Sex has always led technology. Early photography evolved on the back of dirty photos. Home video recording and VHS tapes gained traction first in the world of porn. And the Internet would never have grown into the insatiable beast we know today without the profitable, technology-driving porn industry.

But what of genetic engineering? Sex toys? Future robot sex?

They're all the territory of Arse Elektronika, an alternative sex-meets-technology conference held in San Francisco (of course). Now in its third year, it kicks off Thursday night at the Roxie Theater, with film screenings, an opening celebration and the Prixxx Arse Elektronika Awards Gala.
Discussions, a hands-on session and presentations will include "Atomic Porn: What is the smallest particle of erotica?", "Sexual Etiquette and Law in the Age of the Panopticon" (hello, Foucault!), "Of Hypercrotch and Nanobot" and "Steampunk Vibrator: DIY?"

Explore that last one at your own risk.

Is it the end of September already? Why, that means that it's almost time for Arse Elektronika -- San Francisco's annual festival devoted to sex, tech, futurism, and, of course, robots and the people who love to fuck them.

Events this week include the Arse Elektronika Film Festival at the Roxie Theater, a series of lectures at the Center for Sex and Culture, talks and panels at PariSoMa and Noisebridge, and performances and installations at Femina Potens Gallery. The Prixxx Arse Elektronika Awards will be presented on October 1 at the Roxie Theater, honoring "sex machines, orgasmatrons, and teledildonics." It truly is quite a world we live in, isn't it?

Op het jaarlijkse congres van de sector, genaamd Arse Elektronika (we verzinnen niets), is hij altijd een keynotespreker. 'Cyberseksspeeltjes zijn de geknipte oplossing voor afstandsliefde', zei hij daar vorig jaar. 'Mensen kunnen via hun computer een hogere graad van intimiteit bereiken dan via lichamelijk contact, dat altijd complicaties met zich meebrengt - ritssluitingen, bh-sluitingen, contraceptie, soa's, noem maar op. Er is ook niets onnatuurlijks aan afstandsseks, veel dieren doen het ook. Krekels maken in de zomer een hels kabaal om duidelijk te maken hoe opgewonden ze zijn, honden ruiken elkaars feromonen van kilometers ver.'

Allen Stein, developer of the Thrillhammer sex machine, is set to host an opening night workshop Oct. 1 at the Arse Elektronika event, where he will discuss the technology behind haptic devices.

Stein said he plans to take the audience on a "trip" through the past 10 years' evolution of commercial teledildonics in the adult industry, as well as shed light on society's first interactions with machine-powered sex.

He also will be on hand to demonstrate some of the latest in sexual technologies, including his own. His lecture is entitled, "Welcome to The First Church of Appliantology-Browser Based Telemetry of Genital Haptic Devices."

This week marks the third annual Arse Elektronika conference, an extravaganza devoted to sex, technology, futurism, and orgasmic robots. If you're in the San Francisco area October 1-4, don't miss the naughty, geeky weirdness. [...] I love a conference about sexual futurism that begins with a long discussion of Iain M. Banks. And so will you!

We're absolutely sure that with the aid of super-futuristic technology that we know is being invented right now, sex in the future will be more amazing than our Cylon-Cylon (plus Replicant, plus Cameron/T9) fantasies could imagine. I mean, I just get stuck thinking of two Summer Glau's kissing. But until then, and barring Chinese manufacturing of a cheap entry-level priced Peep Show Holodeck (patent pending), we have the annual international sex and technology festival Arse Elektronika.

This year's theme "Of Intercourse and Intracourse" promises to be a buffet of futuristic and fantastic sexual innovations, artistic explorations, and virtual hallucinations of the sci-fi-meets-pr0n kind. The thing is, it's in just two weeks and with poeple flying in from all over the world to participate, there are a lot of talks and happenings to choose from. Starting October 1 to the 4th, events will be at various San Francisco locations including Roxie Theater, Center for Sex and Culture, Noisebridge, Femina Potens Gallery, and PariSoMa.

The sexiest event of the year - technologically speaking - is monochrom's Arse Elektronika. [...] Far beyond penis jokes and traditional dirty movies, Arse Elektronika is an orgy of big-time brains, deep thinkers, futurists, PhDs, hackers, artists, performers, scientists, experimental engineers and whimsical disruptors determined to give the entire notion of human sexuality a high tech cupcake reach around. Yes - there will be robot sex.

