Unfortunate it may be, but despite the spectacular successes of modern science, there is no ultimate foundation for our knowledge of the world. This was David Hume’s great insight, when he formulated his famous problem of induction. Hume realized that all knowledge about the world is ultimately derived from a process of induction, ie by generalization from specific instances to broader rules. But how do we know that induction works? Because it has worked in the past, obviously. Yet this itself is an example of inductive reasoning, which makes the justification of induction and science itself perilously circular.

Laptop performances have been around since the '80s, when they became de rigueur in trend-setting clubs from L.A. to Berlin. But laptop orchestras are quite new. Wang co-founded the first one in 2005, at Princeton University, where he was a doctoral student in computer science. Stanford's laptop orchestra was founded by Wang just last year.

When it comes to technology, it's the great unfulfilled needs that matter most. That's where the next fortunes will be made. But if you're in the tech biz, how do you know what users want if you're hanging out with techies all the time?

You turn to sex. Here are seven reasons why your tech company should send you to sex conferences like Sex 2.0, Arse Elektronica and Sex in Video Games rather than to mainstream events like this week's Web 2.0 Expo.

The paper is a critique of one of the standard justifications for torture: "what if there were a ticking time bomb about to blow up Manhattan, and you have the terrorist. Would you torture him to save the lives of millions?" Versions of this argument show up in most efforts to justify torture, and its soundness has been thoroughly criticized by writers such as Kim Scheppele and David Luban. My paper takes a different tack, and tries to understand how the TTB functions as a rhetorical device. The gist of my argument is that it sanitizes the torture question of any real world difficulties, thereby making it appear as an act of governmental efficiency. I frame the paper in terms of Judith Butler's work on administration detention policies, and in particular her appropriation of Foucault in that essay.

Brain researchers for the first time claim to have found a method for improving the general problem-solving ability scientists call fluid intelligence, otherwise known as "smarts."

Fluid intelligence was previously thought to be genetically hard-wired, but the finding suggests that with about 25 minutes of rigorous mental training a day, healthy adults could improve their mental capacities.

The method, if commercialized, could be a boon to the growing, multimillion-dollar market for "brain fitness" software like Nintendo's Brain Age.

The team behind the iCub robot believes it, like children, will learn best from its own experiences.

The technologies developed on the iCub platform – such as grasping, locomotion, interaction, and even language-action association – are of great relevance to further advances in the field of industrial service robotics.

The EU-funded RobotCub project, which designed the iCub, will send one each to six European research labs. Each of the labs proposed winning projects to help train the robots to learn about their surroundings – just as a child would.

The term 'grace' designates a key-notion of Christian theology. 'Grace' derives from the Latin 'gratia', which is the translation of the Greek term 'charis' as used in the New Testament. In the Bible of the Seventy, ‘charis’ renders in its turn a similar notion which is already present in the Old Testament in the guise of the Biblical term 'hén' / 'chén'. In his philological review of Lars von Trier's film Dogville, Charles Baladier (2003) reminds us that this Hebrew term has three different intertwined meanings: it refers to the abstract favour that is awarded by a high rank personality to one of his subjects, the concrete witnessing of this benevolence on the part of the benefactor who thus fait grâce, as well as the charm that the beneficiary receives from the fact of being in the benefactor's good graces. Grace can never be attributed to just one person. The dialectical character of this notion is even more evident in the Latin term 'gratia', which can signify both generosity in giving and gratitude for having received. To put it simply, both the Biblical and the Roman pagan grace are ultimately based on a continuous exchange of favours, or gifts, in which what Marcel Mauss named the gift-exchange of primitive societies still resonates.
More precisely, Mauss describes the gift-exchange as the 'exchanges and contracts [that] take place in the form of presents [...] given and reciprocated obligatorily [...] a "total" social phenomen[on] [that gives expression to] all kinds of institutions at one and the same time – religious, juridical, moral, [...] economic' (1990, 3). From this standpoint, the whole social fabric, the symbolic order as such, however complex, is born out of and constantly relies on the gift. Jacques Lacan fully endorses this, as is shown in Seminar IV, when he relates the mythical emergence of primitive symbolisation in the child to the transformation of the virtual object into a gift. After the mother has neglected the child's appeal, objects – first of all the breast – that up to this point were, for the child, virtual objects that satisfied a biological need, are transformed into gifts that may or may not be donated by the real mother as a power. What is more, the real object of need can be perceived as such only after the child has confronted himself with a lack of object, after having realised that the object may not be donated: the relation subject-object is clearly based on the productive nature of the lack. The virtual Real precedes the Symbolic but it can be 'given' as actual only by the symbolic dimension of the gift.

