"We interrupt this program..."

War of the Worlds, the infamous radio play based on the book by H. G. Wells, turned 70. When it initially aired, people in the U.S had the daylights scared out from themselves. Obviously there was also outrage over this radio play, as has been for other such "newscasts." Remember Without Warning on TV in 1994? Yes, people got scared and outraged. Bye Bye Belgium in 2006? Yep. You know the answer. Same reaction. Sometimes I tend to think that even now 70 years later, people blindly trust whatever they hear on the television, radio etc and are simply unable to make a distinction between fact and fiction. Honestly, I personally find faux newscasts to be quite entertaining. So what would I do if I happened to tune into a faux newscast and I am unaware that it is fake. I have three simple rules for that.
1. Switch to another channel, preferrably a news one - if there are really Martian cylinders falling from the sky, then it is obvious that all news channels from CNN to Al Jazeera would have their staff up and in arms, covering the story. If noone else is talking about that, and other channels do not mention it even in their teletexts(especially if they are in the "affected" area)... something is fishy.
2. Run a Google News search on the event "covered." The news must have started somewhere from a smaller source, and once again, read rule no. 1 - you ought to find other news sources confirming it if it really was real. Although caveat: If you find another news service reporting the event, look who they claim as a source. Maybe they have believed the faux newscast.
3. If you have been unable to verify that the event is really happening in real life, then sit back in your couch, and enjoy the entertainment and imagine as if you were in an action movie.

Going up? Or going down?

Now, at the time, when people are keeping their eyes on every stock index from Nikkei to Dow Jones, I thought I'd write about a way of keeping track on my emotions... Tension lack index. I got inspiration for this initially in 2004 when hearing about stock prices rising/falling/being steady from the news. I started daily calculations of it on 30 October 2005 at 15:15 with initial value of 100 points. I am raising it a certain level of percents(4-20, depending on the strength of emotions) when I have a positive emotion, and lower when I have a negative emotion. Using a preprogrammed calculator, doing this is easy. Daily at or near 19:00 UTC, I write this value down. As a result I have an insight how well or not well I have been doing. Now, today, I added a feature this blog which enables to show the latest write-down with the recorded change during the previous day.