ET - just thinking

Using a statistical model I created based on Youtube viewers patterns, Norway will win the 2009 Eurovision song contest.

For those of you who dont know, the annual Eurvision song contest is one of the most successful cultural experiments ever, running now for over 50 years. Whilst at times the competitions strength has waxed and waned, this years competition has seen an increase in the level of musical talent on display and with a change in the voting system, it promises to reward those entrants who are actually strong musical entertainers.

The upside of the changed voting system is that the results are already appearing to have a stronger alignment to reality with the results of the first two semi finals nearly perfectly matching the publics Youtube opinions.

I created a statisical model based primarily on the ranking score of songs on the Eurovision Youtube channel, adding the number of votes cast, and number of views of the song, along with a “jury” based weighting to reflect the actions of a jury on the score.

The 10 selections this model made for the two semi finals are listed below.

Eurovision 2009 Semi Final 1 predictions

1) Bosnia Herzegovina

2) Iceland

3) Portugal

4) Malta

5) Sweden

6) Israel

7) Finland

Turkey

9) Romania

10) Montenegro

Both Switzerland and Andorra were downgraded using this method. Switzerland in particular due to the shocking live performance of their singer which a jury would have been influenced by. Good song Switzerland, absolutely hopeless lead singer.

Eurovision 2009 Semi Final 2 predictions

1) Norway

2) Estonia

3) Azerbaijan

4) Greece

5) Moldova

6) Lithuania

7) Hungary

Denmark

9) Croatia

10) Ukraine

Slovenia was downgraded out of the Top 10 as it contained very little song.

When applying this model to the results of the Eurovision 2009 final the following results are predicted.

This prediction is based on the statistics on Youtube as at 8am on the morning of Saturday May 16, more than twelve hours before the Eurovision final.

EUROVISION 2009 FINAL RESULTS prediction.

1) Norway

2) Bosnia and Herzegovina

3) Estonia

4) Iceland

5) Portugal

6) Azerbaijan

7) Malta

These were the top 7 predictions and were clearly distinct from the other entrants.

Then came a group of 8 tightly grouped together, representing places 8-15.

Germany/ Greece/ Moldova/ Sweden/ Israel/ Lithuania/ Finland/ Croatia

And then bringing up the rear we would see…

Denmark/ Turkey/ Ukraine/ Albania/ Spain/ Romania/ Armenia/ France/ United Kingdom/ Russia

Finally, whilst the Eurovision Song Contest attracts a lot of ridicule, it also produces some suberb songs.

I leave you with an example of this talent, “Love” by Lithuania’s Sasha Son. Enjoy…

Once upon a time, there was an internet page.
Simple, white background with black text.
Only words.
To communicate your message you wrote a full page of text. We rejoiced.

Then came images - and we were terrified, until the pictures took a softer form. Pictures of sex took over from words and pornography exploded across the internet. Ah, the good old days.

Then came advertising - and we were terrified, until some of us realised we could get on the bandwagon and make a quick buck. This made advertising good - except none of us really clicked the ads it was all being done by bots.

Then came social networking - and we were terrified because we were now getting on and this was something for younger people. This was for the “all thumbs” mobile phone generation so none of “us” really cared. And everyone’s personal information was up for sale.

Then came the reduction in words - and we were terrified because we could see where this would lead.
Twitter arrived and said “they shalt use no more than 140 characters” - and they obeyed.(well the youngsters anyhow)

Then will come the next get rich quick merchant who will suck in the youth of the world by declaring that they should communicate using only 10 words - and they will.

And then one day someone will come along and tell the online world to only communicate using one word.
And they will - they will grunt, and we will have returned to where we started.
Grunting beasts will roam the earth again.

There are, apparently, over one hundred million websites in existence today. Thats a lot of websites.

And all around the world people are buying and selling websites as though there is no tomorrow.

Problem is, most of these website sales are a gigantic rip off. Many of these websites being sold for thousands, tens of thousands and even hundreds of thousands of dollars are next to worthless.

