Missing Herman's Head

I miss Herman's Head - which was very much like Inside Out except years before and with human actors!  The main character was Herman and the other characters - and I wish I can remember who they all were - were inside his head - like muses but also with some input into the action.  Why is it that they have to do remakes?  Yes, I know, most of the folk who see Inside Out will have no idea how good Herman's Head was ... or that it even existed!  That's a shame.

Make-up your future

There has been talk about the changing nature of employment lately and how automation and digitisation will change the face of jobs as we know it. Seems to me though that if the whole fascination with Zombie movies and series continues, if you do make-up for the living dead, your future is secure. And, if the zombie apocalypse is real - but like iZombie rather than The Walking Dead, you've probably still covered!

Smile

We all have different skills - and we all try to get more from time to time.  I was reading today that one of the ways to help you learn - especially when you are feeling slack and can't concentrate - is to force yourself to smile as you learn.  If you can't fake a smile, you can force yourself to by holding a pencil between your teeth.  Of course, for some of us this is not an option ... in fact, once that pencil goes in my mouth it's all I can do to not be squeamish.  Maybe that's a new skill I could try to learn :)

A FaceBook challenge

Who knew? Logging into FaceBook from a new browser I had the opportunity to "prove" my identity by answering security questions or by identifying folk I am connected to on FaceBook. Given my lack of ability for facial recognition, it could have been a big mistake. I did manage to get all of them but there were a couple which had me almost guessing. It would be interesting to know how the selection algorithm works ... how it decides which "friends" and which pictures to select for the recogition task. It does give you the option to "skip" if you don't know one, but thankfully I didn't have to find out how many "skips" it takes for you to be locked out. Still, I think it was easier than trying to remember the answers to those security questions.

Time on his hands

Neil Moore, serving time for fraudulently obtaining over 3 million dollars by convincing folk he was from Barclays Bank, has proved he still has what it takes! From his quarters in the Wandsworth Prison in the UK, Moore set up a fake web domain with an address very similar to that of the court service's official address. He then emailed fake bail instructions to prison staff - and was released. His "escape" went unnoticed for three days - and may not have been discivered at all had solicitors not arrived to interview him ... only to find out he wasn't there. Oddly enough, three days after his escape was detected, he surrendered to authorities and is now waiting for sentencing on 8 counts of fraud and one count of escape. It will be interesting to see if they restrict his access to technology this time around.

Charge!!!

It's not often I receive an email reminding me to charge one of my devices ... but I have started getting them from my FitBit Charge (a new acquisition - a Christmas present). The Charge tracks steps, distance, calories spent and consumed (if you have a mind to enter them), several other fitness things, and also, as I now know, it's battery level! What will they think of next ... especially as it holds the charge for 7 to 10 days? This makes it fairly easy to forget ... as opposed to the about-to-be-available Apple Watch ... which surely must have a better battery life than the 18 hours claim I saw the other day!

Apocalypse plan

I'm not sure where I read it, it was a while ago, but apparently the US Military has a plan for coping with the Zombie Apocalypse - should it happen.  The plan's disclaimer specifically states that "this plan was not actually designed as a joke".  CONOP8888 - otherwise known as "Counter-Zombie Dominance" (dated April 30, 2011) was devised to allow the military to come up with a way to plan what could be a real response using a fictional scenario.  That was the plan anyway.  You can read more in The Washington Post - just search Google for "Leaked Document Reveals Government Preparing for Zombie Apocalypse". 

Have a musical day

Watching Ice Dance at the Sochi Winter Olympics this morning, I'm wondering how or if the choice of music affects the judges' perception.  The competitors were dancing to older tunes this morning - not a bar of Eminem to be heard - but some tunes were more familiar than others - and definitely more upbeat and fun.  Did the judges think so as well?  Or are they trained not to take any notice?  I know that as the competitors danced, I was bopping along with some of the music in my head and thought those with the "best" music had done better - and the judges seemed to think so as well!  Or perhaps they were just better skaters. Hmmm.

Milk drinks

Why is it that when you buy Vanilla flavoured milk, the Vanilla doesn't sink to the bottom like Choclate does.  Just wondering ,,,

It's Dino DNA ...

