After retiring from a busy university department in Newcastle upon Tyne, and with the time and the need for more than the usual consultancies, I was able follow some of my more extreme inclinations. As a cyclist, I had occasionally thought of using more or fewer wheels, but it was only when choosing a grandson’s gift that I got seriously lost in contemplation of a gleaming chrome unicycle. My wife said "buy the bloody" thing, which I did on the whim of the moment. After months of practice at home, I graduated to back streets, a small paved park, and finally town roads. I couldn’t avoid being noticed; in turn, I couldn’t avoid observing the form that notice took. Because at the time there were no other unicyclists in the area, such sightings would have been exceptional, yet I soon found that the responses to them were stereotyped and predictable. I realised that this indicated an underlying biological phenomenon and set about its study. [...]

In discovering the genes responsible for storing fat in cells, scientists at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University have answered one of biology's most fundamental questions.

Disney likes to think of the Princesses as role models, but what a sorry bunch of wusses they are. Typically, they spend much of their time in captivity or a coma, waking up only when a Prince comes along and kisses them. The most striking exception is Mulan, who dresses as a boy to fight in the army, but--like the other Princess of color, Pocahontas--she lacks full Princess status and does not warrant a line of tiaras and gowns. Otherwise the Princesses have no ambitions and no marketable skills, although both Snow White and Cinderella are good at housecleaning.

Expect cheers among hardcore online game enthusiasts when they learn Merriam-Webster's Word of the Year. Or, more accurately, expect them to ''w00t.''

''W00t,'' a hybrid of letters and numbers used by gamers as an exclamation of happiness or triumph, topped all other terms in the Springfield-based dictionary publisher's online poll for the word that best sums up 2007.

Merriam-Webster's president, John Morse, said ''w00t'' was an ideal choice because it blends whimsy and new technology.

''It shows a really interesting thing that's going on in language. It's a term that's arrived only because we're now communicating electronically with each other,'' Morse said.

Gamers commonly substitute numbers and symbols for the letters they resemble, Morse says, creating what they call ''l33t speak'' -- that's ''leet'' when spoken, short for ''elite'' to the rest of the world.

For technophobes, the word also is familiar from the 1990 movie ''Pretty Woman,'' in which Julia Roberts startles her date's upper-crust friends with a hearty ''Woot, woot, woot!'' at a polo match.

Purists of ''l33t speak'' often substitute a ''7'' for the final ''t,'' expressing a ''w007'' of victory -- an ''in your face'' of sorts -- when they defeat an online gaming opponent.

''W00t'' was among 20 nominees in a list of the most-searched words in Merriam-Webster's online dictionary and most frequently submitted terms from users of its ''open dictionary.''

The choice did not make Allan Metcalf, executive secretary of the American Dialect Society, say ''w00t.''

''It's amusing, but it's limited to a small community and unlikely to spread and unlikely to last,'' said Metcalf, an English professor at MacMurray College in Jacksonville, Ill.

The 2006 pick, ''truthiness,'' also has its roots in pop culture. It was popularized by Comedy Central satirical political commentator Stephen Colbert.

Some also-rans in the 2007 list: the use of ''facebook'' as a verb to signify using the Web site by that name; nuanced terms such as ''quixotic,'' ''hypocrite'' and ''conundrum''; and ''blamestorm,'' a meeting in which mistakes are aired, fingers are pointed and much discomfort is had by all.

Now celebrating her twentieth year as the host of the world's most influential talk show, Oprah Winfrey is to television what Bach is to music, Giotto to painting, Joyce to literature. Time magazine hit the nail on the head when it recently voted her one of the world's handful of "leaders and revolutionaries." (Condoleezza Rice wrote Oprah's citation: "She has struggled with many of the challenges that we all face, and she has transformed her life. Her message is empowering: I did it, and so can you.") Like all seminal creative figures, her essential gift lies in her synthesizing power. She has taken the most consequential strands in modern life and woven them together into an hourlong show that is a work of art.

The boilerplate criticisms of Oprah--she exploits a culture of victimization that she did so much to create; she glamorizes misery; she amplifies already widespread narcissism and solipsism; she fills people's heads with hackneyed nostrums about life--are correct, up to a point. But that's not the whole story. Oprah's critics write as if her goal of extending to her audience empathy, consolation, and hope were intrinsically cheap and cynical. On the contrary: The question is whether that is really what she is offering. [...]

When I first moved to Moscow in the early 1990s, my friend Dasha gave me a gift-wrapped video. "Watch this," she said. "It was made years ago but it will help you understand our country." I assumed it was a melancholy epic by Andrei Tarkovsky, with lingering shots through rain-splattered windows, or perhaps a revolutionary classic such as Battleship Potemkin.
When I unwrapped the paper and looked at the cover, I found a man in a grubby white uniform surrounded by sand dunes. "White Sun of the Desert," said Dasha. "It's a Soviet-style cowboy film. The best one ever made."

Hans Dichand, born in 1921, founded the Austrian "Kronenzeitung" ("Crown newspaper") in 1959 and still acts as its editor in chief to this day. With over 40% market share, this right-wing populist paper has a unique position of power, and Dichand used this to influence Austrian politics to a great extent. This media-political practice earned him the nickname of "Kanzlermacher" ("He who makes the chancellor").

Shortly after Mr. Dichand started blogging in November 2007, another weblog under his name appeared, where an unknown writer spoofs the newsmaker by using his rather unique tabloid writing style to express views and ideas contrary to those of the original, and to poke fun at the mighty newsmaker.