Have a look on eBay. You will see websites being sold that claim to have proven traffic, claim to be established websites, some claiming to be worth $35,000 with the domain name being worth another $15,000 - yet upon investigation you find the domain name was first registered only 4 days ago.

Sites that have a realistic value of less than $100 are being sold for tens of thousands of dollars.

Is there a way to buy a website and avoid this scam? Sure - the internet is also awash with honest people only too happy to give you are realistic assessment of a websites value - using humans not automated robots.

If you are iinterested in buying a website and want to make sure you arent getting ripped off, try this site Websites for Sale  - it offers a very quick and very cheap service for only a few dollars. If you are sellign a website and want to confirm your sites revenue to potential customers, Websites for Sale also has a Website Revenue Confirmation service.

Every year millions of dollars in spent by the scientific community trying to find extra terrestrial life, one of the more well known projects is the SETI project.

And, whenever humankind sends one of its exploratory spacecraft to the depths of the solar system and beyond, it includes a little information about us.

But all of this makes many sweeping assumptions when it comes to communication.

Putting aside for a moment the problem of what form other intelligent life might take, how can we be so arrogant to assume that we would have any chance at all of being able to communicate with and understand any other creatures in space?

Have a look around on this planet. We are surrounded by millions of different species and yet we are unable to understand the language any of them.

We can not understand what dogs or cats or birds might be saying. We seem to assume it cant be much of importance. Or perhaps the problem is that we are just not talented enough in this area and we have failed miserably to be able to understand the “language” of any other species on earth.

Perhaps before we get too excited about reaching out to other species on other worlds, it might be an idea to invest a little time and effort learning how to speak to the animals on this planet. Who knows, we might learn something.

Then again, does humankind really want to be able to talk to the other animals? Imagine what they might say to us. Imagine your dog demanding equal rights and an end to thousands of years of enslavement for his species.

If we are as clever as we think, why is it that we cant talk to the animals?

What do you think?

Once up a time there was a TV show called the Muppet Show and on that show there was a little segment dedicated to a rather quaint, and funny, character called the Swedish Chef.

For those of you who are aware of the Swedish Chef, I’m sure you will enjoy these couple of classics. For those who have never heard of him - here is a great introduction for you to the Swedish Chef.

The Swedish Chef making Salad

The Swedish Chef making Hot Sauce

In the world of politics, moments when a society rushes forward to the next stage of development are rare. Governments usually just blunder along from decade to decade without vision or meaning.

100 years ago the move to give women the vote was a huge lurch forward, followed half a century later by the move towards universal medical treatment - at least in those more socially civilised areas like Scandinavia, parts of Western Europe and Australia, Canada and New Zealand.

Now 50 years after the Australian people gave their government the power to do so, the Australian government is considering a plan to include dentistry into their universal health system and join a very small group of civilised nations that enjoy such a benefit.

Of course, the dentists dont like the idea because it will cut their inflated incomes and the conservatives dont like it because they dont like universal anything as it removes the barons of industry from the equation.

But from the point of view of the average person in the street, this proposed change would receive a huge Yes vote ( not forgetting that it already did in a referendum 50 years ago), because the average person in the street can not afford dental care.

The other interesting aspect to this story is that governments have for so long divorced dental health from the rest of your body - yet what is in your mouth can directly affect your heart and other organs.
Fixing the nations dental health will be expensive initally as there will be a huge surge in people rushing to have their teeth fixed, but after the rush the benefits will be enormous as other health issues decline.

A quite revolution is underway in Australia as the move to give people the chance to smile again inches forward.

This year, 2009, governments around the world are battling to put together economic stimulus packages to get the world’s economic back into life.
Which is all very nice, and at the end of this little exercise we will all continue on our merry, greedy, self indulgent way and all of humankinds problems will continue.
But there will be no human stimulus package. No stimulation to the vision of humankind other than people wanting to get rich.

Perhaps now is a good time to think about our future, a future that must ultimately include getting our seed off this lump of rock floating around in space. Remember, it doesnt matter how rich we all are, we are all one big egg in one basket.