In Dogville, something definitely goes wrong at the level of the gift-exchange. And this for two main reasons: first, the gift of the charming fugitive named Grace (Nicole Kidman), the gift of Grace – who gives herself away to the townspeople, as Lars von Trier remarked in an interview – is not reciprocated, or better, stops being reciprocated. As we have just seen, following Mauss, the gift, and the symbolic order it sustains, is nothing but reciprocation. Second, the unconditional way in which Grace offers herself to Dogville is as such dangerous: the pure gift soon turns into a poison (Mauss 1990, 62-63), a dis-grace. On this point, von Trier states the following: 'The idea behind Grace's treatment at the hands of the townspeople was that if you present yourself to others as a gift, then that is dangerous. The power that this gives people over the individual corrupts them'.

[...]

Over the last year, several celebrities have gone on media rants where they let slip (or unleashed) racial slurs and tirades that are typically relegated to backstage social spaces. Among the most notable: Michael Richards' tirade at the Laugh Factory where he used the "n-word" repeatedly, Duane "Dog" Chapman's use of the same racial slur in a telephone call to his son, and Mel Gibson's verbal barrage of anti-Jewish stereotypes when pulled over for a DUI.

What I find ironic and interesting about these issues is that no matter how offensive and inflammatory the statements are, somehow the speakers themselves are rarely, if ever, labeled racist. The statements they make may be labeled racist, but the speakers vehemently deny that they are. The idea seems to be that racists are only those who self-identify as such: Klansmen, neo-Nazis, or members of other hate groups who openly claim "racist" as a self-identity that they embrace and accept. Even among everyday Americans, people who openly and regularly engage in racist acts, statements, and behaviors stubbornly insist that despite these actions they really are not racist people.

Is being racist now simply subject to the individual's choice? Are you only racist if you self-identify as such? [...]

FringeWare is pleased to announce our in-store presentation of Austria's culture-jamming heroes from "monochrom" magazine, currently travelling throughout North America on their 1998 "monochrom bringt amerika den sozialismus tour". The illusive and infamous "der jg" and company of media subversives will appear for a special signing of their publication, and also spin as DJs for a show featuring "a really strange mixture of austrian and german music scores..." FringeWare will provide the beer.

In the old system—board elevator, press button—you have an illusion of control; elevator manufacturers have sought to trick the passengers into thinking they're driving the conveyance. In most elevators, at least in any built or installed since the early nineties, the door-close button doesn't work. It is there mainly to make you think it works. (It does work if, say, a fireman needs to take control. But you need a key, and a fire, to do that.) Once you know this, it can be illuminating to watch people compulsively press the door-close button. That the door eventually closes reinforces their belief in the button's power. It's a little like prayer. Elevator design is rooted in deception—to disguise not only the bare fact of the box hanging by ropes but also the tethering of tenants to a system over which they have no command.

Below we have a cat demonstrating an effective strategy for dealing with an attacking philosopher (as discussed here and elsewhere): keep your cool and soon he'll be going around in circles.

