As you can see, Pretensions tends to record her TV shows and watch them at spare moments. Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles actually premiered on the AXN cable network in April, but P never got round to watching it until it finally made Mediacorp 5. For fans of the movies, the programme brings us back to the world of the Terminator franchise, minus "I'll be back" Arnie and Linda Hamilton.

In their places are Lena Headley as Sarah Connor (who's obviously skipped the gym workouts since breaking out of the mental institution) and Summer Glau (last seen in SF flickSerenity)as the new model real-food-eating Terminator from the future. She has a tough time protecting future leader-of-the-resistance John Connor (Thomas Dekker) from his own idiocy and the depredations of hostile Terminator Cromartie (Owain Yeoman).

The pilot episode follows on from the movie T2: Judgement Day, with Sarah on the run with her teenage son, John, protecting him from the Terminators sent back to remove him from history. I'm not sure if Terminator movie director, James Cameron, was involved in the TV series and it keeps to tradition with it's non-stop action, strong female leads and unstoppable robots. The series is lots of brainless good fun for days when you don't want to think too much.

P understands that world domination by Skynet and its intelligent machines may not be too far off. CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, has been developing a grid-computing network to analyse its Large Hadron Collider data. Numerous newspapers, including the Times and Telegraph, have speculated wildly (and mostly incorrectly) over its ability to revolutionise the Internet.

Scientific visionary/maverick Prof Hugo de Garis believes that we could be building godlike intelligent machines by the end of this century, 'though his views are not supported by the rest of the Artificial Intelligence scientific community. De Garis has written a book called "The Artilect War", where he divides humankind into Cosmists and Terrans. Cosmists support developing the AIs with the aim of ultimately leaving Earth, while Terrans will be the modern day Luddites, clinging on to the original visions of humanity.