Between knowledge being vast and brains limited, humans have found the ultimate external hard disk. When encountering an unknown word, subject or task, post-humans will not reveal their ignorance, they will just google¹ for the answer. It’s a first step from pure 100% biological humans to cyborgs with direct connection to computer networks.

As with normal issued-at-birth brains which gather during life beliefs and wacky ideas of substandard quality, the augmented brain also requires monitoring to ensure the output satisfies quality control tests².

By 2020, some post-humans will have taken the next step and have their Eees or Palmtops implanted to ensure even faster access to the global knowledge repositories…

…will you be one of them?

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The second month of olivetalks brought a continuation of the Rio Laser and Xen sagas, including some of their most successful posts so far which will be dealt with in more detail in the soon to be published post by ZoltarStark. Besides that we’ve published more miscellaneous posts about computers and a failed attempt at sarcasm. The average daily amount of viewers during the second month was seen to steadily climb to almost double the result from January. The olivetalks writers were very busy that month, trying to post something every day as documented in the upcoming post by LadyRostand.

The third month of our blog has showed an even faster growth, the total amount of views in March was over 50% higher than January and February combined! This surprised us a bit but nonetheless we are very happy with the olivetalks performance. We put at least part of the “blame” on the new fashion sense of the blog. The average daily amount of viewers in March was more than twice than in February. All that in spite of the writers changing the blogging strategy and publishing higher quality posts while reducing the posting frequency to half of the preceding months. LadyRostand is writing a post about the two main blogging strategies - often short posts or less often but longer ones. ZoltarStark will give some insights into publishing posts which attract many viewers based on our experiences with olivetalks.

Well done olivetalks

And thank you all our readers for your support, your comments or just showing up from different search engines. A blog without you, the readers, would not be half as fun!

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April Fools’ Day

The Queen of England was seen riding a motorbike; Glasgow has decided to build an escalator connecting the two existing train stations; Wales is picking up French as its new official language.

On April 1st everything is accepted. The sillier the better. The one day in the UK-calendar in which you are actually encouraged to lie. But it seems that in my life, lying comes easier than telling the truth, so everything I say, my actions and my reactions should always be taken with a pinch of salt.

But now, as I sit in the freezing library “learning” about Markov chains and Markov decision processes, I realise it is the best day of the year to let the mask slide a bit and actually tell you the truth… or some of it at least.

I do mind he has a girlfriend. I don’t want to have a fling. And coming from a broken family has not only given me my sarcastic attitude, but has left me terrified of showing my feelings in case I get hurt, to the extent that, most of the time, I don’t even know them myself.

But then again, why should today be any different? I might just be pulling your leg.

Happy April Fools’ Day to everyone.

A.Nurboe

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A Waterstone’s kindness
As my older brother and I walked past Waterstone’s (the East end of Princes Street one) on the afternoon of Thursday the 24th, a little soft toy in the window display caught our eyes. It was a tiny Spot (Eric Hill’s amazing children’s books, anyone?). We went in to find out how we could get it and saw a big selection of Spot books but no soft toy. We asked an employee and she said we were to purchase three of Spot’s books in order to get it.

Whilst debating the craziness of buying the books just so we could have Spot (I am 21, after all), the Waterstone’s employee came with the soft toy from the window display and said it was a bit scruffy and dirty, but that we could just take him. If we had lied and said that it was for a younger nephew, I am sure that our amazed faces and the sheer happiness we expressed thanking her would have easily given away that the soft toy was in fact for us. As we were left speechless I realised I had not thanked her enough. I hope this makes up for it.

PS. Yes, that yellow thing is A.Nurboe’s attempt at a cross-over between Spot and an olive… Thanks for trying A.Nurboe!

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While reading many different blogs on very different stories, there was one sentence that caught my attention “[…] when I first imported the old Blogger Blogspot version of the site into the Sciencetext.com, I believe I had 2-3 RSS subscribers (me, me again, and my mother) […]” . The initial readers, subscribers, people that comment, etc. to one’s blog are generally family members. Exactly what happened with olivetalks. The ClustrMap had a huge dot where I live, result of me refreshing the page one (thousand) time too many and one where an olive’s wonderful brother lives. As the days have gone by, the dots have multiplied, surely thanks to the tiny olives efforts?

Ok, ok, so a couple of mother olives told their families about the page, and that would explain a couple of dots more…

Yes, it’s true that a father olive emailed his friends informing them quite innocently about

this very interesting “new” way of teaching or just relaxing by venting, called blogs, like they are doing in… let’s see which one comes to mind as a good example,… oh yeah, http://olivetalks.com

And a couple of dozens of obliging friends popped their heads in olivetalks… Some even from as far away as South America!

Alright, so that explains the southern European dots… the centre European ones… the Scottish visits… the lost penguin from the very northern part of Scandinavia… fiiiiiiiiiine, it explains whole Europe and even South America. California’s visits are obviously from ClustrMaps or maybe even Google or Wordpress, I know…

But!

Look at an image of olivetalks’s ClustrMap from today (if you click on the image you can see an enlarged version, where the dots are clearer), right in the middle of the yellow circle:

Do you see that? Do you? It’s a dot from what I’m guessing is a Japanese island (2nd guess would be a boat… 3rd a shark with Internet connection…). Yes! A user from Japan checked out olivetalks!

Can I finally consider myself successful for obtaining my first reader without any nudging involved? Can I, can I? Or should I just accept the fact that I have a Japanese cousin…

All the best,

theolive

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We intend to use this blog to comment on anything and everything that we find interesting.

Who are we? Good question. Bear with us and you will soon find out.

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