Bonus - Iron Sky theme video

Here's the Iron Sky theme song done by a different group  - and also some great scenes that I don't recall seeing in the original movie as well. Enjoy!

Iron Sky 2 coming

Don't know if you saw the first Iron Sky but it was darn good especially when you consider that it was NOT made by any of the big studios or distributed by them. In short, it was a sort of B-movie tale involving Nazis who have been hiding on the dark side of the moon since 1945, who come back to get their revenge in their flying saucers. I love the whole thing because it's fun, quite well made and chews on the well-known bones of power mad leaders . . . . . . well, a sequel is being made, and this time they have dug into more bones from the Nexus-magazine-conspiracy-wacko graveyard, this time it is Nazis again, but in the hollow earth, with Dinosaurs!
I have to hand it to these guys in finland, there is soooo much source material to work with out there and provided you don't take any of it seriously,  you can have a lot of fun with this stuff. I can't wait to see it, who knows what wild stuff they will come up with this time?

Have a look here for the trailer, and support them if you like via indiegogo.

Economics, or what's wrong with our societies . . . .

Check out this page where Cory Doctrow provides a review of Thomas Picketty's "Capital in the twentyfirst century".
Of note is the observation that despite the clear solution to the dramatically uneven distribution of wealth being to Tax the rich, no government is willing to do that.
I'm not going to go over every detail of it since I have not read the book myself but this does point out the simple fact of the situation we are all in : We don't get rid of the gangsters or try to attack them because after decades of caving in to their every whim, they are now preceived as too powerful.
What will come next? 
 

The Leaders . . . . .

Have a read of this:
Being a psychopath looks like fun
Never mind the title, the content really hits on a big issue for the human race:
Our Leaders, and their mental state.
Never mind the definition of "Psychopath" for now, (or places like North Korea) just consider what it takes to get to the position of being in control of a country or corporation . . . . .
For me, there is a clear divide between self-interest alone and mutual interest.  Also, there is the matter of who loses out, a major issue that seems to be all too often ignored or not even considered.
. . . . but these things are just my personal views, right? I am not the "boss" of anything big. 
As we live in a world where more and more "wealth" is concentrated into the hands of fewer and fewer pointlessly wealthy people,  the lives of us "have-nots" will be more and more at the whim of a small cadre of people who did not even pretend to go through the motions of  qualifying for positions of power or responsibility.
You have been warned.

The Fear Merchants

Check this out.
Why you should visit a muslim country
I won't be leaving home any time soon but the truths expressed here deserve to be repeated.

Quote: (about Iran)
"Their government is a little unhinged. But would you want all Australians to be judged by ours?"

 What I find disturbing is that our government does not seem to represent the views of a majority of citizens: noone I know supports a number of recently introduced policies -  for that matter, whose views ARE they expressing?

I leave the answers up to you, dear reader. 

More Anime, anyone?

Okay, if you want some free anime, all legal, go to www. animelab.com and sign up. There is a fair bit of anime of various styles and new episodes are still being added. I am not sure ofthe exact nature of it, - maybe they are old, some are only two episodes long as if they got canned after that - but there are some gems there. My favourite is STEIN;S GATE (yes, that is how it's spelled) a story of Time Travel - well, it starts with sending SMS messages back in time, okay? In the first ten or so episodes it looked kind of silly but then all gets explained and the story is excellent, I went right through all 24 episodes very fast - ( Time travel is one of my favourite subjects ) and it is well written - dramatic, funny and touching too - and just in case you were wondering, yes, there really was a guy posting on the net back in the nineties calling himself John Titor who claimed to be a Time Traveller. No-one has ever owned up to faking it either.  You will have to see the series to get the rest of it.

 . . . and now onto something much stranger. . . .
DYNAMO. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sb6AqhT9quA>
Paste the link and you can watch episode 1 of this home made series. I mention it here because it seems to me to sufer from all of the classic faults of home made SF movies:
1. The plot  - well, okay, I have only seen five episodes so far, but the plot seems to be swimming in visuals, mostly adrift  . . . . . There are flying machines and so on, all done in Blender, but they suffer from what I decided to name "Transformers disease"  - lots and lots and lots of moving thingies like wings and so on that really don't seem to do anything except decorate - if your ship has antigrav lifters, why the heck do you need fins? - and then they all fold or bend up or down? what for? If they were control or lift surfaces, you really would want them solidly mounted to keep your craft in the air - ah, but they are just there to look "scifi".  
2. Visual - more and more visuals of surreal scenes, low lighting and yet more surreal scenes. A woman typing on a mechanical typewriter. A character who does not talk in one episode then talks in the next - it's all very cryptic and picturesque but not really my cup of tea.
It just seems to me a bit incoherent at the moment.

More oddities as they come to light . . . .

BIG MACHINES FOR BIG JOBS?

First, let me assure you that I am not a fan of "Machine intelligence": I am a skeptic about all such ideas because I have never yet seen any system that even vaguely resembles human awareness of its world or human mental ability.
That said, there are things computers could do that might improve lives if they are permitted (or, cynically, if someone pays for it to be done) . . and this is the sort of thing IBM is now trying out in this article.
This could be good, dealing with the mountain of stuff churned out by people in labcoats, boiling it down automatically and deriving or "mining" information from the mountains of data . . . .
but something sticks in my mind about this.

I recall an old scifi short story where someone invented the "de-legaliser" - software that read legal documents and rephrased it in simple terms that anyone could understand. Of course, the next step was to make the software work in reverse . . . . and by then the machines had started taking over the whole legal business.

I am curious to see how far this whole circuit circus goes.
Just remember that there is no actual research going on here folks, and also note that not all research papers are true and accurate:
Is the software smart enough to know when it "reads" faked research? 
How does it deal with the minefield of legal ownership, copyrights and patents?

One can imagine a scientist who has just completed his life's work only to be trumped effortlessly by a machine in a few minutes.
Hmm. . .