So the Space Year 2008 is finally almost dead and buried, and with just under 24 hours of its measly life left to live before its corpse starts to rot and stink up the place, now’s a pretty good time for a bit of a backwards glance, a look back over the past 12 months to remind ourselves of what went on, because that’s a swell thing to do, apparently.

So here we go.

Blah blah Barack Obama blah blah credit crunch yadda yadda Russell Brand blah de blah petrol prices rabble rabble rabble Georgia blah Russia blah de blah de blah OJ Simpson rabble rabble knife crime yadda yadda Olympics blah blah I’M A JOURNALIST blah yadda de blah yadda-blah Boris Johnson blah blah Anonymous rabble Scientology blah de blah Woolworths rabble rabble Max Mosely blah yadda blah rabble writers strike blah blah bumph.

How did we even cram it all in?! Of course, the most important thing amidst all this is that the year we’re bidding a not-so-fond farewell to was great for an altogether different reason: rhyme-me-do!

If over the course of the last 12 months you happened to arrive somewhere a little after you should’ve, you could’ve said “Sorry I’m a bit two-thousand-and-late!” and received rapturous applause and an instant pardon. Taking up aerobics as a new years resolution? “I’m going to get in shape in two-thousand-and-gyrate!”. Emphatically beat people at a videogame? “Welcome to two-thousand-and-devestate, bitches!”. Discussing Richard Nixon’s scandellous administration? “two-thousand-and-watergate”. I comically enjoyed terming the whole year two-thousand-and-delegate, due to the build up of Team Super Excellent at the workplace. All these and many, many more verb-ending-in-something-that-rhymes-with-8-based puns were made available, with pretty much zero effort, and maximum impact. Certainly a reason to two-thousand-and-celebrate.

But what do we do now? Is 2009 going to be similarly rhyme-pun-infused? I doubt it!

If you’re looking to take up wine drinking as a serious activity, you’re in luck, and I guess you could always say “Gee the weather is rather two-thousand-and-fine today!” if you so desired, although it’s pretty shit, and if there’s any justice in the world, would result in a swift decking. I can’t even think of any others (quite possibly because if I could, this entire post would have no point).

Lament, people, for we have lost a good one. RIP in peace two-thousand-and-great.

Something odd about this image...

Notice anything odd about that image? Apart from that it’s of a weird blue thing with some hard to make out writing underneath it, I mean.

No, idiot! It’s not actually an image! It’s full of stars (text)!

This cool little tool will search google for whatever term you give it, find the first image result, and render it out of coloured text. But not just any coloured text… it uses the search term you gave it!

Pretty clever!

Just Do It Nike

Now to figure out a term that’ll return goatse.

So, due to Bulldog/Pipex/Tiscali being utterly useless, I have been cut off and have had no real internets since the 16th. New phone line won’t be connected ’til Jan 2nd (costing £122.33 too ) and internets about a week later, at best, so until then I’m on a crappy Vodafone 3G mobile USB card thingy. Which means pings too low to game, port blocking so no p2p, image compression on web browsing making everything look nails, and random disconnections. Woohoo!

Anyway as a result of this, I’ve been doing things unrelated to internets. For example, this morning I arranged a new contents insurance policy! For a second example, just now I cleaned and polished my leather sofa, for the first time in the two years I’ve owned it! Apparently you’re supposed to do it every three months, but screw that, it’s too busy being sat on.

For my next trick, I might even go to the shops!!!

Is it a bird? Is it a plane?

Cor blimey, what’s going on here? This looks suspiciously like a Sven-style gadget review! Have I managed to put as much effort into assessing things as my venerable homeslice usually does? We’ll soon find out!

OK so this thing’s billed as an indoor helicopter, with its most eye-catching feature being a 3-channel control scheme, which for the uninitiated means control of 3 separate vectors of motion – up/down, left/right and forward/backward. This should provide a much greater degree of control over the heli’s direction than those tiny polystyrene-bodied jobbies that were all the rage a while ago managed, as those typically only had 2 channel rigs and were very limited. The only way we ever got those things moving was to weigh down the front to give a constant forward motion, then just use the up/down and left/right controls, which worked ok, but not fantastically.