Holocaust denier and President of the Iranian terror regime, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, announced his appearance at the UN General Assembly in New York set for 23 September, at a forum that has willingly offered a stage for anti-Semitic dictators in the past. On this occasion, we want to protest here in Vienna, one of the four UN seats, against the policy of appeasement vis-à-vis the Iranian regime and against economic support of the dictatorship of Mullahs and Revolutionary Guards. With our rally in Vienna, and simultaneous protests in New York, London and Paris, we want to send a clear message against courting the Iranian regime, which has become an open military dictatorship of religious apocalyptics.

Oct 1: Film Festival and Prixxx Arse Awards Ceremony @ Roxie Theater

Oct 2: Seminar/Performance @ Center for Sex and Culture

Oct 3: Conference @ PariSoMa

The first and most theologically sophisticated tradition is the fallen angel motif that stretches back into pre-Christian Jewish antecedents. Sayers isolates the "dark angelic melancholy" as the primary quality in this tradition which gives Mephistopheles in Marlowe's Doctor Faustus and Satan in Milton’s Paradise Lost their nearly tragic splendor that arises from their recognizing the loss of proximity to the Creator.

The second tradition is rooted in a kind of Manichean vision of a dark force pervading the cosmos, a vision of evil in which the Devil appears more as a spirit of negative energy set counterpoised with the positive energy of God. The cosmos is dualistic in this vision, with God and the Devil balanced. Instead of being a fallen angel who simultaneously longs for the splendor of what was and who also hates the splendor of God and heaven, seeking to destroy it by corrupting human beings (the Marlovian and orthodox image), devils—or the Devil—are but instantiations of this negative energy. Devils or demons are thus interchangeable, merely variable images of one pervasive and apparently necessary part of reality, thereby rendering distinctions between Lucifer and his minions, like Mephistopheles, unnecessary. Though one can detect elements of this dualism in Jewish, Christian, and Muslim demonologies, this second tradition is more Gnostic, a bit uncomfortable with the intense monotheism of these three Western religions in their orthodox forms. Sayers claims that the more Manichean Mephistopheles of Goethe's Faust is the literary version that has most influence in the subsequent tradition in contrast to Marlowe’s more traditional depiction of evil.

The third manifestation of the Devil, according to Sayers, is the one that grew from pre-Christian folklore, that pervades much of Medieval literature, and that continually pops up in the literature of post-Christian culture. This devil is the prankster, a trickster figure who engages in nefarious horseplay and whom the audience of Medieval theater expected to see at some point for comedic effects. Sayers argues that by the end of Part II of Goethe’s Faust, Mephistopheles has transformed into this kind of buffoonish figure. The puppet plays that grew out of Marlowe's Faustus perpetuated this comedic aspect of the Devil through the Reformation, and it tenaciously hangs on in film today.

In American film, the Faust tradition mostly gravitates toward the third category, the Devil as buffoon, with number two—Devil as necessary cosmic force—appearing nearly as often, sometimes combining with the third category. American cinema has done poorly with the first category, in which the Faust figure is tragic and damned, and also in which the Devil is portrayed as a created being subordinate to God and whose motivation is destruction of humans simply because they belong to God.

It's clear that Barack Obama is well on the way to becoming the most pro-labor president since Franklin D. Roosevelt - clear that he's firmly committed to strengthening the vital union rights that FDR secured for U.S. workers seven decades ago.
Consider Obama's address to the AFL-CIO's national convention in Pittsburgh on Sept. 15. Yes, the president was speaking to a friendly audience, saying what the convention delegates wanted him to say and promising them what they wanted him to promise. But his were not empty words.
There's no doubt Obama meant it when he declared that "when organized labor succeeds, that's when our middle class succeeds. And when our middle class succeeds, that's when the United States of America succeeds... We'll grow our middle class by building a strong labor movement."
You need look no further for proof of Obama's firm commitment to labor than his appointing, as secretary of labor, former Congresswoman Hilda Solis, an exceptionally strong advocate of working people and their unions.

