Every year, people get confused over how Israel are "allowed" to enter the Eurovision Song Contest. Israel has appeared in the Eurovision' since 1973 but it is neither a member of the European Union nor the European continent; this is common misinterpretation of what the "Eurovision" is. The European Broadcasting Union (parent of Eurovision) has little to do with Europe, except from a historic point of view regarding the countries it was originally formed in. It is in fact a worldwide broadcasting union, encompassing associations with radio/television companies from North & South America, Africa, Asia, Australia... That's why (as you can see in the screen capture above) the Eurovision was involved in coverage of the NATO summit in Chicago recently.
You won't see a song from the USA in the Eurovision Song Contest anytime soon though, because "associated members" of the EBU aren't allowed get involved with Eurovision activities. Only direct members of the EBU can appear in the Eurovision Song Contest. The Israel Broadcasting Authority is a member of the EBU, and that's why they can appear in the song contest. If they so wanted, North African members of the EBU, such as Morroco, Algeria, Egypt... could enter a song, also.
In summation: The Eurovision has nothing to do with Europe. More info [wiki] [ebu.ch]
I guess this explains why Hitler invaded the Ukraine instead of pushing on towards Moscow: he hadn't a clue where he was.
I've done a lot of arguing with people when they joke about "Germany still wanting to rule the world". That shit pisses me off, especially because it's a historically inaccurate thing to say about even Nazi Germany. Then Merkel pulls this shit out of the bag. I'm not even going to go down the road of commenting on the "Russia, so close?" thing. This is just a case of someone behaving patently dumb.
Let's all vote Yes on the 31st, anyway. These people obviously know what they're doing.
I was messing around with the little beatbox Easter Egg included with Google Translate, that I only discovered recently, and I appear to have created the sound of an old rotary phone being dialed. Give it a go yourself.
There's an image of a German dentistry's website doing the rounds on the Internet. It shows all the staff in Dr. Klaus Löhlein's dental practise, and is noteworthy mainly because Dr Löhlein's team are all women, and all are blond. [The practise must seem very clean at times, with the smell of peroxide.]
It seems though, that one staff member has gone missing since the original screen capture, and had to be 'shopped out of the website's main image. Ordinarily, this would be no big deal, but given the peculiar nature to the choice of staff, one can only imagine all kinds of horror story scenarios... "No, Miss Gehring is not with us any more. She had... an accident."
I have a great difficulty with the image. All the similar features causes my brain to hurt, much like those images of faces with a second set of eyes. It reminds me of that story about the Pricewaterhousecoopers story from a few years ago, involving female interns being rated by male staff. Some said they all looked like clones.
Nigel suffered minor injuries when his Bell UH-1 huey helicopter was gunned down over Ho Chi Minh trail, North Vietnam. He later went on to say that the pilot was a communist belligerent, who was ordered by Moscow to fly into the path of the bullets.
Nigel is a Eurosceptic. That means he finds it hard to believe that the continent of Europe exists. He insists that there are only two continents: the United Kingdom, and the "Land of Savages". He said he saw it on a map once.
Nigel has personally hand-delivered informational leaflets to every home home in Ireland. The leaflet supports the "No Campaign" regarding the May 31st Fiscal referendum thing. In it, he tells Irish citizens not to be influenced by non-Irish persons...
Nigel insists that he is not a racist, or a xenophobe. He said he enjoys a nice curry, and karaoke session, occasionally. He also took a two week holiday in Spain in the early 1990's.
Nigel enjoys the sights and sounds of a diverse London.
I came across a series of images on flickr (yeah I know, it's an addiction at this stage) of some serious music gear pr0n, and a woman that appeared to be a dancer of some sort. It piqued my interest as it seemed as if she had sensors to interact with whatever music was being performed. After a little bit of research, I found the following video:
The video editing, is at best, "unfortunate". I'm not sure what they were trying to achieve but I don't think they got there. I'm also not sure if the video is out of sync, or if there was a natural delay with all the effects being used. As I had first thought, her movement is linked to the sounds being created, in the beginning of the piece at least.
The two musicians performing with Hedvig Bang, are Jonas Johnsen, and Alex Gunia. This performance is full-hipster, with pretension turned up to 11, but it has it's moments. It really gets going at 23 minutes in.