It’s a lot larger than those tiny polystyrene ones, and on first opening it (a present from my bro, thanks punk!) I thought it’d probably be too big for indoor use, remembering how woefully unstable those old ones were. After giving it a quick charge (30 mins for 10 mins flight time, according to the internets) though, I found that as long as you’re careful, it’s perfectly fine indoors! Whodathunkit? You’d think the extra size and weight would make it more stable too, and less prone to random wafting about.

It does, however, still waft about a bit, and once it’s decided to drift in a certain direction correcting it can be tricky. There’s a trim control on the remote, which helps stabilise things, but due to the tailrotor arrangement any attempts at forward/backward motion will almost always result in some spinning too… although maybe with more practice you can compensate for it.

Anyway now I’ve been all analytical about it I can say this bit: flying it around is great fun, I highly recommend it. I took a bunch of photos of the thing just now, some of which were successful (see above), some of which… (see below (and here))

OMG A GHOST HELIMOCOPTER

Thetans, in my hard drive? It's more likely than you think

This is pretty interesting. Two former high-level employees at Diskeeper have claimed they were fired for not wanting to participate in forced Scientology training. Diskeeper’s CEO is known to be a Scientologist and they say that he forced Scientology training procedures on all employees.

Pretty fucking crazy! Boycott Diskeeper, much?

Discovered via /., where there’s a whole load of discussion covering interesting points which there’s little point me recycling.

As seen at Hypebeast

So WordPress 2.7 has been out and about for a week or so now, and I’m quite frankly literally mildly slightly marginally surprised it hasn’t been called WordPress 3 for all the things it’s changed – a lot of things! OK, so said things are confined to the back end, I don’t think there’s any major changes to the underlying structure, but given that the back end is where everyone spends all their time, it’s still a big deal.

First major change worth mentioning is the new navigation system. Everything’s been jumbled around a bit and categorised more sensibly and what results is a rather smart expandy-collapsy navigation bar down the left hand side for everything. No more splitting of core navigation items across the top left and top right of the screen, hoorah.

The navigation bar can even be reduced to a thin icon form, for if you’re still living in 2001 with a 15″ monitor, to get you back a hundred or so pixels of horizontal real estate. Very thoughtful!

The next major revision is the main Dashboard page. This has now been totally 2.0-ed up so you can drag and drop the various elements to organise the screen how you like it, which is a pretty major bonus. You can even turn off page elements that you don’t want to see! I’ve settled on having the Recent Drafts and Quick Press elements on the right hand column, with the Right Now and Stats taking priority on the left. With Quick Press you can very quickly save new ideas in a draft post right from the dashboard, and Recent Drafts element then keeping your in-progress things right where you can see them as soon as you login, two features I’m a real big fan of, as I’m forever forgetting stuff, and with this setup you’re reminded of things you’re working on all the time. Bonus!

It’s changed WordPress from a fine-but-a-little-awkward-sometimes tool into something that really is very fluid and much quicker to use… not that it was that slow to begin with, but these revisions just make so much sense I can’t help but sing their praises.

Translates as "Tinfoil hats: don them"

Well, they might be if a team of Japanese scientists’ claims are to be believed (and exagerated (rather a lot)). They’ve managed to reconstruct images a person was looking at, by analysing their brain activity. Spook!

To do this, they hooked up a functional magnetic resonance imaging machine to some people’s heads, showed them a set of 10 x 10 black and white image grids as control data, and recorded the blood-oxygen levels of parts of the visual cortex while they looked on. From this they mapped which specific brain activity patterns corresponded to which image grid patterns, so creating a mapping from brain activity -> image being viewed. To test it out, the next stage was to show the subjects different 10 x 10 image grids (of recognisable things like letters), pass the recorded brain activity through their mapping function and reconstruct the original images. And if you believe the image over there, it worked!

