One week to go…..

… till life returns to normal.

Being “abnormal” doesn’t mean an “anime deficit”, since dinner time is always the best excuse for an episode or two… Recent watching include a promising new release (“shinban”) Tamayura （玉響 or “the sound of jade”）, classics Zipang and The Story of Saiunkoku.

Another thing worth mentioning is an exploit from a visit to local Japanese book store: a hundred-page color illustration book featuring Fujishima Kousuke interviewing 6 anime/manga creator on character design (among them Maeda Jun on Angel Beats!). It costs about a week’s grocery, but worth it anyways : P

The ancient China style character design of Saiunkoku is really inspiring, respect

Is this even real????

link 1:

How much will an e-cat cost

link 2:

E-cat world, official site

link 3:

Hello Cheap Energy, Hello Brave New World (Forbes Coverage)

 

This E-cat thing is simply unbelievable! It is so unbelievable that I still suspect it to be a hoax of some kind… The equipments in the videos look almost too simple to be high-tech… not to mention something like Cold Fusion.

If this is true though, it will no doubt change the world, entirely. The economic and political impacts would be huge, just consider the chaos (and reshuffle) that will happen in the energy sector.

All the input needed is a little nickel and hydrogen, and of course the energy conversion mechanism. What you get is ALMOST a perpetual machine. Shocking.

Nickel is a widely available metal and the process doesn’t even require a lot of it. According to the nickelpower website the machine will bring the cost of electricity down to $0.0012/kwh. Also the process doesn’t produce any waste: totally efficient and clean.

Also the articles suggest that since E-cat produces steam, there might be a revival of Sterling Engine on automobiles, ships and even planes. That sure stirs imagination : ) (see picture below)

Andrea Rossi’s CF system is to be tested on Oct. 28th, let’s see what’s going to happen.

does it mean that things like Hal's Moving Castle will be feasible from an energy perspective? (the world's gonna change and I only care about the world of fantasy steam machines...xD)

 

 

FORBES-Will Facebook’s IPO Mark The Beginning Of The End?

YESSSSSSSSSSSS!

article here.

Quote:

Remember when Netscape went public in 1995, kicking off a torrent of investment in new Internet companies that lasted for five years? Well, now we’re waiting for another Netscape-caliber IPO: the first public stock offering by Facebook, which is expected to come sometime next year. The deal will no doubt value the company at tens of billions of dollars, or more, and make many, many people into multi-millionaires, if not billionaires.

Except this IPO will spell the end of the party, not the beginning. I’m convinced that the frothiness we’re seeing right now in Silicon Valley cannot last. And it won’t last, I believe, past the point at which Facebook finally sells shares to the public.

Why? One would have to be blind, or have no friends in New York, London or Shanghai, to not realize that Silicon Valley is currently operating in a different reality. In Silicon Valley, office space is scarce, engineering graduates are commanding record salaries and homes are being purchased before the “For Sale” sign has even gone up. The number of startups formed in the last two years dwarfs the company formation pace of the late 1990s. And high-growth companies are receiving private financings at valuations – many over $1 billion – that could only have been achieved a decade ago by going public and beating Wall Street’s estimates over several years.

But here’s the disconnect, which is obvious to everyone: We are in midst of the Great Recession, with 9% U.S. unemployment, European default risk, growth in China slowing and state governments on the brink of bankruptcy. Yet young technology companies with unproven management teams and business models are commanding nosebleed valuations. The most recent example is blogging startup Tumblr, which raised money valuing it, reportedly, at $800 million. This despite the fact that the company doesn’t have its business model figured out yet. Many of these investments are being justified by the anticipation of some highly lucrative, initial-public offerings for tech companies in the coming 12 months. If standouts like Facebook, Zynga, Groupon and Twitter are going to go public for tens of billions of dollars, the argument goes, surely lesser tech stars can command a premium in their financings as well.

Totally true, but what’s more important is that people are simply reluctant to buy any story, not with their own cash at the very least.

When was the last time…

…you click on a visual novel, 18x or not, and start reading it from a load file you don’t even remember exist on a Saturday evening?

 

That’s about 10 minutes ago for me… Can’t even remember the names of characters despite having went through the game once. Voice acting by Nonaka Ai is awesome, btw.

メモリズーオフ７

A Lie Detector Test for Online Review (repost link)

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/a-lie-detector-test-for-online-reviewers-09292011.html

Well, the article is about online reviews for consumer electronics and the likes, which are products that could potentially inflict some serious “buyer’s remorse”.

However, it somehow reminds me of certain less-than-sincere  approaches to writing reviews on anime titles… There is no money involved for this one of course, but people sometimes seem determined to keep their true feeling to themselves. Come on, we all know you’ve shed a couple of tears watching 5cm/s, and get emotionally attached to those “cheap romantic plots” more than once!

A quote from the  article:

“At Cornell University, researchers focused on finding semantic tics unique to fake reviews. Like the Texan, they went online and hired people to write 400 fake reviews of hotels. Then they used a computer model to compare those reviews with 400 real ones. The truthful reviews tended to talk about the actual physical space, using specific nouns like “floor” and adjectives like “small.” Since spammers weren’t familiar with the look of the hotel, they spent more time talking about themselves, the reasons they went on a trip, and their traveling companions. “The word ‘husband’ is very indicative of deception,” says Myle Ott, a PhD candidate and co-author of the study. When the researchers trained a computer to look for the linguistic signs, it detected 90 percent of the fake reviews. Ott says several websites, including TripAdvisor, have inquired about the team’s findings. ”

We should totally do this for anime reviews!!!!!

Random cute Nyanko sensei ftw!!!!!!