Forget wondering whether androids dream of electric sheep. The real question is: Do they have erotic visions and robot orgies?

From movies and television to comic books and the internet, science fiction not only creates fantastical visions of the future, but provides a template for the continuing evolution of sex, according to Johannes Grenzfurthner, founder of Austrian art collective monochrom.

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Wed, Sep 24, 730PM: Meet RE/SEARCH at Million Fishes, 2501 Bryant/23rd St. FREE! A party featuring a Counter Culture Hour episode of Roboexotica (monochrom members will be present!). Guaranteed fun!

++TAUGSHOW #16++

Divine Special (Paraflows 08 festival special)

Wednesday, September 17, 2008 / 8:00 PM @ Metalab, Vienna

We are not allowed to talk about the special guest hosts... yet!

But who are our guests?

/// TREVOR PAGLEN
Trevor Paglen is an artist, writer, and experimental geographer working out of the Department of Geography at the University of California, Berkeley. His work involves deliberately blurring the lines between social science, contemporary art, and a host of even more obscure disciplines to construct unfamiliar, yet meticulously researched ways to interpret the world around us.

/// JASON SCOTT
Jason Scott is a digital historian and documentary filmmaker based out of the Northeastern US, focusing on bulletin board system culture of the 1970s and 1980s. He often finds himself well outside of that realm and has collected many archives of general computer and software history, which he makes available on various parts of his online archive, TEXTFILES.COM.

/// RACHEL LOVINGER
Rachel Lovinger works at Avenue A | Razorfish as a Senior Content Strategist, developing ways for global clients to help connect users to the quality content they want and need. She's particularly interested in relevance, findability, signification, and inherently funny words.

/// Regulars:
EVELYN FÜRLINGER, MA.
Evelyn presents "Wicked Wordz", our regular column about lingustics.

/// Showband
THE INCOHERENT DEITIES
Oh yes.

[...] a chat with Johannes of Monochrom, sponsors of the Arse Electronika art/sex/culture conference coming up in San Francisco... the only art/sex/culture conference with its own theme song!

It is sometimes hard to know whether books that strike one as silly and irresponsible, like Dissent over Descent, the latest book from Steve Fuller, are the product of a desire to strike a pose and appear outrageous (the John Gray syndrome), or really do represent that cancer of the contemporary intellect, post-modernism. I suppose putatively sincere extrusions of the post-modern sensibility might henceforth deserve to be known as "the Steve Fuller syndrome". For this offering by the American-born sociologist is a classic case of the absurdity to which that sensibility leads.

There is an added thought. Fuller claims to be a "secular humanist". But having been educated by the Jesuits, so he tellingingly informs us, he "knows how to reconcile the irreconcilable". Indeed! For at the end of these nearly 300 pages of wasted forest he tells us what science needs in order to justify its continuation (oh dear, poor science, eh?) and what Intelligent Design, a theory he defended before a US Federal Court in the 2005 Dover Trial, needs to "realise its full potential in the public debate" – that is: how a theory trying to bend the facts to prove its antecedent conviction that Fred (or any arbitrary and itself unexplained conscious agency) designed and created the world and all in it, can attain its full potential in the public debate. This, note, from a professor at a proper British university. Well: if this is not proof of the efficacy of Jesuit educational methods, nothing is.

"communist, socialist. See AP stylebook. Any favorable reference to a communist must be shown to either the editor or the managing editor of the Sun before publication."

I am referring here to the return of the concept of »race« and not to the return of races. In other words, I am interested not so much in »concrete« groups (or something presumed to correspond to such groups, such as the »races« of 19th-century physical and cultural anthropology) but rather in a conception underpinned by a structure. However, matters are of course never as straightforward as this distinction might suggest. It is difficult to conceive of a generic »race« that is not expressed in contradictions between and hierarchies within groups. However, my focus here is on demonstrating that there has been a change in the relations between the structural, almost transcendental aspect of the problem and its empirical manifestations in terms of what was taught by the history of ideas not all that long ago. For our contemporaries the existence and the number of »races«, as well as the distinctions between them, have lost every scrap of plausibility, yet racial appellations continue to be deployed in identifying ethnic and cultural differences. People still refer to »Europeans«, »Orientals«, »Arabs«, »Blacks «, »Africans«, etc. Perhaps the principle of the race or »racialisation« plays a more dominant social role than ever, particularly as a genealogical principle and in terms of notions that trace the purported »mentality« or »abilities« of an individual or group back to their origins and ancestry. This is racism in the broadest sense of the term, although it is not appropriate to draw a distinction, as people sometimes try to do, between »racism« and »racialism«. If we talk of the return of »race«, then we are asserting first and foremost not simply that racism in the fundamental sense of the term still exists, but also that it has once more become highly virulent.

The Open BTS Project is an effort to construct an open-source Unix application that uses the USRP to present a GSM air interface ("Um") to a standard GSM handset and uses the Asterisk software PBX to connect calls. The combination of the ubiquitous GSM air interface with VoIP backhaul could form the basis of a new type of cellular network that could be deployed and operated at substantially lower cost than existing technologies in greenfields in the developing world.

Alaska's governor is adamantly anti-abortion and supports teaching creationism in schools. No big surprise there. Instead, the questions revolve around how and why she was chosen, some of her actions as a mayor and governor, her daughter's out-of-wedlock pregnancy (the tabloid angle), and association with a political party that thinks Alaska should secede from the US.

McCain spokesmen were quick to deny any connection between Palin and a party that hopes to have Alaska split from the US, and claims she has been a Republican for many years. As the UK Guardian reports, however, AIP vice-chairman George Clark told the audience at the Party's 2008 Convention that she supported the Party before winning her first political post, mayor of the town of Wasilla, Alaska. "But you get along to go along," Clark said, "she eventually joined the Republican Party, where she had all kinds of problems with their ethics, and well, I won't go into that." As Governor, Palin sent a video greeting to the Party's 2008 Convention. AIP's motto is "Alaska First, Alaska Always."

McCain campaign manager Rick Davis: 'This campaign is not about issues.'

Boing Boing tv's "best of" retrospective continues, with a look back at some of the episodes we dig most. One of the things that makes me (and the whole BBtv team) happiest about our daily video project is the opportunity to collaborate in new ways with creative, fun, insane friends of the blog -- like Johnannes G. and the monochrom crew in Vienna. Their wonderful video contributions have become part of the fabric of our show, and no "favorites" review would be complete without their madcap art-tech-philosophy hijinks.