District 9 - Poor or Impressive?

District 9 is a South African Science-fiction film created in 2009. It is directed by South African Neill Blomkamp, and produced by New Zealander Peter Jackson (Lord of The Rings). The film follows the life of protagonist, Wikus van de Merwe who is the field officer of MNU (Multinational United). Wikus' job is to relocate arthropod-like aliens that have been living in a slum called District 9.

The aliens arrived in Johannesburg, South Africa 20 years prior, famished and malnutritioned. MNU helped the aliens (Derogatorily named "prawns") by allowing them to live in district 9 and by allowing them equal rights to humans. MNU take matters into their own hands as conflicts between prawns and humans become substantial after many years. They begin relocating the prawns in District 9 into a new area just outside Johannesburg called District 10. While trying to relocate a prawn named Christopher Johnson, Wikus unknowingly ingests alien fluid. The alien fluid begins mutating Wikus into a prawn, and he is taken to MNU, but escapes after having undergone much experimentation. He pleads with Christopher the prawn to cure him, and he is given hope. Wikus and Christopher then venture into MNU to retrieve the fluid - which is the last remaining fluid available to fuel Christopher's space ship. Christopher makes a deal with Wikus that he will use the fluid to return to his home planet, only to return three years later to cure Wikus.

At first Wikus is enraged at the news, and turns on Christopher. Later, however, he learns to let go as the forces of the infamous Nigerians as well as the MNU are after him and Christopher. The plot plays on the theme of xenophobia, and is historically linked to the event of Apartheid (which occurred in South Africa as an act of racism).  Effectively, the humans show contempt toward the aliens - even though the laws protected them, they were still vulnerable to human superiority.

Poor or Impressive?
District 9 has awoken the originality within me that I thought had disappeared a long time ago. As a South African, I feel proud to review a film so controversial and original that I would never have thought about it myself. The film evokes heart felt emotions toward the end, even tough it is not intended to be a movie as such. In addition to this, District 9 was also funny as it displayed typical South African habits and personalities. It kept me on the edge of my seat and I truly believe it to be the "movie of the year."

Viva Wikus!

Hubble Telescope - The Amazing Universe Through New Eyes

NASA's nineteen year old Hubble Telescope is back after being refurbished. The telescope is fitted with a new powerful spectrograph - which enables it to see galaxies and stars billions of light years way. The new Hubble Telescope is now more light sensitive meaning it is quicker for distant objects to be observed. The telescope will focus on several things that will give insight into our universe. It will focus on the population of asteroids in the Kuiper Belt (which exists at the end of our solar system), the formation of new planets as well as stars, and will view planets in our solar system through their atmospheres (giving us insight into other planets). In addition, the Hubble Telescope will explore Dark Matter with more intent.

Dark Matter:
An invisible matter that is speculated to be the cause for the universe's mass. It was first theorized by Swiss astrophysicist Fritz Zwicky, of the California Institute of Technology,1933.

The following photos were taken on September 9 2009. They are a beautiful sight to behold.
Above: Butterfly Nebula - 3800 light years away
Below Top: Colliding Galaxies - Several Million light years away
Below Middle: Stephan's Quintet - 290 Million light years away
Below Bottom: The galaxy Messier 74 - 32 Million light years away

Additional information:

• Hubble Site - View all 57 new pictures
  
• Wikipedia - Dark Matter
  

Turkish ship shipwrecked off bloubergstrand South Africa

 

A ageing bulk carrier from Turkey has been shipwrecked just off Bloubergstrand in Cape Town. "The ship could stay stuck for some time" said city disaster managers. The 29 year old ship, Seli 1, originally bound for Gibraltar, was carrying 30 000 tons of coal and 660 tons of fuel when it became grounded.
The biggest fear at the moment is what could happen if the ship lost all of it's cargo into the sea. The amount of environmental damage will be tremendous, and take many years to rectify.
A joint operations committee - including the SA Maritime Authority, Southern African Foundation for the conservation of Coastal Birds (Sanccob), Smit salvage and others have said that their first task will be to remove the fuel from the vessel. It is reported that the cargo ship was built in South Korea in 1980.
The salvors report that besides their best efforts they need the swells and weather conditions to become calmer, so as for them to be able to safely remove the fuel and coal.

A spokeswoman, Clare Gomes said that there was no risk of the ship breaking up at this stage. Once the fuel has been removed, experts will be brought in to assess the damage of the vessel and whether it will be viable to have the ship moved or rather to break it up and recycle it.
It has been reported that the ships captain lowered the anchor in Table Bay, but the anchor broke off in the large swells. The vessel then drifted towards the shoreline and was driven onto a sandbank, and finally onto some rocks which punctured a hole in the side of the boat. Unfortunately the hole was exactly in the position of the engine room. After the engine room was flooded, the ship's crew was unable to power the ship and had to be evacuated by the NSRI.
 This is the third vessel that has run aground in the same area just this year.

