "Ink means eternity " - The tattoomummies from Riberalta
+++++ Reviews

For the last few years, the movie industry's battles with Internet pirates offered an entertaining diversion during Oscar season. Their problem: they need to "leak" their films to Academy members for consideration, but don't want those official leaks to fall into the hands of pirates. [...]

>>Here is the dilemma: Weapons research produces in the first place not guns, bombs, bullets and planes and the various command, control and communications hardware and software needed to use these things, but plans, blueprints and designs – knowledge and know-how. Unless these useful plans are lost or destroyed, they can be implemented or instantiated many times over, and thus project unforeseen into the future.

The AK 47 design, as opposed to the individual weapons, won’t wear out; and providing the materials and skills are available, they can be made at any time in the future. The weapons design with the most longevity that I know of is the onager, the one-armed catapult used at the siege of Syracuse under the direction of Archimedes in 212 BCE and invented some centuries earlier. Aficionados still build onagers from the original plans. Now suppose that J, a weapons researcher, designs a weapon because her country is in dire threat from a wicked invader: there are many examples of this, from Archimedes to Watson-Watt the inventor of radar, and beyond. But when the emergency has passed and there is no longer just cause for using the weapon, J's invention is used in other circumstances which she does not condone, such as an unjust war. There is a moral dilemma here for the following reasons. I assume that J is a moral person and hence does not want to do harm unless she has sufficient justification. The imminent likelihood that an aggressor will destroy her family, country and way of life is surely sufficient justification. But the weapon design persists into the future, and once out of J's control can be used for unjustifiable harms. What should J do? And is this really a general problem, or one that only worries Kalashnikov?<<

Microraptor gui, a little dinosaur with four feathered limbs, may have glided through the air like a biplane, with its wings paired in parallel.

How could the body influence our thinking when it seems obvious that the brain controls the body? In How the Body Shapes the Way We Think, Rolf Pfeifer and Josh Bongard demonstrate that thought is not independent of the body but is tightly constrained, and at the same time enabled, by it. They argue that the kinds of thoughts we are capable of have their foundation in our embodiment--in our morphology and the material properties of our bodies.

This crucial notion of embodiment underlies fundamental changes in the field of artificial intelligence over the past two decades, and Pfeifer and Bongard use the basic methodology of artificial intelligence--"understanding by building"--to describe their insights. If we understand how to design and build intelligent systems, they reason, we will better understand intelligence in general. In accessible, nontechnical language, and using many examples, they introduce the basic concepts by building on recent developments in robotics, biology, neuroscience, and psychology to outline a possible theory of intelligence. They illustrate applications of such a theory in ubiquitous computing, business and management, and the psychology of human memory. Embodied intelligence, as described by Pfeifer and Bongard, has important implications for our understanding of both natural and artificial intelligence.

Anonymous communication: A discussion about anonymity, pseudonymity and privacy. Primarily a technical talk, historical and ethical background will also be presented. Pragmatic techniques for communicating anonymously both on the internet and off.

Topics to be discussed include but are not limited to: Anonymous communication. Desires for communicating anonymously. Historical examples. Pragmatic methods for staying anonymous online with software recommendations. Threats are presented for someone trying to communicate anonymously. Techniques that are useful off of the internet. Risks involved in such communication. Ethical issues involved with anonymity. Ideas for the future.

Software to be discussed includes: Tor, JAP, mixmaster, mixminon, Freenet, pgp, gpg, Torpark, generic proxies.

Le Grand Content examines the omnipresent Powerpoint-culture in search for its philosophical potential. Intersections and diagrams are assembled to form a grand 'association-chain-massacre'. [...]

The market is a good example of evolution in action; the try-everything-and-see-what-works approach. This might provide a perfectly morally satisfactory resource-management system so long as there was absolutely no question of any sentient creature ever being treated purely as one of those resources. The market, for all its (profoundly inelegant) complexities, remains a crude and essentially blind system, and is - without the sort of drastic amendments liable to cripple the economic efficacy which is its greatest claimed asset - intrinsically incapable of distinguishing between simple non-use of matter resulting from processal superfluity and the acute, prolonged and wide-spread suffering of conscious beings.

Gordon MARR
Private 11446580 of the 16th Battalion Canadian Scottish Regiment (British Expeditionary Force - France) was sentenced to 10 days imprisonment for theft of a box of fish from Edinburgh Waverley Station on 22nd January 1918. On 8th August 1918 Gordon took part in a battle to re-capture the French town of Demuin on the Somme. Tragically he was killed during this engagement.