Well, probably not, but researchers have discovered components of blood cells in a 46-million-year-old fossilized mosquito. It is the first found fossil of a blood-engorged mosquito and while it might be a Jurassic Park life-imitating-art opportunity, there is apparently no viable genetic material in the sample. Who knew that DNA has a finite life span - around 6.8 million years? The fossil was found - heavens can only guess how given the size of mosquitos - unless they were much, much bigger way back when - in Montana!

Tourist attraction?

There's trouble in Summer Bay! No not the "Home and Away" one; it's a Resort near Florida's Disney World. Guests were given only a short time to escape when a 30m "possible sinkhole" opened at the Resort causing a building to collapse. No-one was hurt in the incident - which means the 105 folk evacuated were much luckier than Florida man Jeff Bush who died in February when the earth opened under his bedroom - swallowing it and him. Hundreds of sinkholes open up in the U.S. each year - and according to a report on news.com.au Florida's "sinkhole season" lasts from the start of the state's rainy season to the end of Summer. As Larry McKinnon, a Sheriff's Office spokesman suggested: Florida is famous for bugs, alligators, pythons, hurricanes and now sinkholes.

Words ... who's responsible?

Words

S read me a quote from one of the blogs she was reading today and asked me to guess whose it was (the quote not the blog). She said it was someone I had been talking about only recently and that was enough for me to guess correctly ... and on my first go. The other two people it could have been were Lizzie Borden (who, although there is that ditty about her killing mother and father, was actually acquitted at trial) or Christa McAuliffe (the winner of the NASA Teacher in Space Project who was lost, together with the other six crew members, in the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster in 1986). For some reason though, it was Mother Teresa who came to mind first. I have been reading about her decision to minister to the poorest of the poor in 1946, when she was 36 and traveling on a train on her way to a retreat. I hadn't realised that the Home for the Dying she opened in 1952 afforded those who were there the opportunity to die with dignity, according to the rituals of their faiths. According to Wikipedia: "Muslims were read the Quran, Hindus received water from the Ganges, and Catholics received the Last Rites". I hadn't realised how controversial some of her views were ... for example, reportedly failing to give painkillers, even in severe cases. According to Mother Teresa's philosophy, it is "the most beautiful gift for a person that he can participate in the sufferings of Christ". It's usually the way, sometimes though isn't it that others can see both good and bad in people: Mother Teresa was honored throughout her lifetime, and afterwards, and she was even appointed an honorary Companion of the Order of Australia!

 

Now, where are those keys?

What will they think of next? Apparently, someone has produced an app for the iPhone (and they're planning to have it for Android-based smartphones at some point) which will keep a copy of your keys for you ... not a real copy, of course, but a virtual copy ... it takes a photograph of your keys and scans them into a diagram which a locksmith can then use to make your new keys. According to the report I read on Zite, the app is called KeyMe but it doesn't yet appear to be available from the Australian iTunes store - possibly because we do not yet have participating locksmiths. But the whole thing isn't a bad idea at all - as long as the whole thing has the right security protocols and doesn't fall into the wrong hands. Now there's an idea for a crime novel ... valet parking ... copies of keys (house and car) ... multiple robberies.

Meat ... the future

"It tastes like despair." That was how one of the characters on "Better Off Ted" (and what did that title mean anyway?) described the meat they made in the lab at Veridian Dynamics. It was the stuff of fiction then but now it's a reality. Over the weekend food critics in London were able to sample meat that had been made in a laboratory. It apparently didn't have the same flavour as all-natural meat although that might have been due to the cooking techniques. I didn't see anyone delicately (or otherwise) discard the meat after tasting it - a la Jeff Goldblum's character in "The Fly" after he has teletransported it and found something had been lost in translation - so it seemed edible. So what now? Will it be mass-produced and be used as an off-set against carbon credits? If they can grow meat rather than graze it, surely that could significantly change the environmental outlook - especially as cattle contribute so much CO2 to the ecosystem. But, more importantly, will it come in different flavours ... colours? Pork ... lamb ... beef - and what will they call it so it's not confused with "real" meat?

Building for the future

Well ... what do they know that we don't? In Brisbane, Queensland, they're building a new Riverwalk. The last one was washed away in the 2011 floods. This one will be built to survive a one-in-2000-year flood. So, if Australia has only been under white settlement (with written records) for 250 years or so, how can they possibly know what a 2000 year flood event looks like? If it's because they have already seen one, is a Riverwalk that will withstand another one necessary? Or do one-in-2000-year events happen more regularly these days?