One of the things that disappoints me the most about those who have done well in life is that they tend to be quite visionless. Of all the men who have personal incomes well in excess of a billion dollars, you dont see any of them driving us forward with passion to a new frontier.

Well, maybe the time has come for some vision - so how it about it all you rich bastards

Lets show humankind some vision and passion - and lets go to Mars.

I dont mean the take 40 years to plan, NASA type of mission to Mars. I mean the “lets do it now” mission to Mars. After all, famed scientist Werner von Braun put forward a fully costed, engineered, proposal to send 70 people in 10 spaceships to Mars - and that was back in 1952.

The greatest expense of a manned mission to Mars is bringing the astronauts back.
So, lets show some thinking outside the square - and lets say we wont bring them back. Is this such a radical and outrageous idea? Everyday millions die around the world from disease, self inflicted abuse, car accidents and work accidents. We dont shut down all industry because 1 million people died at work today.

I propose we send a large group of people to Mars, on a one way mission. They may survive, they die, but whatever the outcome, humankind will be enriched by the vision and the science.

This is how I would do it…
1) raise money from the public for the mission to Mars, including selling TV rights.
2) send large quantities of equipment to Mars in regular shipments in advance of the explorers and make sure enough arrives safely through tests and sensors.
3) send the explorers to Mars, perhaps 50 people, in groups of half a dozen. Some will die as their craft crash onto the surface, some will survive. The journey should be swift and direct.
4) Upon arrival the explorers would cover their previously arrived accomodation with soil (I envisage that there would be separate outposts of humans not all group in one area) and begin extracting water from the soil, growing their own food and providing their own resources.
5) For a period of 5 years, resources would be sent from Earth to Mars to keep them going as they adapted to the conditions.

Others will have other ideas on improving this rough outline but the question is… could we do it?
I believe we can.

We need to get off this rock, and we need to begin the journey to humankinds next stage of development now.
What do you think? Should we go to Mars now?

In one of those stories that are nearly too amazing to be true, a Muslim TV station owner in Buffalo has beheaded his estranged wife.
Ironically, Muzzammil Hassan, opened his TV station in order to counter the negative images in the media of Muslim violence - I suppose he failed in that ambition.
Whilst this is horrifying and disgusting and beyond belief, it shows that when we scratch the surface of human emotion, there is still a significant level of barbarism inside.
Whilst humankind advances technologically, it seems that we do not really make any advances under the skin. We are still, generally, primitive and barbaric people.

Yes, some of us have advanced so that we are no longer primitive and warlike - but the overwhelming majority of humankind appears to have this sickening barbarism under the surface so that the moment law and order breaks down, or our own senses break down, we revert to outright barbarism.

What do you think?

The internet is an amazing place. Most of use cruise across the surface, without having any real idea of the mammoth industry that lurks below.

An example of this is the web traffic industry.
You think you are just travelling from website to website.
But on many of your visits, you are clicking ads, or popups or some other device, which is then turned into web traffic, which is then sold to entrepeneurs who use that traffic to boost their online businesses.
It is an amazing industry.

For those starting out with new websites, buying traffic is a great way to launch yourself onto the market. Straight away you can have thousands of people notice your site each day and you only need a small percentage of those to buy your products and you are ahead.

For those testing new products, or new areas of their website, buying reliable web traffic can boost their performance.

The buying and selling of web traffic is just one small niche of a multi billion dollar online industry - and like most of the internet, it amazes me!

For fast and reliable web traffic, try Traffic Pros.info

Traffic Pros.info

The latest Google Earth (5.0) has been released and includes 3D oceans, a osrt of time travel and now Mars!

Whilst there are plenty of things Google could do better in its day to day existence, Google Earth is one of its great contributions.

Now with its latest version you can sink to the ocean floors and look around, in 3D.

You can select a location and view it back and forth in time.

Or you can go completely out of this world, and visit Mars.
You can download Google Earth 5.0 here

Why not view the Google Earth promo video below…

What do you think of Google Earrth 5.0 ?

And what do you think about Google Mars? Its in 3D Check it out and stake some land on Mars