Chronic radiation is defined as the radiation received slowly or in a low-dose-rate from various sources. It is completely different in nature to the acute gamma or neutron radiation generated from the atomic bomb explosions that occurred in Japan at the end of World War II. Tantalizing insights from people living in higher-than-normal background radiation areas in the world and from nuclear energy workers receiving excess radiation over long years have suggested that chronic radiation might paradoxically be beneficial to humans. However, in the absence of an epidemiological study, it has been impossible to conclude whether chronic radiation is harmless or indeed beneficial to human beings. Fortuitously, an incredible Co-60 contamination incident occurred in Taiwan 21 years ago, which provided the data necessary to demonstrate that chronic radiation is beneficial to human beings.

Inspired by the high profile of its Christian American counterpart, Muslim creationism is becoming increasingly visible and confident. On scores of websites and in dozens of books with titles like The Evolution Deceit and The Dark Face of Darwinism, a new and well-funded version of evolution-denialism, carefully calibrated to exploit the current fashion for religiously inspired attacks on scientific orthodoxy and "militant" atheism, seems to have found its voice. In a recent interview with The Times Richard Dawkins himself recognises the impact of this new phenomenon: "There has been a sharp upturn in hostility to teaching evolution in the classroom and it's mostly coming from Islamic students."

The patron saint of this new movement, the ubiquitous "expert" cited and referenced by those eager to demonstrate the superiority of "Koranic science" over "the evolution lie", is the larger-than-life figure of Harun Yahya.

In the latest challenge to Google's plan to establish the world’s largest digital library and bookstore, the Justice Department said late Friday that a proposed legal settlement between Google and book authors and publishers should not be approved by the court without modifications. The Justice Department said that while the agreement would provide many benefits to the public, it also raised significant issues regarding class-action, copyright and antitrust law.

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, also described as the Eastern Garbage Patch or the Pacific Trash Vortex, is a gyre of marine litter in the central North Pacific Ocean located roughly between 135° to 155°W and 35° to 42°N and estimated to be twice the size of Texas. The patch is characterized by exceptionally high concentrations of suspended plastic and other debris that have been trapped by the currents of the North Pacific Gyre. Despite its size and density, the patch is not visible from satellite photography because it consists of very, very small pieces, almost invisible to the naked eye and most of its contents are suspended at or beneath the surface of the ocean.

[...]

The size of the affected region is unknown, as large items readily visible from the deck of a boat are few and far between. Most of the debris consists of small plastic particles suspended at or just below the water surface, making it impossible to detect by aircraft or satellite images. Estimates on size range from 700,000 km² to more than 15 million km², (0.41% to 8.1% of the size of the Pacific Ocean), or "twice the size as continental United States". The area may contain over 100 million tons of debris. It has also been suggested that the patch may represent two areas of debris that are linked.

Symposium URBAN HACKING
Cultural Jamming Strategies in the Risky Spaces of Modernity.

The three-day program of the symposium corresponds to the thematic priorities Urban, Hacking, and Risk. The panel Urban discusses the city as cultural venue, whereas the second the panel, Hacking, investigates the origin, structures, and evolutionary elements of the multi-faceted notion "hacking." The third and final day will be dedicated to questions of risk, for instance when one – for artistic or philosophical reasons – transgresses boundaries, as well as question pertaining to gender in the given context. The symposium also will serve as a copula between the exhibition and the workshops and will be accompanied by movie screenings and theatre plays.

Festival Opening / Sept 10, 2009, 7 pm
Container Installation, Karlsplatz/Resselpark

The city of Vienna has a long tradition of interventions and actions in the public space. With this year's topic URBAN HACKING, the fourth paraflows festival continues this artistic investigation of the public and urban space of living. What is more, paraflows 09 will shed light on the role played by digital media when it comes to exploring, questioning, and shaping the urban infrastructure.

Exhibition URBAN HACKING

A container village designed especially for paraflows at Karlsplatz will provide the space for the exhibition URBAN HACKING, which will connect the Künstlerhaus, the Karlskirche, and the project space, and thereby unite the historic with the contemporary. More than 30 national and international positions of digital art and cultures as well as the artistic strategies connected therewith shed light on current and older tendencies of interacting with the public space.What will be put on display are projects on use and intervention, on hacking and setting up the urban public. A focus will thereby be laid on the possibilities "urban hacking" offers for the redesign of public space.

