Boffins Creates Zombie Dog

Via TorrentSpy.com…

SCIENTISTS have created eerie zombie dogs, reanimating the canines after several hours of clinical death in attempts to develop suspended animation for humans.US scientists have succeeded in reviving the dogs after three hours of clinical death, paving the way for trials on humans within years.

Pittsburgh's Safar Centre for Resuscitation Research has developed a technique in which subject's veins are drained of blood and filled with an ice-cold salt solution.

The animals are considered scientifically dead, as they stop breathing and have no heartbeat or brain activity.

But three hours later, their blood is replaced and the zombie dogs are brought back to life with an electric shock.

Plans to test the technique on humans should be realised within a year, according to the Safar Centre.

However rather than sending people to sleep for years, then bringing them back to life to benefit from medical advances, the boffins would be happy to keep people in this state for just a few hours,

But even this should be enough to save lives such as battlefield casualties and victims of stabbings or gunshot wounds, who have suffered huge blood loss.

During the procedure blood is replaced with saline solution at a few degrees above zero. The dogs' body temperature drops to only 7C, compared with the usual 37C, inducing a state of hypothermia before death.

Although the animals are clinically dead, their tissues and organs are perfectly preserved.

Damaged blood vessels and tissues can then be repaired via surgery. The dogs are brought back to life by returning the blood to their bodies,giving them 100 per cent oxygen and applying electric shocks to restart their hearts.

Tests show they are perfectly normal, with no brain damage.

"The results are stunning. I think in 10 years we will be able to prevent death in a certain segment of those using this technology," said one US battlefield doctor.

Insanity.  Would you freeze yourself for a period of time if the technology becomes available?  I’m so there.  Throw $10 in McDonald’s stock, freeze myself for 150 years, come out the day’s equivalent of a millionaire.

/rizzn

War of the Worlds: Best Movie Evar

Just a quick note to say that War of the Worlds – clearly the best movie evar.

The first movie in the sci-fi horror genre, or the horror genre for that matter, to ever leave me with a feeling that extended five minutes after I left the theatre (other than revulsion that the film was ever made).

Great flick. If you see no other movie this year, watch this one.  There were literally an entire row of people in the theatre on the edge of their seats – no joke.

/rizzn

BlipMedia News: Profiles, Profitability and another P-Word.

Lots of big BlipMedia BlipMedia news today. I’ll be brief.

I all but finished the profiles section of BlipMedia.  I need user input on this one.. I put everything I could think of with relevency on the front page, but I think it’s missing a couple things.  I have a few changes I want to make to the front page before I call it finished. I want to add blog posts to the list of updated media on the left, but right now the RSS retrieval system is so fubared that I don’t think I want to throw it up there just yet (read: James! get off your butt and finish my RSS piece like you said you would a month ago!). I also need to finish the directories.  Two things need to happen before I get the directories done – one is I need to build the alphabetical lists.  I have a code snippet somewhere that I need to paste into that page.  The other thing is I need to debug the code on the category system and figure out why it’s not parsing the subcategories properly.  Once that’s done, we’ll have quite a nice little search engine and podcast directory.

This next section is just me bragging, so if you’re a hater, you might as well just go away now.  Like I said in a previous article this week on the site, I’ve been doing a fair amount of market research on the “podcast industry.” As it turns out, I’m the largest podcasting host in the biz.  I’m seven times larger than my nearest competitor.  Try that one on for size!

Also, it has been confirmed as of today, BlipMedia will be turning a profit in it’s first quarter!  Google, eat your heart out! If sales trends continue along these lines, we’ll be a million dollar company our first year in business.

Not bad for a college dropout, eh?

/rizzn

Tom Cruise Kills Oprah, and I Kill Sauron

I just finished the Solo Campaign on Lord Of The Rings: Battle for Middle Earth.  I kicked Sauron’s ass all up and down Mordor. I have two things to say having just spent a good 24 hours sweeping through the game.  One: the gameplay kicks much butt, and is a hoot to play.  Two: the ending graphic is dissappointing as heck.

LotR:BfME is a WoW style strategy game.  The graphics are incredible, and it has one major thing that WoW doesn’t have: LotR.  The battles are always so epic, and of course its immersed in such a rich storyline, it makes it that much more fun to play. My favorite thing to do is take my immense cavalry of Rohan and run them across a brook or stream – watching the water spray under their hooves is just magic.

This is the first strategy game with this level of good graphics, so you’ll hafta excuse my oohing and ahhing for a bit.

Unfortunately, they completely skimped out on the ending.  The only battle that took me more than a couple tries to win was the battle of Black Gate (the final battle).  They literally throw everything behind the black gates of Mordor at you and you’re constantly playing catch up if you misstep just once. On the downside, after all the Oliphants, Mountain Trolls, Hadarim, Orikai and Dragon Thingies (the name escapes me now) are dead, all you get is a 13 second animation of Frodo tossing the ring in.  No dialog, no yay, good for you, you did it.  Just your stats and a Campaign Won screen.  Bad fruit.

If anti-climatic endings don’t bother you, and you have a monster graphics card, give ol’ LotR:BfME a try.

On another note, I’m not the only one doing a fair amount of killing these days.  Apparently Tom Cruise killed Oprah.  Check it out!

http://tcruiseko.ytmnd.com/

This will no doubt become a big meme here very soon, so make sure and tell everyone that you found it here first, so that everyone will think I’m hip and all that.

/rizzn

Musical Cattle Call

Just a reminder – Remember, I’m headed out to Paris’s club opening July 4, supposedly.  Going to have a handful of CDs to give out, and there’s a few open slots left on the CDs for your music (assuming you make music).