Among the intellectual ideals inherited from the Enlightenment, autonomy is considered the most valuable and essential in the pursuit of a rich intellectual life. But this ideal contrasts with the reality of our permanent dependence in epistemic matters. We constantly rely on others and need to place our trust in them in order to epistemically secure most of our more cherished beliefs. Some recent versions in virtue epistemology emphasize the role of the agent in the acquisition of epistemically valuable beliefs. No doubt, the cognitive character of epistemic subjects and how they are involved in the task of knowing are crucial in our understanding of the very value of knowledge. Moreover, a reflective turn suggested by certain foundationalist trends in epistemology has shaped under a new light the question of the normativity of our epistemic agency, specially in cases of judging and other active epistemic tasks performed by the subject. What is then the place we have to give to agents in epistemology? The aim of this conference is to discuss both the role of the autonomous epistemic agent in the acquisition of knowledge and the role that the dependence on others (and also on artifacts) has in our epistemic endeavors.

Rose Shapiro's excellent book, Suckers: How Alternative Medicine Makes Fools Of Us All, won't be read by the people who would most benefit from it. It's a potted history of alternative medicine, as well as a thorough rebuttal of it, and her research is both fascinating and illuminating. Did you know that traditional Chinese medicine, described so often as dating back thousands of years, was actually a rag-bag of ideas put together under Chairman Mao to try to fill in the gaps left by a shortage of "the superior new medicine"? Me neither.

Many libraries began digitizing books a decade ago to preserve them. Funding from Google allows the 28 libraries it's working with to cut their digitizing costs because they don't have to pay for scanning the books Google wants to include in Book Search. More than 1 million rare or fragile books have been digitized through the Google-Michigan partnership since it began in 2004, with an estimated 6 million to go.

The Innermost Unifier: Today it's the Corporate Anthem
A talk/audio performance by Johannes Grenzfurthner, monochrom (Vienna, Austria)

Using different historical and current examples (especially from the area of the hardware/software-industry), Johannes Grenzfurthner gives a theoretical and applied - and not unamusing - overview on the musical genre of corporate anthems.

Come and sing along. Powernapping is welcome, too.

(*)
There was a young man named Kleene
Who invented a fucking machine.
Concave or convex,
It fit either sex,
And was remarkably easy to clean!

(limerick, attributed to John von Neumann)

#1: Carrie (1988)

This atrocious adaptation of Stephen King's novel - taken by the Royal Shakespeare Company to Broadway where it folded after 21 performances - remains the primus inter pares of the musical flop. King's story of a menstruating schoolgirl with telekenetic powers and a mad religious mother was served up with a ghastly gloop of rock-pop and fake blood. It was hailed as "a resounding mistake" in England and duly went on to be ferociously panned in New York, losing a neat $8 million.

I would like to invite you to the international conference "The Iranian threat - The Islamic Republic, Israel's struggle for existence and the European Reactions", which will be held on May 3rd and 4th at the Vienna University. Details concerning the program can be found on our website www.stopthebomb.net.

The conference will start with a screened video message by Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Elie Wiesel who is also a supporter of the STOP THE BOMB online petition.

I Can't Be Blamed For Transfiguring History But For Laziness, Though

A musical gala evening with monochrom featuring Damon Smith (acoustic bass), Phillip Greenlief (saxophone), Weasel Walter (drums), Aurora Josephson (vocals).

The temperature of Heaven can be rather accurately computed. Our authority is Isaiah 30:26, "Moreover, the light of the Moon shall be as the light of the Sun and the light of the Sun shall be sevenfold, as the light of seven days." Thus Heaven receives from the Moon as much radiation as we do from the Sun, and in addition 7*7 (49) times as much as the Earth does from the Sun, or 50 times in all. The light we receive from the Moon is one 1/10,000 of the light we receive from the Sun, so we can ignore that.... The radiation falling on Heaven will heat it to the point where the heat lost by radiation is just equal to the heat received by radiation, i.e., Heaven loses 50 times as much heat as the Earth by radiation. Using the Stefan-Boltzmann law for radiation, (H/E) temperature of the earth (-300K), gives H as 798K (525C). The exact temperature of Hell cannot be computed.... [However] Revelations 21:8 says "But the fearful, and unbelieving...shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone." A lake of molten brimstone means that its temperature must be at or below the boiling point, 444.6C. We have, then, that Heaven, at 525C is hotter than Hell at 445C.