A little bit more about Bang that I found. Taken from danz.no, and translated from Norwegian to English:
Hedvig is a former student at Lillehammer Ballet School, (now Lillehammer and Gjøvik Dance Center) where she also was a member of Project Dance Company. She studied dance at the Strange vgs followed by one year in a Spin Off preliminary study in dance. Recently she completed her education at the Art Academy in Oslo with a BA in Jazz Dance. She will be a substitute for May Elin on Tuesdays at Gjøvik the semester.
Is there any chance TV3 could give us the news without the shitty script writing? Bigger than that: Is there a chance any Irish news organisation could give us news without some sort of spin to it.
And as some bonus content, here's an infuriating bullshit Daily Mail article written by "Matt Blake", about the Unha-3 launch.
Matt Blake, what the fuck are you talking about!? Props left over from the 70's? These are clearly modern 16:9 LCD flat-panel monitors, set inside custom made cabinets. There is nothing 19 fucking 70's about them! And even more incredible is your accusation that devices from the 1970's were incapable of launching a rocket into space. The Soviets launched the first manmade satellite into space in 1958 and the Americans walked on the moon in 1969. You are a complete and utter fucking moron. The development of your brain must have been severly retarded at some point in early infanthood. You are the definition of a cretin.
All we need is news; bare-bone news; the facts and figures news. We don't need you journalist fuckers trying to jazz it up for us poor peasants. All this editorialising is nothing but brainwashing; juice to improve sales, and propaganda to tell us what to think.
As a small follow-up to my 2009 post ["Why You Shouldn't Rotate Your Images In Windows"] detailing image degradation from repeated jpeg compression, I have done some experiments with video and the effects repeated saves using the XVID [wiki] implementation of the MP4 standard will bring.
I won't be going into the same detail as the other post, but I may return to this again at some point in the future. I've only used one example video, which is Italian make-up artist Giuliana (Makeup Delight) [youtube]. The video choice was somewhat arbitary, but there is good contrast in image content. Lots of movement in the foreground with facial expressions, while the background remains relatively still.
As you will see, the final videos get fairly mangled by Youtube's own compression algorithm, which is why I put off trying video experiments for so long. You can increase the resolution to 480, which helps, and I have included some still frames from the videos below too.
I dialled everything back on the XVID codec settings, to really get the compression process working. When I initially started experimenting I found that the degradation process was taking too long, and while I probably could have implemented an automated process fairly easily, I just wanted to try this on-the-fly. So to increase entropy in the image, I applied two types of filters. With the video above I have added a simple (standard VirtualDub) sharpening filter, at about 50%. This effectively magnified the effects of each iterative save, by increasing the detail in the changed edges. I only went as far as 52 iterations, but you can clearly see the effects it had on the video. The image becomes infested with squares, with multitude of apparent geometric patterns. More on that later.
N.B. no audio track
For the second video, I used a error diffusion dithering filter [http://whitewing.co.uk/vdub_errdiff.html] which gave the effect of increasing the relative noise in the image. The effect here, looks more like the results garnered when experimenting with jpeg compression. It's not that clear in the Youtube version, but the background really begins to move about even after just one save. Most apparent here is the sudden flashes of noise which gradually fade back. I imagine these are based on the key-frame points in the original video.
I'm not going to pretend I know exactly what's going on here, but I would assume that the shapes represent the xvid quantize matrices, which due to the extreme measures of compression, have reduced them themselves down to binary values (either 0 or 255). I'm also going to guess that the reason they keep changing between frames, is because of a cascade effect from surrounding matrix squares. Someone reading this can probably explain it better, and it would be great if they offered an explanation in a comment :)
A 100% crop of a frame from the dithered version
That's as much as I want to discuss for now. Be sure to check out Makeup Delight's blog [ http://www.makeupdelight.com/ ] and Youtube account [ makeupdelight2009 ]. I've been following her videos for some years now and she has produced many videos detailing fine examples of her makeup artistry. Ciao.
This is a little notebook that I used to doodle in, some years ago at work. While a lot of the doodle-pads have vanished over the years, this one managed to survive. I plan to spawn a few posts based on pages this notebook, but not all of them.
I've made a few references to musician, Tom COSM, on this blog over the years, but this is definitely the strangest. Tom said he was emailed this video a few days ago, and insists it's the genuine article. Some suggest it's a fake, organised either by Tom himself, or someone he knows, but it's hard to say. Something about the cleanness of room doesn't sit right with me. Others have said it's just someone doing it out of spite, a mere attack at the ego. The video is very creepy either way, and is testament to why I want to live my life hiding under my bed.