Scary much?

Well, for one (minor niggly) thing, the released image (sourced directly from the Japanese website linked below) contains hugely similar ‘reconstructed’ image for both the first and last ‘n’ letter (accounting for jpeg encoding). If they’d been recorded by separate viewings of the image, I’d expect more differences.

For another (major) thing, it’s one thing to analyse the visual cortex, with a hugely expensive machine right next to your head, for a very restrictive set of distinct visual data-keyed brain patterns, over a long time (reported 12 seconds per image), after a nice control data set to train it… and quite another to actually read and visualise thoughts (unless you’re a batshit insane conspiracy theorist, of course, in which case they’ve been doing it for years already!!!1) or even more general visual data.

Still, a nice step in the right direction, eh?

If you can read Japanese click this, if you can’t then click this, which has more detail than I’ve gone into.

Yeah they're pretty still...

Ok so against popular opinion (and the often accurate portent of it only being advertised a matter of weeks before release) I decided it might be a good idea to go and see the remake of The Day The Earth Stood Still. Was it the right decision? Only time (and some SPOILERS) will tell!

Firstly, I’d read a few reports that the CG in this film wasn’t up to scratch, but really for the most part it was fine. In some places: actually quite good! Never seriously problematic.

As the original carried a message of anti-nuclear-war (one which, having not seen the original, I can’t comment on the execution or effectiveness of), so this carries a timely warning to society, albeit a very weak, very rubbish one: OMGZ NOES WE ARE KILIN TEH PLANIT KWIK DO SUMFIN B4 WE ALL DIE LOL. That just about sums up the gravity of the statement.

Now, I’m not usually one to enjoy a message, especially not a rubbish one, and in this case it’s made worse, due to some bullshit: pivotal point in the plot occurs when K. Reeves (the alien who came to decide once and for all if we needed to be exterminated in order to save the planet, principally by talking to an old oriental man (in a terrible accent) who was actually an alien plant for 70 years (played by the only aging oriental guy in the world, if Hollywood films are to be believed)) witnesses our main non-alien protagonists crying about their dead husband/father, and for some reason decides that because of this we as a species can change and should be given a chance to fix Earth ourselves. Hello what? Maybe I’m John T. Stupid but I really don’t see the connection between crying over a dead relative and a species being capable of un-fucking-up its planet. Hello?

So, that really does nause things up. There then follows some very nice effects, whereby the aliens release a bunch of nanites which zoom around ripping everything to shit, but these sequences don’t last anywhere near long enough, or contain enough people being ripped to shit; it’s all structures, man! Where’s the fun in that? K. Reeves then kills himself (or does he?) and the aliens fly away. As far as we see, they never bother to return the samples of animal life that they Noah’s Ark-style kidnapped earlier in the film, either.

There’s some sense to be found though: the aliens’ reason for valuing the planet over its smelly inhabitants is that there’s only a handful of life-supporting planets in the universe, and they can’t afford to let us fuck this one up. Which y’know is some sound reasoning, that is if you assume all the ‘damage’ we’re doing to the planet is not only just going to kill us, but somehow going to prevent any life from ever forming here ever again. Ok so maybe not the best reasoning in the world (universe!!!1).

TL;DR pfft pretty poor. I score it 23 out of 106 planks of wood.

P.S. There’s also the usual stock of sudden scientific revelations based on nothingness and false assumptions, and too much lovey-dovey-ness.

Pretty damn tidy

Ok so my bro just hit me up with news of next year’s new Z4 model and, crikey, it’s more than a little bit tidy. First thoughts were ‘ah, only a subtle restyling, sleeker looking’ but on closer inspection it’s changed a fair bit. There’s clear influence from the current 6 series and even the extensive flame surfacing found on the CS concept, and I like this direction a lot. Images shamelessly borrowed from here, where there’s even more to check out, including excellent concept artwork.

More pretty damn tidy