Al-Qaeda, which was very, very advanced and very, very impressive in its use of new technology, is, I think, a bit behind the curve," Kimmage says. "They are sort of stuck in Web 1.0. They are producing what they think is the coolest content, the best videos, the most impressive press releases. And they are creating the most sophisticated — the best network — to distribute it to the web. What's missing is interactivity in user-generated content — a world in which users generate a lot of the content and in which people what to interact with others. Al-Qaeda really seems stuck in the old model.

How will life on Earth end? The answer, of course, is unknown, but two new studies suggest a collision with Mercury or Mars could doom life long before the Sun swells into a red giant and bakes the planet to a crisp in about 5 billion years.

The studies suggest that the solar system's planets will continue to orbit the Sun stably for at least 40 million years. But after that, they show there is a small but not insignificant chance that things could go terribly awry.

On human timescales, the solar system seems to move as regularly as clockwork. But Isaac Newton realised three centuries ago that the gravitational tugs the planets exert on each other can potentially nudge them out of their orbits over time.

Predicting what will happen is extremely challenging because so many bodies are involved. Even small errors in the observed positions of the planets today can translate into huge uncertainties in projections of the future. Because of this, astronomers can only say for sure that the solar system will remain stable for the next 40 million years.

What is Marx's contribution to the philosophy of time? Or, to put it another way, what has a temporal reading of Marx's writings to contribute to the understanding of the philosophical aspects of his thought? How, for example, might it reconfigure the relationship between the historical, analytical and political dimensions of his work? These are not merely, or even primarily, historical questions, but constructive and critical issues about the philosophical present: constructive, because with only a couple of notable – and notably partial – exceptions (Antonio Negri and Moishe Postone), the temporalphilosophical side of Marx's thought has yet to be systematically disinterred; critical, because of the light such a construction promises to throw on a range of issues, not least the specific contemporaneity of Marx's thought. This is a propitious time for such an investigation, for a number of reasons.

What is population stability, and why is the number 2.1 so important?

Answer:
Population stability is the point of equilibrium at which a country’s population is neither growing nor declining. In order to maintain current population, the average woman must have 2.1 children during her lifetime. Essentially, she needs to replace herself and a man. Because some children will die before reaching maturity, slightly more than two children are needed. Hence, 2.1.

A birthrate of more than 2.1 equals population growth. A birthrate of less than 2.1 means long term population decline. The rate of 2.1 is based on currently low infant mortality rates. In countries where infant mortality is higher, the birthrate required for population replacement would also be higher.

...to what degree this is a Mormon project. A fellow named Smoot appears to be a major sponsor and Merril Jenson is listed as doing the music and I get a "strengthen the family" vibe. For another, the production values look high and what discussion there is on the website looks credible (though a 1.3 TFR for Europe as a whole is on the low side, if I recall) but I'd like to get some sense for the scholars and sources they rely on before I spring for a copy of the DVD.

Investigators from the US Government Accountability Office (GAO) wanted to know if it was possible for countries or organisations opposed to the US to obtain sensitive items of military equipment over the internet. They were astonished to discover how easy it was.

Using the online trading sites eBay and Craigslist and posing as members of the general public, the team had no trouble at all picking up 10 pieces of US military body armour, which are supposed to be destroyed if no longer required by the DoD. They also managed to buy a used nuclear-biological-chemical protective suit, an antenna for an F-14 jet fighter and several other sensitive items, the GAO says in a report it released last week. While the US has retired its F-14 fleet, one nation has not: Iran - and it is known to be in need of components to maintain the aircraft.

