Doesn't Nathan Myhrvold get enough attention? The guy is the former chief technology officer of Microsoft, a multimillionaire, a gourmet chef, a prize-winning photographer and keeper of multiple higher degrees from prestigious institutions. As the CEO and founder of Intellectual Ventures, a private outfit that invests in "pure inventions," he frequently finds himself in the news.

And yet, at the annual techno-hip TED conference in February, Myhrvold decided to up the ante, tapping into the misery of millions of rural African women and their families to wrap his business in a cloak of moral urgency. "Every 43 seconds a child dies of malaria," he told the crowd. And current anti-malaria interventions, many of which target the rural African women and children who are malaria's main victims, don't work that well, he said. Insecticides can be environmentally dangerous and some people use anti-mosquito bednets to catch fish instead.

That's why Myhrvold came up with his latest invention: A mini-"Star Wars" weapons system that tracks mosquitoes in the air and shoots them down mid-flight–with lasers, of course. Like a Death Ray. All you need to make one is a Blu-ray player and a laser printer, plus a few months of processing time on a supercomputer, and voila!: you're on your way to eradicating malaria in Africa for good.

Oh. My.

After a year-long investigation, court-appointed bank examiner Anton Valukas has produced a deadly 2,200 page report which details the activities that led to the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy. The report is a keg of dynamite. The question now is whether anyone in government has the nerve to light the fuse. Valukas provides powerful evidence that Lehman executives were involved in "balance sheet manipulation" by implementing an arcane accounting procedure called "Repo 105" which masked the bank's true financial condition from investors and regulators.

According to Valukas, Lehman was "Unable to find a United States law firm that would provide it with an opinion letter permitting the true sale accounting treatment" using Repo 105. So, Lehman executives went outside of the country in an effort to enlist the support of a London law firm that would approve the procedure.

It is impossible to overstate the significance of Valugas's findings. The report exposes the opaque but central role of the repo market which provides essential short-term loans for financial institutions. (Lehman used repos to conceal the full extent of its collapse, by dint of the amount of leverage it was using, meaning the pitiful asset anchor tethered to a vast zeppelin of debt) More importantly, it shows the cozy and, very probably criminal relationship between the country's main regulatory bodies and the Wall Street behemoths. The activities of the New York Fed (NYFRB), which at the time was headed by Timothy Geithner, is particularly suspect in this regard. The report should trigger an immediate Congressional investigation, probing the whole affair and most importantly the role of the Fed.

Reading this story requires you to willfully pay attention to the sentences and to tune out nearby conversations, the radio and other distractions. But if a fire alarm sounded, your attention would be involuntarily snatched away from the story to the blaring sound.

New research from Vanderbilt University reveals for the first time how our brains coordinate these two types of attention and why we may be temporarily blinded by surprises.

The research was published March 7, 2010, in Nature Neuroscience.

"The simple example of having your reading interrupted by a fire alarm illustrates a fundamental aspect of attention: what ultimately reaches our awareness and guides our behavior depends on the interaction between goal-directed and stimulus-driven attention. For coherent behavior to emerge, you need these two forms of attention to be coordinated," René Marois, associate professor of psychology and co-author of the new study, said. "We found a brain area, the inferior frontal junction, that may play a primary role in coordinating these two forms of attention."

The Coens have raised the bar with A Serious Man, a sledgehammer allegory delivered in a blizzard of wordplay and imagery so subtle I still don't know what hit me. Nevertheless, I feel reasonably comfortable that, in a big way, the film is an assault upon its intended audience.

As a cine-masochist, I am plum delighted.

A survey of the criticism on imdb suggests three main readings.

1. Political--ASM is a biting take on the foibles of a Hebraic tradition that has become hollow—equated textually to the erosion of the American Dream.
2. Postmodern--The movie is a loving send-up of the same tradition. A moral fable, wherein the existential conundrum is absolved through the proper apprehension of Love and its purported source, Hashem. A fancy turn on the axiomatic 'God is Love', built upon a Kafkaesque reading of the Book of Job.
3. Magical--A parabolic parable upon the nature of uncertainty.

