As an experiment we decided to ask a load of the denizens of stumbleupon.com this question: What is the strangest thing you believe to be true? We got an amazing response and some truly fascinating answers. This is first installment of a series of articles so if you don’t see your answer here don’t despair, as I’ll be printing all of them eventually.

I asked a lot of people the following question:
What is the strangest thing that you believe to be true?
I started with a few writers and scientists whose answers are below. But I found myself continually asking people this question. I went on Stumbleupon and asked dozens of people this question. I’ve got all kinds of weird and wonderful answers…

We asked Mike Treder and Patrick Lin, two nanoethicists the following question:
Do you think the global economy and already existing regulatory structures will be able to adapt to the impact of nanotechnology without large-scale negative disruptions?
This is part of our nanotechnology series, more of which can be found by clicking through to the post itself.

I was going to post a frivolous Brain Parade up tonight but as I’m all grumpy and introspective from my battles with nicotine withdraw I can’t be asked to write anything funny. So today I’m going to give you a bit of controversy by asking whether scientists should criticize religion or if this is counterproductive?

Me and Charlie had a drunken conversation about the “Does Science Fiction have a Job?” Brain Parade last night. Charlie didn’t like the question initiately because he thought the answer was obviously no. And of course he’s right, just about all the responses we got on that Brain Parade were basicaly variations of “no”.

As you know we don’t normaly do linkage but there’s two new Science Fiction sites that I’d like to give a shout out to:

The first is a new free ezine but out by one of my favourite authors and bloggers Rudy Rucker titled Flurb.

This is the second installment of the Brain Parade we kicked the week off with. You can see the first installment here.

We asked the question: What is the job of contemporary SF? Does it have a job?

Today we cover odd facts that authors dig up when they’re researching stories. Here’s the question I posed to todays commentators:
What’s the oddest thing that you learned while researching a story?
Find out what weird factoids our pick of authors have discovered while researching for their books.

We ask a bunch of our favourite Brainiacs if there are any places that give the impression they were ripped out of the pages of a science fiction or fantasy book.
This is the second part of this brain parade, read the first part here.

We stray from our Modus Operandi today with an interview with fantasy author Mark Chadbourn from the English midlands. One of his recent blog posts entitled Age of Heroes, where he talks about how the state of the world effects people’s tastes in genre fiction, caught my eye, as well as a few links to him from the SF&F blogosphere.