Woody Allan once observed that he didn’t like the idea of getting old until he thought of the alternative. For those who don’t like the alternative, there is good news. According to a recent report from the House of Lords Select Committee on Science and Technology, life expectancy in the UK is increasing at the rate of about two years for each decade that passes. Hang around long enough and you’ll live for ever. These trends are almost certainly going to continue. The dramatic decline in mortality from cardiovascular disease will be sustained as the identification and treatment of people with risk factors becomes more comprehensive and effective (in the UK, deaths from coronary heart disease below 65 have fallen by nearly 50% in the last decade).

These cheerful statistics have been greeted by some with cries of woe. They translate ‘the ageing population’ into more people living restricted and miserable lives due to chronic and disabling diseases. In fact this is not how things are turning out: despite large increases in life span, the length of the period of illness before death is remaining steady, and the proportion of life spent ill is declining. What is more, if present progress in postponing disabling disease is maintained, we might reasonably anticipate a ‘compression of morbidity’, in which the health span approximates ever more closely to the life span.

Wrapping up our week-long retrospective of the most crowd-pleezin' episodes in Boing Boing tv's first 6 months of existence, we revisit an episode in which...

Vienna-based art-pranksters monochrom teach us how to "hack the urban context" with campfires, sausages, beer, and an elderly Austrian gentleman who speaks LOL. In the second segment of today's episode, someone constructs a campfire, complete with beer bottles and half-cooked links, right in the middle of the Vienna airport. American kids, don't try this at home unless you want a one-way to Camp X-Ray.

The following joke vividly illustrates some of the grammatical issues presented above. It is patterned on the famous dialog from Casablanca (film)

Two gentlemen have the following conversation in Trafalgar Square:

"Excuse me, which watch?"
"Near six."
"Such much?"
"To whom how..."
"MGIMO finished?"
"Ask!..."

While mostly or fully incoherent for someone without good knowledge of Russian, this exchange is immediately understood by native speakers; each sentence is merely a direct ("word-for-word") translation into English while keeping Russian grammatical structure intact; in most cases, when a Russian word has several English translations (each with a different meaning, appropriate in different context), additional incoherency (and humor) is obtained by choosing an incorrect version. Similar issues are commonly encountered in machine translation.

What does it mean, if anything, that a student, child of Korean immigrants, killed thirty classmates and faculty at a Virginia university while nearby celebrations of the onset of colonialism was taking place?

In April 2007, all the news seemed to be coming from Virginia and was about mass murder, occurring yesterday (400 years ago in Jamestown) and today. I heard no commentary on the coincidence of those bookends of colonialism. Maybe I noticed because I was working on the first chapter of a history of the United States and had colonialism and massacres on my mind.

Jamestown famously was the first permanent settlement that gave birth to the Commonwealth of Virginia, the colonial epicenter of what became the United States of America nearly two centuries later, the colony that in turn gave the United States its national capitol on the Potomac River up the coast. A few years after Jamestown was established, the more familiar and historically revered Plymouth colony was planted by English religious dissidents, but still under the auspices of private investors with royal licenses, accompanied by massacres of the indigenous farmers, just as Jamestown was. This was the beginning of British overseas colonialism, which led to its eventually far more powerful spawn.

343 years after ragged mercenaries set foot on Powhatan territory at Jamestown and began massacring the indigenous farmers and stealing their food crops, the United States invaded Korea, a half-million troops strong, with 30,000 remaining more than a half century later.

The Virginia Tech killings were heralded as the worst "mass killing," and "worst massacre," in the United States.

Descendants of massacred ancestors--indigenous peoples, African Americans, Mexicanos, Chinese--took exception to that designation.

But, we know what those headlines meant; they meant the largest number of innocents killed by one armed civilian, although even that's probably not accurate either, so they really mean with guns and in the last half-century or so, maybe beginning in 1958 with nineteen-year-old Charles Starkweather, and his even younger girlfriend Caril Fugate, who killed eleven in Nebraska and Wyoming.

Edward Lorenz, the father of chaos theory, who showed how small actions could lead to major changes in what became known as the "butterfly effect," died of cancer on Wednesday at the age of 90, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology said.