A Serious Man is all of these, I reckon, and more. At once an apparently impossible riddle or Gordian Knot, an emo one-liner and a sort of magic trick, complete with a dazzling punch provided by the use of in situ music by Jefferson Airplane. So to start us off, we have three solid interps, which taken together ought to provide enough fodder for a good variety of critique and analysis well into the future.

But I deduce another and much tougher meaning. A Serious Man is a message, loud and clear and in no uncertain terms: there is a God and he is fucking pissed-off. See, folks have pretty much given up on him, Hashem, God, though some don't know it or won't admit it. The Coens take serious lengths to establish Hashem's unique problems, going so far as to a hint of his ultimate identity.

For those concerned with the fate of the earth, the time has come to face facts: not simply the dire reality of climate change but also the pressing need for social-system change. The failure to arrive at a world climate agreement in Copenhagen in December 2009 was not simply an abdication of world leadership, as is often suggested, but had deeper roots in the inability of the capitalist system to address the accelerating threat to life on the planet. Knowledge of the nature and limits of capitalism, and the means of transcending it, has therefore become a matter of survival. In the words of Fidel Castro in December 2009: "Until very recently, the discussion [on the future of world society] revolved around the kind of society we would have. Today, the discussion centers on whether human society will survive."

Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay: two names that have become synonymous in many people's minds with torture and abuse of human rights by American interrogators. When Barack Obama entered the White House in January 2009, he set out to erase the stain such practices have left on America's image. The High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group established later that year has as one of its stated aims to interrogate without brute force and to employ "scientifically proven" techniques - though without saying what these might be.

It seems like a noble goal, but on closer inspection it raises a host of questions. Can science validate interrogation techniques - and if so, how? What is the effect on the human mind of coercive interrogation that stops short of physical torture? And, crucially, are there any interrogation techniques that can be shown to be both effective and humane?

Speakers: Johannes Grenzfurthner (founder of monochrom and Arse Elektronika), Heather Kelley (media artist and video game designer), Karen Marcelo (founder of dorkbot-sf), Bonni Rambatan (media theorist).

Date: April 1, 2010 (Thu) Time: 6pm-7pm Venue: Osage Soho; Address: G/F, 45 Caine Road, Central, Hong Kong.

Co-curated by Johannes Grenzfurthner (Austria) and Isaac Leung (HK)

From the simple electronic vibrator to the complex assemblages of cybersex, sex and technology have always intersected. The dynamic relations between sexuality and technology are constantly changing along with the ways in which human beings achieve psychological and bodily pleasure through these devices. By inviting artists who're dealing with various issues of technosexual bodies, we aim not only to examine the unexplored technicalities, functionalities and interfaces of the new technologies and sexualities, but also to formulate a broader understanding of the meanings of the "technosexual".

Participating Artists: Timothy Archibald (USA), Shu Lea Cheang (USA/France), Paul Granjon (UK), Katrien Jacobs (Belgium), Heather Kelley (USA/CAN), Kyle Machulis (USA), monochrom (Austria), Ellen Pau (HK), Stephane Perrin (Japan), Rainer Prohaska (Austria), Allen Stein (USA), Morgan Wong (HK)

Opening Reception: April 2, 2010 (Fri), 6pm
Exhibition Period: April 7-27, 2010
Opening Hour: 12pm-7pm (Tue-Sun except public holidays)
Venue: Videotage (Unit 13, Cattle Depot Artist Village, 63 Ma Tau Kok Road, To Kwa Wan, Kowloon, Hong Kong)

The "Digital Communities" category focuses on the wide-ranging social and artistic impact of the Internet as well as on the latest developments in social software, user generated content, mobile communications, mash-ups and location based services. Digital Communities" focuses on innovation in human coexistence, efforts to bridge the geographical as well as gender-based digital divide, overcoming cultural conflicts and fostering cultural diversity and the freedom of artistic expression. Consideration is also given to projects that advance the practice of sharing and the formation of a "Cloud Intelligence", and that facilitate access to technological-social infrastructure. Digital Communities spotlights the political and artistic potential of digital and networked systems and is thus designed to singled out for recognition a broad spectrum of projects, programs, artworks, initiatives and phenomena in which social and artistic innovation is taking place, as it were, in real time. A Golden Nica, two Awards of Distinction and up to 12 Honorary Mentions will be awarded in the Digital Communities category in 2010.