Amazing but weird disfigurement - TREE MAN

 

Dede Kosawa (37) - also known as "tree man" is a man with a strange disfigurement. His body is covered by several kilograms of warts. These warts give him the strange tree shape appearance he has, and is a disease known as  Epidermosdisplasia Verruciformis. He contracted the disease when he scraped his knee at the supple age of fifteen. The gash soon sprouted warts and these soon spread around his body.

The Indonesian man makes a living by working in the circus, by performing in the "freak show". The term is horrible, but describes the performance accurately, as he is joined by many others with similar bizarre disfigurements.

Kosawa has been interviewed by Discovery Channel, as well as Ripley's Believe it Or Not. Incredibly, he has already undergone surgery several times and has had more than four pounds (1.8 kg) of warts removed from his hands and feet. After the surgery he reported being able to see the outline of his toes for the first time in several years. An American, Dr Anthony Gaspari, has taken it upon himself to attempt to cure Kosawa's disease. He has taken several skin biopses and hopes to help the poor man to continue the rest of his life in normality. He says he wants to meet a girl, get married, and get a proper job.

"Tree Man" after having 4 Lbs of warts removed from his body

Additional Information:

• Wikipedia - Epidermodysplasia verruciformis
• Discovery Channel - Half Tree, Half Man
  

Apple Mac: Snow Leopard

 Macintosh have once again beaten Windows to the chase with their 'finely tuned' operating system. Name Snow Leopard. Mac have promised many things in this upgrade of their previous operating system, Leopard. They have promised and once again delivered to the maximum amount possible.
Something to notice about this OS is that it is not a completely new OS, just a tuned up version of Leopard.
The most amazing thing about the new OS is that it is 7 gigs smaller than the previous version.

Apple have introduced something that is very fascinating to me, it is called 'Open Cl'. What this particular feature does is allows the user to use the graphics processing core as a secondary core. It does not give a clear description of how it will achieve this feat but it seems to now be possible.
Apple as usual are creating Operating Systems that are way before their time, and Apple claim that Snow Leopard is able to handle 16 terabytes of ram. They say that they programmed it to handle so much, just because they can. 
Another new innovation to accompany Snow Leopard is something called Grand Central Dispatch. Which allows programs to easily take advantage of the multiple cores in processors, boosting the speed of heavy duty applications such as video editing software.
They have also encoded the whole OS to run on 64 bit processors. This is a big step forward as it decrease the time taken for most tasks by almost 2 percent. This should also allow word programs and normal browsing to be slightly faster.
If you are a fan of backing up your computer, Apple claim that it is now 80% faster to back up your system which is a significant decrease.
A new version of Quicktime has also been released alongside the OS. Quicktime 10 will allow the user to crop videos in the program, which means that you don't always have to fire up iMovie to just crop a video quickly. Also there will be no need to buy Quicktime pro as all the advantages of Quicktime pro will be in Quicktime 10.
Start up is now 2 times faster and Shutdown is 1.8 times faster. This is a nice little bonus.
Apple have once again out performed their rivals. Unfortunately they have not released a 'pc' compatible version as yet. If they did I would most definitely go and buy their software right now. The only reason that Apple Mac control such a little piece of the market is because their computers are so expensive and there is limited software available for the OS.  Hopefully in future I will be able to enjoy Mac on my PC alongside with Windows.
Now all we need to do is wait and see how Windows 7 has to add to the table. Looking forward to it.

Half life 2 Episode 3

For all those people who played Half life 1 or Half life 2 would have noticed that they were market changing games. Meaning that Half life 1 was the first game that was a first person shooter to be well received by consumers. When Half life 2 was released there was complete amazement and shock at how deep and interesting the storyline was. The graphics on both those games were completely unheard of at the time and even for a few years afterward.
Half life 2 episode 1 and 2 were released about a year apart. Valve used the Source engine for all of the games.
Although nothing much has been said about Half life 2 Episode 3, there are some things that valve have said to confirm that it is in existence and are working on it.
For instance, When Valve was questioned about Half Life 2 Episode 3 they did not deny that they were working on it.
Also Valve have recently stated that they will be learning Sign Language. They said that they would use this to explain why Dog and Alex can sign to each other and can "talk" to each other while no one else can understand what they are saying. This sounds like a interesting twist to the story.
I am very excited to see this latest installment for myself, and I hope that Valve will release early 2010. If it is anywhere near as awesome as any of the previous episodes I will definitely say well done to Valve.
Here is some concept art of how Half lIfe 2 Episode 3 will look.