Music Man

Tully, far north Queensland: A karaoke party was interrupted last Friday night when a man, 175 cm tall and Caucasian in appearance, and with a moustache, and grey and blond hair, walked into the house, smashed the karaoke machine with a shovel and left. Police are still looking for the man - and hopefully they'll ask him if he did it because (a) he loves music or (b) he hates music.

Not a good night out

Aaron James Belt wept today as he was sentenced to three and a half years jail (parole was set at nine months) for glassing two students at a nightclub in August 2011. There is something about this that I just don't understand, especially as he was not drunk at the time.

It all started in the nightclub when two university students entered the toilets where Belt was in a cubicle. They told him to hurry up. As Belt was leaving, a scuffle broke out between them and he came back a short time later with a friend. All may still have been well at that point had Belt not been carrying a beer bottle and had one of the students not accidentally head-butted him. Belt thought it was a deliberate act and reacted by smashing the bottle on one student's head, shattering the bottle, which Belt then slashed across his face, breaking his nose and cutting an artery. He then turned on the other student, slicing him across the forehead. Even though both of the glassed men were bleeding badly, Belt left the bathroom and would have left the Club if security guards had not stopped him. The report I read did not say what Belt's friend was doing while this was happening. Belt, who was not drunk or impaired by illness at the time of the attacks, wept as he was sentenced.

What I don't understand though is, even if the toilets were full, how do you accidentally head-butt someone?

Decisions ...

Reports today suggest that brilliant English theoretical physicist, cosmologist, author Stephen Hawking was so ill with pneumonia (contracted during a visit to CERN) in 1985 while writing his Brief History of Time that doctors offered to turn off his life support system. His then wife, Jane, refused and Hawking, who has a motor neurone disease which has progressed over the years to leave him almost entirely paralyzed, recovered but not without being given a tracheotomy which removed what remained of his speech. He had previously used partner-assisted scanning to communicate but at about this time he was given a computer program called "The Equallizer" from Walt Woltosz - allowing him, unassisted, to select between nearly 3,000 letter/word options.  One of his nursing staff (he required full-time care after the life-threatening pneumonia), Elaine*, had a husband who was a computer engineer and he rigged a portable computer to go on Mr Hawking's wheelchair ... giving him the true power of speech.  One of the first things he did with his new computer-generated voice (with an American accent which he has kept unchanged) was to ask his assistant to help him finish Brief History.  And the rest is ... History was finished and for a work that set out to be a popular book which "would make the universe accessible to the general public" - it was ... staying on the best-seller list for over 4 years (237 weeks) and making Stephen Hawking a household name. 

* Elaine subsequently left David and married Mr Hawking in 1995, but they have since divorced.

Say what?

Is it just me or does this seem counter-productive?  One of the suggestions received for possible inclusion in the "Queensland Plan" (the 30-year look ahead being pioneered by the current Queensland Government and seeking public input) is ... compulsory (my emphasis) volunteering.  It seems that these notions may not even belong in the same sentence!  Compulsory = required by rule;  Volunteer = agree freely.  It will be interesting to see if this and other ideas championed in the plan get any traction.  And, come to think of it, did anything ever come out of that Summit organized by the Labor Government just after it came to power back in '07? I can't remember the details now but they were looking at a way to improve Australia in the coming decades and enlisted the input of hundreds of Australians, mostly leaders in their fields.  Hmmmm ... might have to go and have a look.

Look ... there on the horizon ...

...it's an Election! I saw this in today's The Courier Mail and was immediately stuck by that this must be advertising the Labor Party's "new" asylum solution for the benefit of the voting public ... unless there are potential asylum seekers who are subscribing to The Courier Mail. I'm interested to know what other press the ad has appeared in ... and how much government money is being spent on internal (to Australia) advertising ... and whether it appears in the electronic versions of publications as well. Doubtless the Government has a good reason for doing this advertising ... besides electioneering ... but I have to wonder, too, how long this has been in the pipeline given it was only announced last week by K Rudd, less than a month after he took over the leadership of the ALP again. Whoever it was that said the wheels of government move slowly hadn't reckoned on this lot!