"It left a huge impression on us. For example, the movies are almost real. It's an example that makes us think a lot because the indigenous are defending their rights. We have to defend just as the indigenous so clearly defended in the movie. We had an uprising we had a confrontation with gases; it's the same as what we just saw in the movie."

"This is a Hollywood movie, so it's practically a given that a mestizo comes to the defense and leads (the people) to triumph in the end."

"A simple rule of robotic personality seems to be: don’t make things the most efficient way," said Magnus Wurzer, who has been running the Vienna-based Roboexotica, a festival where scientists have gone to build, showcase and discuss "cocktail robots" since 1999.

One entry, Beerbot, detects approaching people and asks for beer money. When it acquires enough, it "buys" itself a beer. Bystanders can watch it flow into a transparent bladder. As for other humanizing behaviors, "like a robot that doesn’t stop short at lighting a cigarette but actually goes ahead and smokes it?" Mr. Wurzer says, "We had that.

Roboexotica has inspired a stateside version as well, which just had its third annual celebration in San Francisco.

And in at least one case in Europe, a robot actually got behind a bar. From 1999 to 2002, a scarlet-eyed metal robot named Cynthia poured drinks at Cynthia's Bridge Bar and Lounge in London. But according to Mr. Wurzer, "she was too costly to maintain once the bar was sold by the robot's maker."

Pomona College (Pomona, California) at 10:30am on Thursday, February 25th.

What can you do with one button? In an age of ever-more-complex touch interfaces, we'd like to imagine what a single, tangible, hardware button can mean for a design.

[...]

This call seeks to inspire unique hardware/software hacks that integrate playful, one-button interaction within a standalone machine or device. The curators are seeking circuit-bent gadgets, retro-fitted consoles, mechanical constructions, custom electronics, and other one-off creations. During the week of the Game Developers Conference, the Game Objects will be featured in an exhibit at the Gray Area Foundation, a new collaboration and exhibition venue revitalizing the Tenderloin, near the Moscone Center. A selection of these Objects will be shown at the opening night Gamma party, alongside the software-based Gamma4 one-button games, on March 10th at the Mezzanine in SoMa.

In a world where robots and humans struggle together in the fight against boredom...
Only one event ends up with the robots dancing "The Human" while the meat puppets (you) end up singing the praises of RoboBartenders.
This February, come hang out with some alternate life-forms at BarBot 2010.

"Other than the benefit of having more time, what will happen is a reduction in inequality and the potential to be better-quality friends, partners and parents engaging more with communities."

Like good science fiction, the material collected in Do Androids Sleep With Electric Sheep? leaves us with more questions than we arrived with; if you can stomach the subject matter (which shouldn't really appall anyone but the most prudish and conservative, to be honest, though my perceptions may be somewhat skewed), this is prime fuel for your imaginatory engines. The focal character of James Tiptree, Jr.'s story "And I Awoke and Found Me Here on the Cold Hill's Side" suggests that, as humans, "we're built to dream outwards" [pp 239], to project our desire onto "the other", whoever or whatever it may happen to be. It's an insight that makes more sense each time you read it, and serves to underline the basic commonality between sex and science fiction, or indeed art in general -- they are both ways in which we try to subsume ourselves into (or control and dominate over) that which we are not.
Love makes us do strange things, after all.