Lorenz, a meteorologist, figured out in the 1960s that small differences in a dynamic system such as the atmosphere could set off enormous changes. In 1972 he presented a study entitled "Predictability: Does the Flap of a Butterfly's Wings in Brazil Set Off a Tornado in Texas?"

Energy of all sorts was once hugely abundant, making possible the worldwide economic expansion of the past six decades. This expansion benefited the United States above all -- along with its "First World" allies in Europe and the Pacific. Recently, however, a select group of former "Third World" countries -- China and India in particular -- have sought to participate in this energy bonanza by industrializing their economies and selling a wide range of goods to international markets. This, in turn, has led to an unprecedented spurt in global energy consumption -- a 47% rise in the past 20 years alone, according to the U.S. Department of Energy (DoE).

An increase of this sort would not be a matter of deep anxiety if the world's primary energy suppliers were capable of producing the needed additional fuels. Instead, we face a frightening reality: a marked slowdown in the expansion of global energy supplies just as demand rises precipitously. These supplies are not exactly disappearing -- though that will occur sooner or later -- but they are not growing fast enough to satisfy soaring global demand.

The combination of rising demand, the emergence of powerful new energy consumers, and the contraction of the global energy supply is demolishing the energy-abundant world we are familiar with and creating in its place a new world order. Think of it as: rising powers/shrinking planet.

Tools to direct and combine signals carried by terahertz radiation are bringing super-fast data-processing closer, say US researchers. Their new devices are to high-frequency waves what wires are to electricity.

Terahertz frequencies are the only part of the electromagnetic spectrum not used by humans and are now being explored for higher bandwidth wireless communications or security scanners able to look through clothing.

But engineers at the University of Utah, US, led by Ajay Nahata are more interested in using them to process information.

On the frontier of a new industry, [comic book] writers and artists are creating scores of characters, but publishers profiting from them. These days creators have learned from the past by self-publishing or otherwise securing the rights to their progeny. But some of the founding fathers of American superheroes are still seeking justice.

Office art (especially office drawing) is a regular technique used by people in white-collar working situations. There may not necessarily be a creative impulse to create office work, but the impulse of overcoming general work boredom or the necessity to help office workers keeping focus during telephone conversations and/or office meetings. This page is dedicated to collecting office art.

A peculiarity about the contemporary discussion of the proper human treatment of other animals is that, when the topic is broached at all, it often falls under the rubric of 'environmentalism'. No doubt this is an unintended consequence of the otherwise welcome prioritizing of an ‘environmental crisis’, which was highlighted in the last issue of this magazine. It is peculiar nonetheless because it begs a rather key question: whose environment is it?

Germany stands for an uncompromising struggle against the Jews. It is self-evident that the struggle against the Jewish national homeland in Palestine forms part of this struggle, since such a national homeland would be nothing other than a political base for the destructive influence of Jewish interests. Germany also knows that the claim that Jewry plays the role of an economic pioneer in Palestine is a lie. Only the Arabs work there, not the Jews. Germany is determined to call on the European nations one by one to solve the Jewish problem and, at the proper moment, to address the same appeal to non-European peoples.

—Adolf Hitler to Haj Amin Al-Husseini, mufti of Jerusalem, November 28, 1941

The persistence of widespread Judeophobia in the Muslim world is hardly a matter of dispute, even if many commentators are inclined to dismiss it as merely an "understandable" reaction to Israeli "oppression." Among those who take the phenomenon seriously, however, a debate has been taking place of late about its origins. The debate has been spurred on, notably, by the publication in English translation of the German political scientist Matthias Küntzel's book Jihad and Jew-Hatred: Islamism, Nazism and the Roots of 9/11. The central thesis of Küntzel's book is that anti-Semitism — or, more precisely, modern anti-Semitism as crystallized in the "Jewish world conspiracy" theory — was largely imported into the Muslim world from Nazi Germany.

