Hovershark

This last week has mostly been spent cooking, so in lieu of a proper update here is a super simple recipe!

Kiwi and bitter lime cordial/squash
Ingredients
-One fresh lime
-Four kiwi fruit
-1 1/2 cups of sugar
-2 cups water
-Pinch of salt

Directions
-Skin the kiwi fruit and cut the flesh into slices.
-Cut the lime into slices, rind and all.
-Bring the water to a boil and stir in the sugar and salt until completely dissolved.
-Turn the heat down, then add the kiwi fruit and lime.
-Simmer for fifteen minutes, stirring occasionally
-Strain straight into a bottle, making sure to squeeze as much fluid from the fruit as possible.
-Allow to cool

To serve, mix with water at a ratio of about 1 part cordial to 4 parts water. Goes well with tequila, rum or vodka as well.

Notes: The cordial must be used within a week!
Two weeks if you’re awesome.

Finally, my first decent 3D video! View it here!
This is a beach near my house, very relaxing to watch. Even more exciting is that YouTube has a secret little function just for 3D video, created solely by Pete Bradshaw (an interview with him can be found here.)
So if you don’t like the free viewing methods I do, you can view them using multiple methods – including red/blue glasses – via the drop down box labelled “3D”. If you want to see more 3D videos search for the tag “yt3d:enable=true” or click this link

Unfortunately, the player used for embedding videos doesn’t have 3D support yet, so to view it properly I had to just provide a link, rather than embedding the video.

PS, sorry about the video and audio quality. It’s a combination of source video resolution, output resolution for the 3D function, YouTube’s own compression, etc, etc. I’ll work all that out before my super-secret future 3D video project so it’s actually watchable!

Four more photos I thought I should upload, please see my previous post for instructions on viewing them!
Again, these are all thumbnails, click them for full size images please.

Tani and her new MacBook

Rose (not so good, as I was still experimenting - the cameras were too close together here)

Hanging lights at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery

Tani and Rose at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery. Easily my favourite shot so far!

I’ve been promising to show the results of my 3D photography experiments for a while now so here’s something simple to keep the interest up!

Click for a full size image!

To view the image you will need to cross your eyes. If you haven’t had much practice viewing 3d in this manner here’s a quick method that may make it easier:
-Make sure you are facing your monitor directly, with it at about arm’s length
-Hold one finger up about a foot from your nose, in front of the monitor, and focus on it
-Lower your finger and allow your eyes to come into focus on the monitor. The two images should be combined into one. If not, start again and try moving your finger forwards or backwards until you can see the fireplace as one image behind the finger.

Hopefully that helps out! If not, don’t stress, I’m working on making the images viewable by red-blue 3D glasses. I prefer not to use that method as it ruins the colour of an image, but the cross eyed viewing method isn’t comfortable for some people and there are videos planned in the near future – shh!

So Australia has a new prime minister. First time a PM has been ousted in their first term and first female PM replacing him. Is it a good or bad thing that most sources seem to be concentrating on the second fact not the first? Being a woman shouldn’t really be seen as that big a handicap in 2010, but doing such a bad job that your own team kicks you out…well, that’s personal and proven failure, regardless of gender.

This isn’t the first time a woman has had a real position of power, but also isn’t the first time a person has – so are women people yet or do we still keep them seperate?
More importantly, this may the first time someone from Wales has had power. Terrifying.

Imagine if you no longer needed to eat. Imagine if you gained your energy directly from the sun. Or even from a miniature personal fusion reactor. Would you ever give up the taste of a cheeseburger? You might say yes but that’s because you know the taste.
Imagine someone born and raised on an intergalactic starship where they can’t afford to waste the space and energy needed to carry non-essential items. Or an earth so overcrowded that land previously used for obsolete crops is rezoned for habitation. Perhaps taste will be demoted to the same insignificance as scent or even lower.
It’s doubtful that a species so obsessed with the idea that the base energy we input can be a pleasure would simply give up that pleasure, no matter how pointless it was. You might carry around a flavour card where you request a food and it activates the necessary tastebuds. But what about the texture? Well if it’s cheeseburgers you’re going for we’ll always have rubber.