Your focus on spending is pushing on thread
In the long run, my friend, it's your theory that's dead
So sorry there, buddy, if that sounds like invective
Prepare to get schooled in my Austrian perspective

In a market that is "rigged by piracy" it is non-English language music which suffers the most when the music industry tightens its belt.

The crowds who flocked to the London playhouses in the late-16th and early-17th centuries could expect to be amused, amazed and moved. Not only would they experience the drama of some courtly comedy or woeful tragedy but, in many cases, if they stayed on after the play had ended, they would also be treated to a sort of 'B-feature', a rude, lewd farce, commonly known as a 'jig'. Featuring songs, dancing and slapstick, jigs involved far more than the simple Irish folk dance that the word has come to denote. In the playhouses of Elizabethan London dramatic jigs were established as the standard ending or afterpiece to more serious theatrical fare.Not that everyone approved. The playwright Thomas Dekker wrote in 1613:

"I have often seen, after the finishing of some worthy tragedy or catastrophe in the open theatres that the scene after the Epilogue hath been more blacke -- about a nasty bawdy jigge -- than the most horrid scene in the play was."

To the literary world they were an object of disapproval. Ben Jonson (1572-1637) loathed the 'concupiscence of jigs', believing they prevented audiences from appreciating plays. Shakespeare's Hamlet, after drawing Ophelia into a particularly vulgar exchange, apologises to her by calling himself 'Your only jigmaker'. The satirical poet Everard Guilpin (born c. 1572) dismissed the 'whores, bedles, bawds and sergeants' who 'filthily chant Kemps Jigge', noting how, on leaving the playhouse fired up with lust, 'many a cold grey-beard citizen' would sneak into 'some odde noted house of sin': easy to do, as theatres, bear-baiting pits and brothels were situated in close proximity on London's South Bank, outside the formal control of Dancers perform in a circle around musicians in a masque at a banquet held in the home of the courtier Sir Henry Unton (detail, c.1596). Inset: Richard Tarlton, a popular jig-maker and clown, portrayed in a manuscript from 1588. the City authorities. Even Thomas Heywood, a dramatist and actor with the Lord Admiral's Men, felt disgust at these sub-literary dramas. While on the one hand delighting in the comic farces he called 'merry accidents', he wrote in An Apology for Actors (1612): 'I speak not in the defence of any lascivious shrews, scurrilous jeasts, or scandalous invectives. If there be any such I banish them quite from my patronage.'

A new study published in Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences rejects the theory that the origin of life stems from a system of self-catalytic molecules capable of experiencing Darwinian evolution without the need of RNA or DNA and their replication.

Argentine courts have launched an investigation into crimes committed at the ESMA Navy Mechanics School during the nation's military dictatorship. The landmark human rights trial is one of the most far-reaching attempts to bring crimes of Latin America's bloody past to justice.

For more than three decades, survivors and their families awaited the trial that finally began on Dec. 11, 2009. During Argentina's 1976-1983 dictatorship, the ESMA Navy Mechanics School served as a clandestine detention center, used to torture and disappear thousands of people. Now 17 former ESMA officers face charges of human rights abuses, torture, and murder.

E.T.A. by JUNK from Henrik Bjerregaard Clausen on Vimeo.

New year, new symbol? Dubai's new tower fits. The $1.5 billion building unveiled in downtown Dubai Monday is the world's new tallest tower. More than half a mile high, more than two Empire State buildings tall, the Dubai tower boasts 169 stories, the world's highest swimming pool, the world's highest place of worship, and the world's tallest mountain of denial.

History repeats. Like the Empire State building before it, the Dubai tower was built in a global depression when cheap labor was plentiful, as were the dreams of the ambitious and affluent.

The engineering marvel was constructed in the desert heat by low paid immigrant workers, mostly Indians and Pakistanis, paid 5-20 dollar a day. (It's a state secret how many lost their lives in the process.) While the state-owned construction operation suppressed worker demands and banned unions from the site, it catered to consumer fantasy with equal extravagance. The tower features 144 apartments and a hotel designed by Giorgio Armani, the Italian designer. In the super scraper, the super-affluent can live and vacation without leaving the brand, or the building.