The net, as public infrastructure with its individual elements, possibilities, and mechanisms, has become integral to social communication and extended the public space via hyperspace. How these two parallel layers of reality are organized and impact the individual's freedom of movement is one of the questions to be answered by paraflows 09 URBAN HACKING.

Symposium URBAN HACKING
Cultural Jamming Strategies in the Risky Spaces of Modernity.

The three-day program of the symposium corresponds to the thematic priorities Urban, Hacking, and Risk. The panel Urban discusses the city as cultural venue, whereas the second the panel, Hacking, investigates the origin, structures, and evolutionary elements of the multi-faceted notion "hacking." The third and final day will be dedicated to questions of risk, for instance when one – for artistic or philosophical reasons – transgresses boundaries, as well as question pertaining to gender in the given context. The symposium also will serve as a copula between the exhibition and the workshops and will be accompanied by movie screenings and theatre plays.

The cooperative system is fundamental to the organization and structure of a Prout (the Progressive Utilization Theory) economy. It is an expression of economic democracy in action - cooperative enterprises give workers the right of capital ownership, collective management and all the associated benefits, such as profit sharing. Prabhat Ranjan Sarkar, the propounder of Prout, goes further and argues that an egalitarian society is actually not possible without a commitment to the cooperative system. The commitment is not just to an economic order but also to a cooperative ethic and culture. This essay explores some of the scientific evidence that humans have a predisposition to cooperation and in particular to economic cooperation. The evidence comes from a new and exciting field of research known as neuro-economics. We then turn to those insights provided by sociological studies.

After long, drawn-out negotiations, PRS for Music and YouTube have finally come to an agreement over rates. It's good news for British music fans, since YouTube's blocking of premium music videos on their site will now be lifted. What it means for songwriters financially is still a mystery however, since the agreement is covered by a Non-Disclosure Agreement.

According to sources close to the negotiations, Google/YouTube took the NDA to another level by insisting that the people at the negotiating table would not even be allowed to tell the PRS board what the agreement is (although the PRS say they would never pass anything without it being seen and signed off by their board). It's rumoured that YouTube only wanted two people to know – one YouTube rep and one PRS rep. It makes you wonder what information can be so sensitive as to push requests for secrecy that far. For a company that is all about sharing information, it's somewhat ironic that Google are so unwilling to share any of their own.

Dr Jamie Tehrani, a cultural anthropologist at Durham University, studied 35 versions of Little Red Riding Hood from around the world.

The apparent complexity of the human mind is not a barrier to building a 'replica' brain claims Professor Markram. "The brain is of course extremely complex because it has trillions of synapses, billions of neurons, millions of proteins, and thousands of genes. But they are still finite in number. Today's technology is already highly sophisticated and it allows us to reverse engineer the brain rapidly." An example of the capability already in place is that today's robots can do screenings and mappings tens of thousands of times faster than human scientists and technicians.

The U.S.-India nuclear deal was initiated through a framework agreement signed by India's Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and U.S. President Bush in July 2005. India, at the instigation of Washington, agreed to separate its civilian and military nuclear production facilities, and place all civilian production facilities under the inspection regime of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), in return for U.S. economic, technological, and military cooperation. The nuclear deal, which took three years to complete, is officially aimed at promoting India's access to uranium and to civilian nuclear technology, through enlarged importation of both. Whereas nuclear energy contributed a reported 2.5 percent of India's energy requirements in 2007, the deal is expected to boost the contribution of the nuclear sector to India's electricity supply, without reducing India's primary dependence on coal. From its very start, the U.S.-India nuclear deal has generated huge controversies, both in India and internationally. The intent here is to lay bare the implications of the deal for the creation of waste, while putting aside, for the moment, other important controversies associated with the nuclear agreement.

A Republican Congress and President Bill Clinton abolished a welfare programme in 1996 under the (largely fallacious) pretext that it bred fraud, waste and abuse. Thirteen years on, the reforms that Barack Obama is proposing will not fundamentally change the United States' abysmal healthcare system because those who profit from it have been able to buy protection from the lawmakers. The welfare programme ditched in 1996 absorbed about 1% of the US budget; today's well-ensconced private insurance companies swallow most of the 17% of the budget set aside for healthcare.

Paradoxically, the US president is one of the most spirited prosecutors of the system he has chosen to retain. Day after day he recounts how "we are held hostage by health insurance companies that deny coverage, or drop coverage, or charge fees that people can't afford for care they desperately need… We have a healthcare system that too often works better for the insurance industry than it does for the American people".

