Nintendo and Youtube have teamed up to create an interesting ad. Check it out here

I have been looking for a housemate recently, and to no avail, here’s the pitch:

Not long ago I moved into a house with my fellow and a friend. The situation was this: the friend and her lady had been living in the house, her lady moved to Sydney and she was to follow in several months, which is what brings us to the housemate hunt I speak of. Our housemate is moving out THIS week and we have yet no one to replace her.

I began the search a couple of weeks back. Given that we decided we did not really want to live with close friends, I sought out help from an online site. What struck me, however, was how much this site felt like internet dating (if I could imagine what that might be…). You enter all your details, submit them, and then you are matched up with people with similar interests and needs. Anyway, after going through well over 150 matches, I found three that I ‘accepted’ (your options are to accept, decline or remain undecided) about matches.

The reason for my ruthlessness is this, I was judgmental about things such as an exclamation mark after their name, or over-enthusiasm of any sort really, small matters of type can make a women turn one way or the other you see. It’s important to judge one’s character on the way they are reflected on paper (or the screen in this matter). You have to be aware that you are going to have to face this person every morning. Eat breakfast with them at an early and potentially grump hour, scoop yoghurt from the same tub and be prepared for their undies to brush your face when you are hanging up your own laundry on the line. These small things need to be taken into consideration.

Then came the next issue, which was really more of an internal thing, but something that had me bemused, well, sort of. This fellow of mine is rather against the idea of meeting potential housemates at the house (not willing to let strangers into the house), which under normal circumstances is a reasonable request, but in the case of house sharing, I found this somewhat difficult to get around. How is the potential housemate supposed to see the house in question if not by coming over to the house? It felt the killing two birds with one stone to me – we meet and greet at the house, they scope out the dwelling while we scope them out, and you go from there, simple. Apparently not.

So in here lies yet another fork in the road, for now at least two meetings with one potential housemate are needed. So before we even get to this point, I’ve scared off half the options by asking them to join me (a stranger) for a drink at a random location. This, you will find, eliminates quite a few regular people here, (and for the record, I don’t even agree with this out of house first meeting thing).

Anyway, the point of the story is this, I have run dry all other options for house mate hunting after giving up on internet sites. I have a sign up at Readings too, so what else am I to do?

It is proving rather difficult to find a housemate to fill the room in our lovely two bedroom fully renovated and furnished house with floorboards and a large sunny courtyard (sorry bout the hard sell), especially since we have to make two dates before we decide on their worthiness. But aside from that, we are really ok and not really creeps at all. So because I am almost desperate, I am posting this on the BHN blog in hopes that if by chance someone reads it, maybe they have a nice friend or acquaintance they know who is looking for a room. FYI – the house is in Clifton Hill and the rent is $750 a month (plus bills and bond).

In pirate news:

A tense standoff has developed in waters off Somalia over an Iranian merchant ship laden with a mysterious cargo that was hijacked by pirates.

Somali pirates suffered skin burns, lost hair and fell gravely ill “within days” of boarding the MV Iran Deyanat. Some of them died.

Andrew Mwangura, the director of the East African Seafarers’ Assistance Programme, told the Sunday Times: “We don’t know exactly how many, but the information that I am getting is that some of them had died. There is something very wrong about that ship.”

Woooooo. Creepy.

The Iran Deyanat was sailing in those waters on August 21, past the Horn of Africa and about 80 nautical miles southeast of Yemen, when it was boarded by about 40 pirates armed with AK-47s and rocket-propelled grenades. They were alleged members of a crime syndicate said to be based at Eyl, a small fishing village in northern Somalia.

At Eyl, the ship was secured by more pirates — about 50 on board, and another 50 on shore.

But within days those who had boarded the ship developed mysterious health trouble.

This was also confirmed by Hassan Allore Osman, minister of minerals and oil in Puntland, an autonomous region of Somalia.

He headed a delegation sent to Eyl when news of the toxic cargo and illnesses surfaced.

He told one news publication, The Long War Journal, that during the six days he had negotiated with the pirates, a number of them had become sick and died.

“That ship is unusual,” he was quoted as saying. “It is not carrying a normal shipment.”

The pirates did reveal that they had tried to inspect the ship’s cargo containers when some of them fell sick — but the containers were locked.

Pirates AND mysterious killer cargo. This story is playing out like a Ken Follet novel.

Link to Times article

… to our foreign correspondent with an update on Greatest Things News.

Me: Salted Meats still dominate the top of the leaderboard. Back to you in the studio gang.

This is perhaps the most bizarre chemical reaction that exists – it involves a piece of mercury thiocyanide, which while decomposing produces bizarre, seemingly never-ending tenticles. Warning! do not attempt – the reaction byproducts are highly toxic

A collection of the animations from 33 year old British animator Cyriak. This man has such a strange brain.

Observe.

I’m reading this amazing book at the moment called Vision and Art: The Biology of Seeing by Harvard Neurobiologist Margaret Livingston. The book goes into detail about all kinds of things like how our eyes see and interpret color and luminance, and about how we have two very different visual systems that work in tandem to give us a picture of the world around us. Basically, we have a “Where” system, which is very good at picking up movement and contrast, and predominately works in our peripheral vision, but it is almost totally colorblind. The “What” system is what we use to inspect things closely and it works in very fine detail and with high accuracy. But it operates over only a tiny fraction of our field of view, so we compensate for that by moving our eyes around a lot when we look at things.

The overlap of these two systems goes somewhere to explaining the enigma of the Mona Lisa, she explains:

These three images — [pictured above!] — show her face filtered to show selectively lowest (left) low (middle) and high (right) spatial frequencies.

So when you look at her eyes or the background, you see a smile like the one on the left, or in the middle, and you think she is smiling. But when you look directly at her mouth, it looks more like the panel on the right, and her smile seems to vanish. The fact that the degree of her smile varies so much with gaze angle makes her expression dynamic, and the fact that her smile vanishes when you look directly at it, makes it seem elusive.

D&AD showcases this year’s award winners. Some superlative advertising/design work in here.

Link

It’s a rare to find radio that’s this interesting. Concentrated, intelligent and highly compelling mind juice.

Link