On Monday, Dubai's Sheikh Mohammed and his Chicago-based architects hailed their building as a symbol of future good all things great. There's just one glitch. According to the Sunday Times, that future involves melting the equivalent of 28 million pounds of ice a day for air conditioning, and the consumption of billions of gallons of desalinated water in a city-state that already has the world's highest per-capita carbon footprint.

The climate actually changes as you ride the elevator. It's way, way hotter at the bottom. The engineers are doing everything in their power to counter physics and so far so good. But rising heat of a far less metaphorical sense already struck in the form of economics.

Researchers at Purdue University have created a magnetic "ferropaper" that might be used to make low-cost "micromotors" for surgical instruments, tiny tweezers to study cells and miniature speakers.

The material is made by impregnating ordinary paper -- even newsprint -- with a mixture of mineral oil and "magnetic nanoparticles" of iron oxide. The nanoparticle-laden paper can then be moved using a magnetic field.

"Paper is a porous matrix, so you can load a lot of this material into it," said Babak Ziaie, a professor of electrical and computer engineering and biomedical engineering.

When a defendant's DNA appears to match DNA found at a crime scene, the probability that this is an unfortunate coincidence can be central to whether the suspect is found guilty. The assumptions used to calculate the likelihood of such a fluke - the "random match probability" - are now being questioned by a group of 41 scientists and lawyers based in the US and the UK.

RepRap and other 3D printers are the future. There’s no question about it. With the proud tradition from The Pirate Bay, we want to take all of this to the next level. TPB will be TPB, but for real life objects. For now, visit Thingiverse who already understands this.

We want you to download those new jeans.
We want you to share those new shoes.

It's possible, let's make it happen.

The term "crisis," attached to the global ecological problem, although unavoidable, is somewhat misleading, given its dominant economic associations. Since 2008, we have been living through a world economic crisis — the worst economic downturn since the 1930s. This has been a source of untold suffering for hundreds of millions, indeed billions, of people. But insofar as it is related to the business cycle and not to long-term factors, expectations are that it is temporary and will end, to be followed by a period of economic recovery and growth — until the advent of the next crisis. Capitalism is, in this sense, a crisis-ridden, cyclical economic system. Even if we were to go further, to conclude that the present crisis of accumulation is part of a long-term economic stagnation of the system — that is, a slowdown of the trend-rate of growth beyond the mere business cycle — we would still see this as a partial, historically limited calamity, raising, at most, the question of the future of the present system of production.

An amazing number, but Avatar isn't exactly a business model. Hollywood can't live on a ginormous hit once a decade. And if the studios chase the success of Avatar, they're [liable] to throw a lot of bad money after good.

Part history, part ethnography, part marketing theory and part coffee memoir, Everything but the Coffee places Starbucks at the center of the hypocrisy of the American middle class. Simon has to stretch a great deal here, as he explores why, for a time, the American middle class saw Starbucks is central to its identity.

Simon shows us how we really live, and it ain't pretty. There was a time, not so long ago, Simon reminds us, that many of us wondered why people would pay so much money for a cup of coffee--even as we were edging closer in line to place our own order. Starbucks, writes Simon, "had little to do with coffee, and everything to do with style, status, identity and aspiration. ... Starbucks delivered more than a stiff shot of caffeine. It pinpointed, packaged, and made easily available, if only through smoke and mirrors, the things that the broad American middle class wanted and thought it needed to make its public and private lives better." Starbucks fed our emotional needs for status. It became our little "self-gift," an emotional pick-me-up. It allowed us to feel successful.

It also provided a safe, clean "third space" between home and work, those big chairs and couches becoming our new public sphere. It brought us exotic places and sounds, exposed us to an underground in the safety of a cushy seat: teaching us about places where our coffee came from, and new music and literary voices. It tried to be our cultural guide and helped us feel good about our environmental footprint through its green campaigns and aid to farmers, even if Starbucks did little and we did nothing but buy coffee. It did so consciously, purposefully manipulating our desires, hopes and aspirations, all the while making us feel good about ordering up a venti soy latte.

