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).

So I killed two mice a few weeks ago, using an old-fashioned mouse trap. Some construction in the basement of my apartment building drove a whole colony of mice up into my walls, and they started running around my apartment, eating my rice and squeaking at all hours of the night and pooping everywhere. At first, I tried to negotiate with them. Really, they were cute and sort of awesome and I just wanted them to leave. I put all my rice in bins, threw out anything that might attract mice, and put out “humane traps.” But they ignored the humane traps, and continued to run around squeaking and zooming under my bed and pooping. They also ate the edges of a bunch of my books.

So I acted like the predator that I am, and put out deadly traps. Killed two mice the first night. After that, I didn’t have any more problems. I believed that I had finally conveyed a message that mice could understand: If you come into my house, I will kill you. It wasn’t a pretty thing, but it was effective. When I wrote about my mouse struggles, I got all kinds of hate mail. Was it the PETA joke I made? My ruthlessness? Read my column about killing mice, and find out more!

I was fascinated by a recent article in Science about Brak, a 6,000-year-old Mesopotamian city (now in Syria) whose structure seemed to defy conventional wisdom about how urban spaces evolved. Unlike many early cities, Brak did not start as a dense, central core and slowly radiate outward into neighborhoods. Instead, it began as a loosely-connected group of neighborhoods arranged in a semi-circle that gradually grew together and formed a centralized downtown area with temples and large ceramics shops.

Anthropologists investigating Brak speculate that its unusual evolution meant that its inhabitants may have been more tolerant of diversity, and less dependent on an authoritarian, centralized ruling class. This is certainly an appealing idea, since many social reformer types like myself are asking how we can improve the quality of life in urban spaces. Maybe a decentralized city model is more liberating? Less likely to result in slums and highrise palaces? Actually, I don’t think so. Read more about why I think a decentralized city model may not be as antiauthoritarian as it seems.

I’ve been traveling for several weeks, and have finally gotten home and back into the swing of doing things like, say, updating my personal blog. While I was away, I had a chance to go to a conference and meet up with a bunch of smartypants techie commentators like Adam Greenfield, Clay Shirky, Jan Chipchase, Ethan Zuckerman, Xiao Qiang, and Genevieve Bell. They all gave great papers, and it was one of those rare occasions where I felt like sitting in an air-conditioned room listening to people for 8 hours was as intellectually stimulating as reading a great book.

Greenfield made a comment that really stuck with me: He said that the United States used to be a country of neophiles, people in love with the new and (implicitly) the futuristic. Since the early 1970s, however, we have shied away from this tendency, finding comfort in the status quo or even in the past. Interestingly, Alvin Toffler’s wildly popular book Future Shock came out in the early 1970s, and it became such a massive, global bestseller precisely because it captured why people in the West were beginning to fear of newness and change.

Of course the 70s were also the era when the tools of our present-day social mutation got built: home PCs and the internet are both babies of the 70s. So obviously there is some neophilic impulse at work in the US today. But I still think Greenfield is right on some profound level, because the social reaction to Web culture today is so much more paranoid and unhappy than, say, the social reaction to Space-Age culture was in the 1950s. Certainly people in the 50s feared new technologies like the atomic bomb, but that’s quite different from fearing social networks like MySpace, or getting bent out of shape about blogs.

My question is, what could make people in the United States neophiles again? How can we relearn the love of change, the fearless embrace of what’s new, without becoming completely naive about the darker possibilities for biotech and ubiquitious computer networks?