This fake blog has gathered quite a bit of media attention over the last weeks, especially since the original Dichand saw it necessary to write about "The Forger," as the fake blogger has been called on numerous occasions.

Mexico was not only the first country to have a revolution in the twentieth century; it also built its most long-lasting one-party government. When Vicente Fox of the PAN (National Action Party) was elected in 2000, he was the first president not to belong to the PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party), which had ruled Mexico for more than seventy years. His election was viewed with enthusiasm by large sectors of the population, who believed it represented the advent of an effective ‘democracy’: once the PRI had been thrown out of office, and a complex and expensive apparatus had been set in place in order to guarantee the transparency of elections – especially regarding the non-intervention of the party in government – the advent of democracy could be celebrated and its advantages enjoyed. Also, and for the first time in Mexico, Fox’s government had to work with a plural legislative power, which would not entirely comply with the dictates of the executive. On 2006, the PAN won the election again, but it did so in one of the most conflictual and contested processes in the modern history of the country. The following is a short narrative of Mexico’s so-called ‘transition to democracy’ in the light of two of the conflicts that arose during the last election: one in the arena of institutional politics, the other in that of popular movements. [...]

Alekton artspace. Sfaktirias 43, Keramikos, Athens, Greece.
December 7-9, 2007.

Sean Bonner has been putting things on the internet since 1994. As the creator of several widespread memes he has been featured in Wired, Wired News, The Register, The Industry Standard, CNN, Playboy, Salon, Forbes, ZDNet, CBS News, The New York Post, USA today, The Chicago Sun Times, The Silicon Alley Reporter, Yahoo! Magazine (Best of the Web) among others and has spoken on panels across the US about online communities and grassroots local journalism.

As co-founder of Bode Media Inc, he helped create the Los Angeles group blog, Blogging.la, the flagship site of the worlds largest hyper local network of city based blogs, Metroblogging. Based in Los Angeles, he is currently the Entrepreneur in Residence at The Groop and recently consulted with the LAPD helping them get their own blog up and running. The end of 2007 will see him participating in the cultural residency program in Vienna, Austria.

Previously he helped build the groundbreaking contemporary art gallery sixspace, ran his own design firm, and worked as Sr. Designer for Playboy.com and Creative Director for Victory Records while running his own label Toybox Records.

When the annual Computers and Writing conference descended upon Detroit City, the theme for the event, borrowed from an article by Geoffrey Sirc, was "Virtual Urbanism." As the conference web site promised, "Detroit, Michigan offers a unique opportunity to consider the effects of rhetoric and writing on the urban experience, an experience constantly shaped and reshaped by emerging and existing technological issues, from the birth of the assembly line at the Ford Motor Company to the introduction of techno music." The rhetorical strain of this urban seduction, which links writing to techno music and automotive manufacturing, raises some questions. What exactly does it mean to write a city like Detroit, where rates of adult illiteracy are among the highest in the nation? Who will read this writing? The question becomes all the more poignant when computers are added to the mix. What does it mean to write Detroit as electronic text? Such questions haunted me as I made my way through the dark, mile-long tunnel that links Windsor, Ontario with Detroit, a city to which I was returning as a mere tourist. This Stygian tale begins here, on the border. I am the First Tourist of the Apocalypse, in search of a body and a city. [...]

Discover the Photo Shoot of 5 Supermodels in Rio de Janeiro wearing brand-new fake Chanel fashion accessories made out of real taxidermised rats: a rat-bra, a rat-slip, a rat-handbag, a rat- handkerchief and a pair of high heel rat-shoes.

[...] check out a wonderfully lo-fi tribute by Viennese "art-pranksters" Monochrom on BoingBoingTV. That means he's cool.

There is a cure for zombies after all – if you are a cockroach. A new study has shown that cockroaches that turned into "zombies" after being stung by a parasitic wasp can be revived with an antidote. [...] "Our brain is of course much more complex, and we use different neurotransmitters," he says. “But new research shows tiny quantities of octopamine exist in the vertebrate spinal cord and do affect leg movement, so it will be interesting to see what exactly octopamine does in humans."

Creating a single-payer system of universal health care that provides full coverage for all Americans by passage of the United States National Health Insurance Act.

The immediate, phased withdrawal of all U.S. forces from Iraq; replacing them with an international security force.

Guaranteed quality education for all; including free pre-kindergarten and college for all who want it.

Immediate withdrawal from the World Trade Organization (WTO) and North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).

Repealing the USA PATRIOT Act.

Fostering a world of international cooperation.

Abolishing the death penalty.

Environmental renewal and clean energy.

Preventing the privatization of social security.

Providing full social security benefits at age 65.

Creating a cabinet-level "Department of Peace"

Ratifying the ABM Treaty and the Kyoto protocol.

Introducing reforms to bring about instant-runoff voting.

Protecting a woman's right to choose while decreasing the number of abortions performed in the U.S.

Ending the War on Drugs.

Legalizing same-sex marriage.

Creating a balance between workers and corporations.

Ending the H-1B and L-1 visa Programs

Restoring rural communities and family farms.

Strengthening gun control.

If I were to tell you I work in radio and went to a party where the guests were pissed on, drenched in alcohol and "saved" by 30 firemen, you might assume I had been hanging out with some musicians.

You would, of course, be wrong. I was at Roboexotica, the 9th annual symposium for cocktail robotics, last weekend.

Developers, thinkers and drinkers congregated to experience the cutting edge of robotic revelry. In an attempt "to document the increasing occurrence of radical hedonism in man-machine communication," SHIFZ, monochrom and the Bureau of Philosophy put together a program of discussions, performances and, of course, drink-pouring robots.