Consumer electronics are so 2007. It’s all about the consumer biotech, people. Want to find out what the three big upcoming home biotech gizmos will be? Read my column about the “DNA Crystal Ball,” “Clonies!” and “Gene Expression Jam Session.”

James Watson, co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, has finally been publicly spanked and booted from his job for a lifetime of sexism and racism. I will never forget when he gave a lecture at Berkeley in 2001 and claimed that black women were “sexier” than other women because there is a genetic correlation between skin color and horniness. The guy is a fucker. Find out why I think that sexist, racist scientists like Watson should make us question the scientific enterprise itself.

When I was at the excellent conference Arse Elektronika last month, I was lucky enough to meet the artist/musician/geek Matt Ganucheau. He’s known for his electronic music and sound-related art projects, but for Arse Elektronika he created an interactive erotic device known as Moaning Lisa. A hollowed-out mannequin covered in piezo sensors that register pressure, Moaning Lisa could be induced to have an “orgasm” (signaled by the sound of a million women moaning) if you touched her sensors in the right order for the right length of time. Each time you played with her, her software would change which sensors and timings were required to create the orgasm. Despite her sex-doll appearance, I liked Moaning Lisa because she taught a simple (feminist) lesson: every woman’s body is different, and creating sexual pleasure for her is not magical but instead just involves learning how to deal with a series of sensors. When I wrote about Moaning Lisa, I managed to outrage a number of feminists who couldn’t get past the idea that she’s a sex doll.

My pal Brady Forrest organizes a weird and cool event called Ignite for O’Reilly, whose premise is that every speaker gets 5 minutes and 20 slides to say whatever they want. I love bizarre formats like this because it actually forces me to be more creative. Plus, 20 slides in 5 minutes means I’m forced to show a bunch of pretty pictures instead of text. And so when I perform tonight at Ignite (DNA Lounge, 7:30), you can be sure there will be tons of awesome images in my slide deck.

I’ll be doing a quick and dirty cultural analysis of why we love spaceships (and some dragons). Expect beautiful science fiction art and rampant sociological speculation. Plus, a bit of genuine sentimentalism aimed at some of my favorite ships like Serenity and the TARDIS.

I’ve worked at home full time since 2005, and the longer this situation goes on the more I’ve had to compensate for my social isolation with technology. I rely on IM to provide the kinds of idle conversations and impromptu meetings with colleagues that I once had face-to-face in the office. The beauty part of the whole arrangement is that IM allows me to avoid the meetings I once dreaded during my days as an in-office worker. I don’t have to sit through long “all hands” meetings (where I often passed the time on IM anyway).

More importantly, I can avoid unwanted chatter that interrupts my workflow. I do this by deploying a form of IM etiquette that I call “always away.” IM clients allow you to specify a status that gets displayed to other people using IM, and the defaults are things like “available” or “away.” I always set my status to “away,” sometimes adding a phrase like “working” or “fighting aliens.” Most of my colleagues do the same thing (except for the fighting aliens part). This allows me to have plausible deniability when I need to ignore a purely social message that interrupts my workflow. After all, I might really be gone. But I can respond when a colleague messages me about something important.

Every new form of social interaction breeds its own etiquette. Read more about this.

I’ve been watching NBC revamped Bionic Woman TV show now for three weeks, and it’s gone from bad to worse. Producer David Eick, who worked on the terrific revamp of Battlestar Galactica, promised us a show that would deal with what it means when women are equals with men. Instead, we’ve got a bionic lady — hero Jaime Sommers — who is forced to work for the company who created her bionic implants because they paid so much money for them. They’ve installed a GPS tracker in her brain, and watch a live feed streaming from her bionic eye in order to keep her in line.

As if those indignities weren’t enough, she gains her superpowers because she’s dating a guy who works at the secret bionic lab. When she gets into an accident, he rushes her into surgery against her will, turning her into a killing machine (and property of his bosses). I’m feeling the female power, aren’t you?

There’s another bionic lady on the show, Sarah (played by Katee Sackoff, so great as the macho Starbuck on Battlestar), who suffers an even worse fate. She’s also doing the dirty with one of the guys from the bionic lab — I mean duh, how else do women get their powers? At least she’s gone rogue from the lab, but we’re reassured that her bid for freedom is actually because her implants have driven her mad. Though at one point she teaches Jaime how to disable her GPS tracker, the two women cannot form an alliance because, well, Sarah is insane. No female bonding or solidarity for you, primetime TV watchers! If you want to read more of my rants about the retrograde gender politics in this future-looking show, you can read my column.

This Sunday at 1 PM I’m giving a talk called “A Futurist’s History of Technology” in San Francisco at a conference called Arse Elektronika, devoted to pornography and technological innovation. Mostly it will be a tour of sexual technologies in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, including some devices that may surprise you. I’ll conclude by talking about where we’re headed with sexual technologies over the next 50 years.

If you want to come out and say hi, get more details at the Arse Elektronika conference site. The conference starts Friday, and there will be awesome speakers all day Saturday and Sunday, including Carol Queen, Violet Blue, Kyle Machulis, and many more!

I recently had the pleasure of attending an event at UC Berkeley devoted to a pressing issue for many digital archivists: what to do with raw war footage, particularly the videos produced by sundry terrorist groups in Iraq? This is a very real issue confronting Brewster Kahle, who runs the Internet Archive, a nonprofit in San Francisco devoted to preserving history in digital form.

Kahle wants to preserve important digital art, book, and movie collections, but he also wants to give regular people a way to preserve their digital history, too. That’s why he has a section of the Archive called open source movies, where anybody can upload their footage. And now he’s getting 30-50 Arab-language videos every day, all of which deal with the war. Some of them are graphically violent. Others appear to offer directions on how to put together an IED. The question is, what should he do about it? Archivists have historically never been in this position because they usually receive curated collections, not raw information from the anonymous public.

If you want to know more about how Kahle resolved some of the problems of being a non-censorious archivist in real time, read my column. And if you want to help the Archive by translating some of the videos they’ve received, check out their Iraq War footage collection.

I had a blast writing an article for one of my very favorite science magazines, New Scientist, about the future of virtual worlds. It was the third part in a series that focused mostly on SecondLife — I broke the mold with my article by arguing that SecondLife is not the future of the virtual. Instead, I think we’re headed towards a state of “augmented reality,” where we don’t plunge into cyberspace but instead bring elements of cyberspace out of the Web and into the real world.

Here’s an example. Five years from now, you might have a pair of Web-enabled glasses that provide a data-rich overlay on your environment, providing you with directions to the nearest bus shelter in the form of arrows that tell you when to turn — or they might offer instant translations of signs you’re looking at if you’re traveling in an area where you don’t read the language. Your real world experience will be virtualized or augmented by data from the Web. Sure there will be a place for immersive entertainment worlds like SecondLife or World of Warcraft in the future. But most of us will be busy turning the real world into a version of cyberspace.

Want to find out more, and hear what futurists and tinkerers like Amy Jo Kim, Mikel Maron, and Stewart Brand have to say about all this? You can read a PDF version of the article.

Popular Science has posted an article online that I wrote for their back-to-school issue about the nation’s five coolest university labs, including ones where you crash cars, create hurricanes, and walk on lava fields. Want to know more about what’s cool about going back to school? Read the article (and be sure to watch the amazing videos that the PopSci video team filmed — this one, taken at the Texas Tech Wind Lab, is my favorite).