The rapid introduction of full body scanners at British airports threatens to breach child protection laws which ban the creation of indecent images of children, the Guardian has learned.

Privacy campaigners claim the images created by the machines are so graphic they amount to "virtual strip-searching" and have called for safeguards to protect the privacy of passengers involved.

Ministers now face having to exempt under 18s from the scans or face the delays of introducing new legislation to ensure airport security staff do not commit offences under child pornography laws.

With limited sound, simple graphics, and tiny amounts of computing power, the first games on home computers would hardly raise an eyebrow in the modern era of photorealism and surround sound. In a world of Quake, Half-Life and Halo, it is expected that a successful game must be loud, fast, and full of blazing life-like action.

But in the early 1980s, an entire industry rose over the telling of tales, the solving of intricate puzzles and the art of writing. Like living books, these games described fantastic worlds to their readers, and then invited them to live within them.

They were called "computer adventure games", and they used the most powerful graphics processor in the world: the human mind.

Rising from side projects at universities and engineering companies, adventure games would describe a place, and then ask what to do next. They presented puzzles, tricks and traps to be overcome. They were filled with suspense, humor and sadness. And they offered a unique type of joy as players discovered how to negotiate the obstacles and think their way to victory. These players have carried their memories of these text adventures to the modern day, and a whole new generation of authors have taken up the torch to present a new set of places to explore.

Get Lamp is a documentary that will tell the story of the creation of these incredible games, in the words of the people who made them.

Walk down any major street in Yemen in the afternoon or evening, and you'll see men with bulging cheeks, chewing qat leaves; their constituents, cathinone and cathine, produce a high. Qat — or Catha edulis — is cultivated in the Horn of Africa as well. But in Yemen, buffeted by fierce government-tribal clashes in the north, renewed secessionist strength in the south and dwindling oil revenues, the qat shrub is just about holding the Arab world's poorest country together.

Qat chewing occurs almost everywhere in Yemen, except tourist hotels (one in Aden greets visitors with a sign, "Guns and qat are not allowed"). Many private homes have a comfortable, well-ventilated room, or diwan, set aside for the purpose. But it is at street level that the pervasiveness and tempo of the activity can best be appreciated, in the qat markets, or drifting amid those chilling out on it or consuming it during their workday as a taxi driver or an attendant for kids' camel rides at a park, or just shopping for fruit and vegetables.

If it is a ritualised activity, it is a seamless one, like taking coffee after a meal is for a westerner.

Partaking of this natural amphetamine is not prohibited in the Qur'an, and the jury remains out on whether it is addictive or harmful. Accepted in Yemen, it is not in other Arab countries; and while legal in the UK and much of Europe, it is banned in France, Norway, Sweden, the US and Canada.

Loud, persistent ringing in the ears, known as tinnitus, can be vexing for its millions of sufferers. This perceived noise can be symptomatic of many different ills—from earwax to aging—but the most common cause is from noise-induced hearing loss, such as extended exposure to construction or loud music, and treating many of its underlying neural causes has proven difficult.

But many people with tinnitus might soon be able to find refuge in the very indulgence that often started the ringing in the first place: music.

A new music-based therapy has shown promise in helping reduce the ringing's volume in tinnitus sufferers within a year, according to a study published online Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "Tinnitus loudness can be significantly diminished by an enjoyable, low-cost, custom-tailored notched music treatment," wrote the researchers, who were led in part by Christo Pantev at the Institute for Biomagnetism and Biosign Alanalysis at Westfalian Wilhelms-University in Munster, Germany.

Scientists at UC Santa Barbara have made a major discovery in how the brain encodes memories. The finding, published in the December 24 issue of the journal Neuron, could eventually lead to the development of new drugs to aid memory.

The team of scientists is the first to uncover a central process in encoding memories that occurs at the level of the synapse, where neurons connect with each other.