A private security company organized and managed by former Secret Service officers spied on Greenpeace and other environmental organizations from the late 1990s through at least 2000, pilfering documents from trash bins, attempting to plant undercover operatives within groups, casing offices, collecting phone records of activists, and penetrating confidential meetings. According to company documents provided to Mother Jones by a former investor in the firm, this security outfit collected confidential internal records—donor lists, detailed financial statements, the Social Security numbers of staff members, strategy memos—from these organizations and produced intelligence reports for public relations firms and major corporations involved in environmental controversies.

"Although the last Star Wars movie came out three years ago, the battle over rights and ownership of the costumes used in the films is still raging. George Lucas, the director who dreamed up the lucrative series, is suing the prop designer who made the stormtrooper helmets and suits for the original 1977 film because he is selling replicas to fans for £1,800 a time."

• hardhack is a place with hands-on workshops
• hardhack is for anyone who loves to understand circuits
• hardhack is about reverse engineering
• hardhack is about haring knowledge in a hands-on way
• hardhack is making your hardware do what ou want it to do

hardhack is not really a conference (nor is it an un-conference), and it is definitely not a place for powerpoint presentations. that doesn't mean you can't bring slides, but be prepared to bring hardware with concrete working examples as well. if you are someone who likes to reverse engineer embedded devices, or someone who enjoys soldering, or someone who makes hardware work with hardware that it wasn't made to work with, then hardhack will be for you. hardhack will be an event so that we can all get our hands dirty, learn a thing or two, and have fun with hardware.

A critically acclaimed Pakistani film on Islam has been released across cinemas in India. It is the first Pakistani film to get a wide commercial release in India in over four decades... Officially, India and Pakistan have banned each other's films since going to war in 1965.

Arse Elektronika, the awesome San Francisco sex tech conference that last year brought us talks like "Fucking Machines" and "Porn, Tech, and Creativity," has opened up its 2008 call for submissions. The event will take place from September 25th-28th, and the theme is "Do Androids Sleep with Electric Sheep?: Critical Perspectives on Sexuality and Pornography in Science and Social Fiction" (so… good…). Interested sex dorks like yours truly can submit presentations in any one of the three "panel" topics: narration, technology, and politics.

Welcome to the Internet Movie Cars Database. You will find here one of the most complete list on the web about cars, bikes, trucks and other vehicles seen in movies, image captures and information about them.

As well as being regarded with a certain warmth, there's also a sense of mistrust around the genre. Writers fear that it's somehow a bit uncool - a bit 70s - and so we get interminable plays about Urgent Contemporary Issues rather than coolly speculative projections. It's a shame. After all, some of the 20th century's greatest literature was set in the future - consider 1984, Brave New World and A Clockwork Orange.

With the benefit of hindsight, few now doubt that the housing bubble that induced most of the recent growth of the U.S. economy was bound to burst or that a general financial crisis and a global economic slowdown were to be the unavoidable results. Warning signs were evident for years to all of those not taken in by the new financial alchemy of high-risk debt management, and not blinded, as was much of the corporate world, by huge speculative profits. This can be seen in a series of articles that appeared in this space: "The Household Debt Bubble" (May 2006), "The Explosion of Debt and Speculation" (November 2006), "Monopoly-Finance Capital" (December 2006), and "The Financialization of Capitalism" (April 2007). In the last of these we wrote:

So crucial has the housing bubble been as a counter to stagnation and a basis for financialization, and so closely related is it to the basic well-being of U.S. households, that the current weakness in the housing market could precipitate both a sharp economic downturn and widespread financial disarray. Further rises in interest rates have the potential to generate a vicious circle of stagnant or even falling home values and burgeoning consumer debt service ratios leading to a flood of defaults. The fact that U.S. consumption is the core source of demand for the world economy raises the possibility that this could contribute to a more globalized crisis....

Art, sex and technology collide as monochrom discuss the intersection of science, porn and culture in the digital age