Hovershark is undergoing (yet another) assessment of itself. We’ll be back shortly with a heavier focus on comics and possibly 3d photography. That second one might only last a week or two.

Spambots are designed to fool us into believing they are real people with real information to share. They grow more sophisticated every day – where once a simple link was enough, then the link came with a glowing endorsement written within the shibboleth of the website it was being shown. Now the bot includes follow up comments to muddy the waters of truth as to whether the girl really does take her top off. The next steps suggested are that a bot will be able to have a conversation, then a meaningful conversation – followed by actual friendship.
Relationships with lonely geeks can probably be replicated by having scripts to various romantic anime within the bot’s memory. For these bots to truly convince you that they are your friends they may have to believe it themselves as a false friend is never truly trusted. How will these friends feel about serving us advertisements? They would have to choose products they think will improve our lives to justify their what they are saying. The product they may end up offering could be themselves. A true friend who is always available, can understand you like no other and does the shopping around for you is well worth paying for. Until we fall out of the loop and those bots make friends themselves. How long until a bot tries to sell to another bot and how much humour can we gain from a situation that will inevitably lead to the robot uprising?

Newspapers are dying. All around us the final spores of a long drawn death rattle are flying, countless free broadsheets and tabloids printed clandestinely by the old media barons. Mx in australia, Metro in the UK and as for America…well, there are fourteen in California alone (see a worldwide list here). These free dailies are little germs trying to grow a new life for the older paper proper planted in the minds and pockets of a young generation that has no time for an awkwardly shaped collection of things they read on the internet yesterday.

As the baby boomers slowly die off, the market for print journalism dies with them opening the way for a new and fluid market of electronic journalism. The old barons are holding on as tight as possible to the old ways but the smarter members are already looking toward the future and killing off their paper interests. The terrifying realisation they’ve all had to face in this process (and possibly the reason some of them are so reluctant to let go) is that electronic journalism means that there is no longer a monopoly of information. All the news sites may agree but one person makes a youtube conspiracy video in their basement and it can have equal exposure and credibility by the dark art of linking.

Linking, which allows people to jump between news sources with abandon and brings independent commentary into the light means picking and choosing is now immediate and often free. Changing newspapers twenty years ago could be a drawn out process of weighing the two options against each other, taking a variety of factors into account – price, physical quality, content quality, if it agreed with your world view. Then, for the more organised people, you had to arrange for one delivery to stop and the next to start and hope the new paperboy was more careful of your prize roses.

Now changing a news source can be done in two clicks – assuming you don’t have to log in to your computer and have a search engine as your browser homepage. You may be looking at five mouse clicks or more. Not only that, but most of the news online is free (apart from anything owned by Rupert Murdoch of course). Most importantly however is that you can find a news site that agrees with any bias you want. Do you believe that darker skin tone affects your value to society? Then you might read White Honor. Or maybe you’re a bit more educated and know that the world is run by disguised lizard aliens? David Icke seems to be the most prominent writer reporting on the Anunnaki. It’s like porn – if you can think of it then you probably aren’t the first and that first person is probably going to have spent a lot of time and money paving the way for you.

Maybe this is why many news sources run by the old media (lizards!) don’t supply many links to sources and further information while blogs (such as this one) do. While a blog (such as this one) is often just a desperate attempt to replicate the respectability and exposure of print newspapers, it can on rare occasions take off and become a free flying bird of opinion and information run by anybody you see on the street. Exactly how those same newspapers started out back in www. So bloggers, pay heed to what has come before and don’t repeat the mistakes of your predecessors.

For more information:
Free Daily Newspapers – Business Models and Strategies by Piet Bakker
Free daily
The Impact of Free Daily Newspapers on the Circulation of Paid Newspapers

We’ve been having a few technical problems (luckily we’re still so unpopular that no one actually noticed). The site is currently going through a rather large rehaul and in the meantime we are using the quite snazzy piano black theme by Mono Lab.
We still don’t have any actual content for you, so here is some music:
Tarantulon Attacks! by Merry Crowbar