Grand Opening:
Free Barium Nitrate!
The symbolic liberation of Barium Nitrate will signal the opening of this "International Year of Polytheism". We would like to invite you to join with us in igniting 10.000 bound sparklers, free of any judaeo-christian intent. Nothing but a wonderfully powerful fire signal, whose representational vacuity and lack of otherwise traditional symbolic meaning might just wake some of the ignoble gods exiled by monotheistic McKinseyism. We welcome the gods back from their second-class beyond(s).
January 26, 2007. Symposion Lindabrunn, Lindabrunn, Lower Austria.

Second event:
Premature Burial as a Field Trial for Near Death Activities
The people present will have an opportunity to be buried alive in a coffin for fifteen minutes. Volunteers will be able to experience a semi-traumatic situation and possibly get in contact with various gods and/or afterlives.
As a framework program there will be lectures about the history of the science of determining death and the medical cultural history of "buried alive". People buried alive not only populate the horror stories of past centuries, but also countless reports in specialized medical literature. The theme of unintentional resurrection by grave robbers also runs through forensic protocols. Even in the 19th century it was said that every tenth person was buried alive.
February 7, 2007. Blackwood Gallery, Mississauga/University Toronto, Canada.

Manchán Magan decided to take a trip around his country and speak its native language. Nothing remarkable about that? Ah, but he's Irish, in a country where 25% of the population claims to speak the language of that name but in fact... well, let him tell it:

I chose Dublin as a starting point, confident in the knowledge that in a city of 1.2 million people I was bound to find at least a few Irish speakers. I went first to the Ordnance Survey Office to get a map of the country. (As a semi-state organisation it has a duty to provide certain services in Irish.) "Would you speak English maybe?" the sales assistant said to me. I replied in Irish. "Would you speak English?!" he repeated impatiently. I tried explaining once again what I was looking for. "Do you speak English?" he asked in a cold, threatening tone. "Sea," I said, nodding meekly. "Well, can you speak English to me now?" I told him as simply as I could that I was trying to get by with Irish.

"I'm not talking to you any more," he said. "Go away."

He had similar experiences trying to get a drink ("'Did you not hear me, no?' the barman said menacingly"), information from the tourist office ("'You don't speak English, do you?' he asked coldly"), and so on, and he and the reader are getting pretty depressed, until:

I might have been tempted to give up the journey entirely had it not been for something that happened during the radio phone-in. I was rapidly approaching a point of despair when some children came on the line. I found they spoke clear and fluent Irish in a new and modern urban dialect. They told me how they spoke the language all the time, as did all their friends. They loved it, and they were outraged that I could suggest it was dead. These were the children of the new Gaelscoileanna — the all-Irish schools that are springing up throughout the country in increasing numbers every year. While old schools are being closed down or struggling to find pupils, the Gaelscoileanna are having to turn people away...
These children were reared on Irish versions of SpongeBob SquarePants and Scooby-Doo on TG4 . They had invented Irish words for X-Box and hip-hop, for Jackass and blog. They were fluent in Irish text-speak and had moulded the ancient pronunciations and syntax in accordance with the latest styles of Buffy-speak and Londonstani slang. I realised it was they I should have turned to for help on the streets. The children filled me with renewed confidence as I left Dublin and took to the road...

They were burying people alive the first time I went to Machine Project. Someone had dug a hole in the ground, into which a coffin was lowered. A group of Austrian artists known as monochrom were putting on an event called "Experience the Experience of Being Buried Alive!" It was an invitation to confront death.

"There is no external ventilation," someone announced, "there is no easy means of escape. You will be buried alive for real. People interested in doing this, you'll need to sign the waiver."

One by one, folks got inside the coffin; others power-drilled the lid shut. A video camera projected the proceedings onto a wall, while another camera inside the coffin let those waiting in line observe the interred. A couple on a first date who had asked to be jointly buried began to kiss, and a crew from NPR documented the entire affair.

"The drilling of the lids is taking longer than I thought it would," said a guy dressed like an officiating mortician — black suit, formal shirt, black tie. As it was a warm night to be mucking around with soil and coffins, he was sweating. He swiped a napkin across his forehead. "Next time we're doing mass graves."

The sweaty guy in the mortician suit was Machine Project creator Mark Allen.

RFID Song (Bratlfettn Version)
monochrom feat. Stefan Ried and Manfred Krejcik

RFID Song (Rohkost Version)
monochrom feat. Stefan Ried and Manfred Krejcik

[...] explicit and strangely arousing volley in the effort to save the overhead projector.

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