Conceptually, it's a musical instrument in space, played by space rather than just after-the-fact sonified. We like the idea of flying something in space whose purpose is to make music until it dies -- music from science.

At the time, it would have been hard to predict which of these events 40 years ago would prove to be most momentous:

- Humans step out of a spaceship and walk on the moon.
- The Woodstock concert becomes a seminal cultural moment for the baby-boomer generation.
- A New York City police raid leads to the Stonewall riots and modern gay-rights movement.
- A handful of engineers at UCLA send some data from one computer to another.

You may disagree, but in my opinion, it's the last of the list: four decades ago today, the Internet was born.

The success of Europe Ecologie in France and moderate advances elsewhere in the June European elections have emboldened the green right but disaster in Ireland, where the party was wiped out - and to a lesser extent in the Czech Republic - shows what happens when they abandon their principles for a shot at the big league.

Since the France's Europe Ecologie triumph in the European elections, the European media have been talking of a Green wave across the continent, with leading member Daniel Cohn-Bendit's gurning visage nigh on inescapable.

But the effervescent Cohn-Bendit has every right to be in an especially jolly mood - the result was indeed truly spectacular. It saw them soaring from the 7.45 per cent of the French vote in the 2004 EU elections and their embarrassing 1.57 per cent in the 2007 presidential elections.

Cohn-Bendit christened the night 'the D-Day of ecological politics', leftwing daily Liberation called the result an 'earthquake' and saluted the victory of Cohn-Bendit's green dream team alliance - bringing together the former soixante-huitard with, among others, alter-globalisation's most famous farmer, José Bové. As well as crusading anti-corruption judge Eva Joly and the ex-chief of Greenpeace France, Yannick Jadot. Meanwhile, the Socialists abjectly conceded that the Greens had tapped into something profound among French voters that their own party had entirely missed.

You describe AI as the science of illusion.

It is my contention that AI, and particularly robotics, exploits natural human zoomorphism. We want robots to appear like humans or animals, and this is assisted by cultural myths about AI and a willing suspension of disbelief. The old automata makers, going back as far as Hero of Alexandria, who made the first programmable robot in AD 60, saw their work as part of natural magic - the use of trick and illusion to make us believe their machines were alive. Modern robotics preserves this tradition with machines that can recognise emotion and manipulate silicone faces to show empathy. There are AI language programs that search databases to find conversationally appropriate sentences. If AI workers would accept the trickster role and be honest about it, we might progress a lot quicker.

Last September Spain's homegrown "super-judge" Baltasar Garzón—best-known for his dramatic 1998 effort to arrest the late Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet in London— announced that he was investigating not only the whereabouts of the remains of the "disappeared" of the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), but also the huge numbers of defeated Republicans executed by General Francisco Franco in the grim postwar years. His goal was to try to amass enough evidence to charge Franco's regime posthumously with crimes against humanity. Could it be that, after so long, "help" and "pardon" were finally coming to the descendants of those who died defending the Spanish Republic?

According to the great Hispanist Hugh Thomas, the three-year Civil War claimed the lives of 365,000 Spaniards, a toll that includes both those loyal to the fascist rebel Franco and those who opposed him. Some historians put the figure higher. Both sides carried out brutal executions, the bodies of victims often ending up in unmarked mass graves.

When the Civil War ended in 1939, the victorious Franco regime executed an additional one hundred thousand-plus Republican prisoners, many of whose corpses were flung into yet more mass-burial pits. These unmarked mounds, visited stealthily by the families of the "defeated" during the dictatorship, are scattered the length and breadth of Spain.

Scientists in Moscow say stray dogs have learnt to use the subway to travel to the city centre in search of food.

Biology professor Andrew Poyarkov said he had seen several dogs unaccompanied on the city's underground rail system, reports rupor.org.

He claims the dogs travel into the city centre, where they can more easily find food, each morning and travel back to where they live each evening.

monochrom has just announced Arse Elektronika 2009: "Of Intercourse & Intracourse", their annual conference on sex, technology and the future, which takes place October 1-4 in San Francisco, kicking off with the Prixxx Arse Elektronika 2009 Awards Ceremony on October 1st at the Roxie Theater.