Send your submissions to mark@blipmedia.org.

I had an email catastrophe last week, so if you wrote me about anything and I didn’t respond, that means I didn’t get it.  Please write me back/again so I make sure I didn’t lose your enquiry.

Speaking of which, not a day goes by that I don’t get an email something along these lines:

From: Random Rizzn.com Reader
To: Mark Hopkins
Subject: GET ME TIcKATZZ PLZ!!

Dude!  I’m your biggest fan/oldest friend/your mom.  You’ve got to get me a pass to get into the Paris Hilton party.

Dude I SOO want to bone her/kick her ass becuz she’z prettiar than me/have sex with her/have her give me money.

Hook me up?

Sighned,

Your friend, a random rizzn.com reader.

So let me just say here for everyone’s sake – yes, I love each and every one of you, but I cannot take you all physically.  AS a result, I’ll hafta just take pictures, video, and audio of the event and post it here.  Sorry.

/rizzn

Podcasting and my market research.

It’s interesting.  I’ve been doing some heavy research into different e-marketing techniques over the last week or so.  It’s more or less paid off for me.  I’ve doubled the site traffic to rizzn.com, and doubled daily signups to BlipMedia.

In so doing, I’ve seen that a seedy underbelly has been developing in the Podcasting world. Most of you were probably unaware there was a belly to podcasting at all, much less a seedy one.

Interestingly enough, I noticed it on Google of all places.  You can find them yourselves!  Google up “podcasting” real quick.

You’ll find a link there to Conference Calls Unlimited, CreateYourPodcast.com, and Maven.net. These are the shady guys I’m talking about.  Two of them are ebook salesmen, and the third is a conference call provider masquerading as a podcast host.  To have a podcast with three people on the line, the price appears to be $40/ hour.  Excuse me?

Maven.net purports to tell you how to make money podcasting, or “Monetize Time Shifted Radio.”  I can’t think of one single person who would pay any amount of money to hear audio content on the web that they can get from literally 50,000 other sources.

CreateYourPodcast.com is pretty much along the same lines – except it promises profit within four hours or something…  The bottom line is that by yourself, there is no legitimate and reliable way to make money with a single podcast.

On the other hand, podcast networks, which seem to be the latest bleeding edge trend, are definately breeding grounds for corporate sponsorship.  I think it was last week or maybe two weeks ago on one of the podcast mailing lists I subscribe to, there was an “Old Timey Radio Network” that formed.  Something along those lines is definately sponsorable.

Think about it: If you are a single by yourself podcaster, unless you’ve got a long term track record of reliably producing quality content, how do you expect to gain the noteriety required to recieve corporate sponsorship?

Conversely, in a podcast network, like BlipMedia or this new Old Timey Thingy that formed, there is an organisation, reporting structure, and just overall redundancy in the group dynamic that instills confidence in the advertising buyer.

Most of you know my stance on advertising and podcasting… and if you don’t, I’m against it.  It is a very tempting proposition given that the whole advertising/broadcaster paradigm is something everyone knows well, and hence all the money appears to be in that dynamic.  On the other hand, I believe that by my subsidization of free media with Blip, we’ll be able to create a community of free media and entertainers that will create a sufficient talent pool that you’ll actually be able to sell your broadcasts in much the same way the celebrity photographers shop their content around.

Let me explain (in grossly over-simplified terms).  The celebrity photography business is something I’m familiar with due to my friendship with Ricky McGill, another founding member of BlipMedia.  In his spare time he does celebrity photography for special events.  Every so often, he’ll recieve a phone call from either a local area publicist or one of the agencies he’s contracted with.  They’ll give him a tip that hey, Paris Hilton’s going to be showing up at P. Diddy’s party on such and such date.  Here’s a press pass, you’ve got red carpet access.

Since he’s with an agency, Ricky, after shooting and uploading his photos to the agency, recieves a chunk of change every time a magazine buys a photo from him.  The agency takes a piece for being the middle-man, and all’s well.  There’s no corporate sponsorship, there’s no Budweiser logo in the picture, simply the photograph, the photographer, the middle-man, and the buyer. This is the future of podcasting.

You can already see the lines forming.  Podcast networks are forming, like ours, libsyn, and if Adam ever gets his butt in gear, podshow.net.  Broadcasters (like Clearchannel and Infinity) will know where to look for new shows to run on their networks.  At first they will make offers privately, but then the clearinghouses will wise up and set themselves up to be the brokers for the deals. That’s the circle of commerce, Simba!

What’s the best thing for the average podcaster out there?  Well, my (biased) advice is to either form a network of podcasters with people who have either similar content matter, or complementary content matter as you OR join a larger hosting service like Blip or even LibSyn.

No article by me about podcasting would be complete without this link:

http://blipmedia.org/su/rp – SIGN UP FOR BLIP’s FREE PODCAST HOSTING NOW.

I welcome your comments on the topic. That’s it, I’m out.  Deuce!

/rizzn

Who the heck is Stan?

Am I the only person who thought this dude was saying “That’s Allstate, Stan.”

For as long as this series of commercials have been on the air, I always ask myself who the heck Stan is. The mystery became too much for me to bear this evening, as I actually lay awake staring at the ceiling wondering this.  Yes, with all that’s going on in my life, this is the only thing that was on my mind this evening.

As it turns out, Dennis Haysbert (best known for his work in "24" and, well, this commercial) is saying “That’s Allstate’s Stand,” not “That’s Allstate, Stan.”

Another mystery solved.

Hopefully I’ll be able to sleep now.

/rizzn