As Congress wrestles over the parameters of a health care bill, amidst maddened catcalls of 'death panels' and 'socialism!', I am reminded of the experience of John Black, an old trade unionist, revolutionary activist and journalist.

Black, a fervent supporter of the Cuban Revolution, joined the Venceremos Brigades, an annual trek of foreigners to the island, who assisted in harvesting the sugar crop and other agricultural work.

Although he was in his mid-to-high seventies at the time, Black did his part, until the searing tropical heat, or perhaps the work (or both) took its toll.

Black was taken to a nearby hospital, and received what he called "excellent treatment." As he was leaving, he reached for his wallet, and began pulling out some bucks. The doctor looked at him quizzically -- and then told him to put his money away.

"We treated you because you were sick, Senor," the doctor explained, "Not for the money."

These words blew Black away, and this experience with socialist medicine moved him deeply.

What is even more remarkable is that Cuba was doing this during its 'Special Period:, a time of economic chaos when its biggest trading partner, the Soviet Union, stopped bartering things for things (as in oil for sugar, for example) and began demanding cold cash for trade.

As of 2006, Cuba had a Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of $45 billion dollars--about the same as the Congo, or the Sultanate of Oman ($44.1bn).

The GDP measures the market value of goods and services purchased within a nation over a given period of time -- usually a year.

Do you want to know what the U.S. GDP was for 2007?

Over 13 trillion dollars. 13 trillion.

Guess which country provides free medical care?

Videogames are no longer the preserve of adolescent males in dark bedrooms. Their emergence as a social medium is changing the way we work, learn and fight wars.

[...] the question remains: Which movie is the best of the decade? Is there any consensus among the accumulating lists? To find out, we collected all of the rankings we could find and synthesized the results using a simple scoring system: Movies got 50 points for being the No. 1 pick on a list, 49 points for a No. 2 nod, and so on, down to one point for a No. 50 slot. (Brody, who only chose 26 movies, still received 50 points for his top pick.)

To see which movies of the aughts are earning the most end-of-decade love, select the "Points" category from the drop-down menu on the left. You can also sort the films by director or by total number of appearances on best-of lists. (Some directors had more than one movie in the running; mouse over the director's name to see which of his or her movies made the cut.)

Was planning to get to announce this last week, but got caught up in some last minute finagling with MIT. But we've finally got it hammered out.

In any case, happy to announce today that we've officially decided that ROFLCon II will be on April 30th and May 1st, 2010.

Got it? Awesome. Planning to open up registration sometime in January, and we'll announce on the blog when it goes up. If you've already hit up tim AT roflcon DOT org, we've already got you covered (even if I haven't responded), and, if you haven't, definitely do drop a line if you want to be notified by e-mail when it opens up.

Johannes, an insane Austrian man we met this weekend, will be conducting a rant at Hackerspace.SG this Thursday evening.

For those who are unfamiliar with the rant: it is a tradition of performance art which was developed in Europe in the 19th century and successfully ported to the Internet in the early-to-mid 1990s. It is now being introduced to Asia by aesthetic pioneers like Johannes Grenzfurthner.

In recognition of Singapore's leading position as the financial and cultural capital of Asia, and of Hackerspace.SG as the leading hackerspace in Singapore, he has chosen Hackerspace.SG as the venue for his first Singapore performance of this artwork.

We invite all members of hackerspace.sg and the related community to attend this rant.

There is no fee, though we wish to thank in advance all the wonderful people who consume beer, wine, or soft drinks, for their cash donations into the little glass that says "your donations are welcome."

For the purposes of licensing under Chapter 257 Section 319, this is an exempt entertainment as defined by the Public Entertainments and Meetings (Specified Arts Entertainment) (Exemption) Order 2005.

monochrom and the East: Some stories about Context Hacking and Asia
A tour-de-farce by Johannes Grenzfurthner of monochrom

monochrom is a worldwide operating collective dealing with technology, art and philosophy and was founded in 1993. So to sum up, monochrom is an unpeculiar mixture of proto-aesthetic fringe work, pop attitude, subcultural science, political activism and technological disaster.

