As the earth spins through space a view from above the North Pole would encompass most of the wealth of the world - most of its food productive machines doctors engineers and teachers. A view from the opposite pole would encompass most of the world's poor.

That is not to say that we can relax our readiness to defend ourselves. Our armament must be adequate to the needs but our faith is not primarily in these machines of defense but in ourselves.

We all have our time machines. Some take us back they're called memories. Some take us forward they're called dreams.

I had been impressed by the fact that biological systems were based on molecular machines and that we were learning to design and build these sorts of things.

Become an internationalist and learn to respect all life. Make war on machines. And in particular the sterile machines of corporate death and the robots that guard them.

But I was very very lucky and it was a wake up call as far as motorbikes are concerned. I never flirted with death on the bike but now I'm totally convinced they're death machines.

I took my courage in both hands and went to the Laundromat to do my washing. I had to use three machines.

I think I was lucky to come of age in a place and time - the American South in the 1960s and '70s - when the machine hadn't completely taken over life. The natural world was still the world and machines - TV telephone cars - were still more or less ancillary and computers were unheard of in everyday life.

We've been working now with computers and education for 30 years computers in developing countries for 20 years and trying to make low-cost machines for 10 years. This is not a sudden turn down the road.

It seems like everything that we see perceived in the brain before we actually use our own eyes that everything we see is coming through computers or machines and then is being input in our brain cells. So that really worries me.

If the machines can take the drudgery out of it and just leave us with the joy of drawing then that's the best of both worlds - and I'll use those computers!

We often attribute 'understanding' and other cognitive predicates by metaphor and analogy to cars adding machines and other artifacts but nothing is proved by such attributions.

Not since the steam engine has any invention disrupted business models like the Internet. Whole industries including music distribution yellow-pages directories landline telephones and fax machines have been radically reordered by the digital revolution.

I'm afraid for all those who'll have the bread snatched from their mouths by these machines. What business has science and capitalism got bringing all these new inventions into the works before society has produced a generation educated up to using them!

I am a big popcorn fanatic. I love popcorn. In fact one year for my birthday my husband bought me one of those big popcorn machines like they have in movie theaters.

When I say that human beings are just gene machines one shouldn't put too much emphasis on the word 'just.' There is a very great deal of complication and indeed beauty in being a gene machine.

The days when you needed amazing Silicon Graphics machines to run animation software are gone now.

There are a lot of downsides to being male. We age faster and die younger. But give us this: we're lifetime baby-making machines. Women's reproductive abilities start to wane when they're as young as 35. Men? We're good to go pretty much till we're dead.