Johannes wants to tell us stories about monochrom's "context hacking" projects that specifically deal with our focus on contemporary Asian topics.

The term context hacking—like its mimetic sibling "communication guerrilla"—refers to unconventional forms of communication and/or intervention in more conventional processes of communication. Context hacking is a specific style of political action that observes and makes visible the paradoxes and absurdities of power. Context hacking uses absurdities as the starting point for interventions by playing with representations and identities, with alienation and over-identification.

With all the talk about failing, one interesting speaker that managed to get all our attention was Johannes Grenfurthner who runs Monochrom – an art-technology-philosophy group in Vienna. With his stage presence and use of different yet interesting metaphors conveyed why it's important to fail and had interesting points on why sometimes competition isn't the right way to create something that people need.

The numerous parallels between modern linguistics and computer science may come as a surprise to the audience and their notion of language may change significantly. Language is a system of signs and we adjust it every day. Especially new forms of communication (Twitter, instant messaging etc.) change the way we perceive and use language. Many people use the same abbreviations in texting and instant messaging, and social networking websites. Acronyms, keyboard symbols and shortened words are often used as methods of abbreviation in Internet slang. Laccetti, a professor of humanities at Stevens Institute of Technology and Molsk, criticizes that acronyms, predicting reduced chances of employment for students who use such acronyms, stating that, "Unfortunately for these students, their bosses will not be 'lol' when they read a report that lacks proper punctuation and grammar, has numerous misspellings, various made-up words, and silly acronyms." Fondiller and Nerone, in their style manual, assert that "professional or business communication should never be careless or poorly constructed" whether one is writing an electronic mail message or an article for publication, and warn against the use of smileys and these abbreviations, stating that they are "no more than e-mail slang and have no place in business communication".
But this is of course a very conservative way to see the subject matter. This talk is meant to explore the many ways in which speakers 'hack' and re-interpret their language based on the various definitions of the term 'hacking'.

Hackers love knowledge. They try to find out how stuff works. And that's great. Experimentation is a major part of hacking. It is in the most philosophical sense a deconstruction of things.

A specific use is never inherent to an object, even though technical demagogues like to claim that it is. Just compare the term "self-explanatory" and the term "archeological find". It's a pretty hard task to find out what technology is and what it should do if you don't have a clue about the context. Usually the use is connected with the object through definition ("instructions for use"). Turning an object against the use inscribed in it means probing its possibilities.

Science and Technology Studies (especially Langdon Winner and Bruno Latour) have convincingly demonstrated that the widespread inability to understand technological artifacts as fabricated entities, as social and cultural phenomena, derives from the fact that in retrospect only those technologies that prove functional for a culture and can be integrated into everyday life are "left over." However, the perception of what is functional, successful and useful is itself the product of social and cultural, and last but not least political and economic processes. Selection processes and abandoned products (developmental derailments, sobering intermediary results, useless prototypes) are not discussed.

Well. What can we do?
We can fail. Beautifully.

Santa: "HO HO HO! Wien is MY turf now, Christkindl. I've been making a list, checking it twice, and I know who's been naughty or nice... and who's going to get their skinny white angel butt kicked if they don't get out of my way. It's time to work for me or leave for China, baby boy."

Christkindl: "Santa, du Oaschsau! Gemma auf die Bluatwiesn!"

monochrom presents:
++TAUGSHOW #20++
Roboexotica Special

Friday, Dec 4, 2009 / 9:00 PM @ Roboexotica, Drinkomat-Halle, Missindorfstrasse 21, Vienna (presented by Johannes Grenzfurthner und Roland Gratzer)

But who are our guests?

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/// AARON "SFSLIM" MUSZALSKI

/// ROSE WHITE

/// KYLE MACHULIS

/// METALAB

/// BAR2D2

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