We wanted to give those of you who have been following the progress of this lamp from a wild idea to a final product something special, so we made a special limited edition just for you.

The limited edition features a laser engraved signature at the bottom of the UFO and a specially printed certificate poster. The lamp is made from metal with a high quality finish, and it comes complete with an alien crew, a perspex beam, a bovine abductee and real fake grass on a non-slip base. The antenna function as the on-off switch as promised, and it can also enable a very smooth pulsing of the light. I am happy to say that great attention has been made to every detail, making this a high quality product that I hope you will be happy to own.

Everyone who posted a comment on this blog or signed up at the original or the new abductionlamp.com should now have received an invitation to order a limited edition Alien Abduction Lamp.

There are only 2000 of these lamps, so hurry up and grab one at http://abductionlamp.com/order

And of course, the grass and/or cow can be removed so that you can place any figure or object that you want to have abducted in the beam.

We have now published the new website for The Alien Abduction Lamp, and we are showing a picture of a prototype for the first time! The picture shows the last prototype, and there will only be very small changes (if any) before production starts.

If you have been following the progress for this lamp since the start, you will notice that we have managed to produce a lamp that is very true to my original 3D renderings. The way from concept to prototype has gone very well, without having to compromise on any important details. The few changes that have been made from the renderings to the final products have been by will and by listening to your feedback in my little survey rather than by necessity. The most noticeable change is the removal of the ornaments and pattern to arrive at a more timeless and clean result. You probably also noticed that it has taken quite a while, but seeng the beautiful result, I think it has been worth the extra time.

The UFO itself is very solid and cast in metal with a beautiful black pearl finish (you can’t really see how nice the finish is in this otherwise great photo). The antenna functions as the on off switch, and it also has a third position for pulsing light. And of course it comes complete with glow-in-the-dark aliens, real fake grass and a poor removable bovine abductee!

The Alien Abduction Lamp. Photo by Tiger Global

Now, pull out your 3D glasses and head over to abductionlamp.com to take a look for yourself!

(Those of you who have sent me a message with your email from the old website do not need to send a new one now.)

This great little video shows how people who believe in certain ’supernatural’ concepts often think they are open minded, when in fact they have misunderstood the concept of an open mind altogether, and would benefit from learning critical thinking to protect their minds from collecting too much rubbish.

Lately I find that there is an overwhelming amount of people who seem to get a kick out of collecting followers just to expand their audience. There are also a number of theories on how to increase the amount of followers.

A Twitter Bot Contest

I am not too interested in the quantity of followers myself, but I do find this interesting from a strategical point of view. I think it would be very interesting to test different theories on maximizing the amount of followers by setting up a number of twitter bots with different strategies to see how well they perform.

The idea for a twitter bot contest comes from reading Robert Axelrod’s book “The Evolution of Cooperation” many years ago. The book described different algorithms competing to perform best at Prisoner’s Dilemma (among many other things). Competing to get twitter followers is very different from the tit-for-tat competition, and many times more entertaining since (mostly) real people are involved on the other end.

Twitter ranking

There are a lot of different ways to measure twitter success – from the most basic following / follower ratio to more advanced twitter ranks that takes the amount of people referencing your account into consideration. A ratio is simple and nice, but it does not favour a user following 10.000 people that he follows back over a user with 10 people that follow each other.  It is obviously a lot harder to get 10.000 people into your network than to just invite your friends, so quantity should be rewarded.

A success criteria for such a bot could be the number of followers with a punishment for the number of people the bot is following. After all, following someone is very easy, but getting them to follow you back requires more effort. (For a real person it is probably more ethical to follow the people following you back, but getting a lot of followers without following them back is a lot harder to do).

I came up with the following equation to achieve the score distribution that I was after:

Just following someone gives 0 points if nobody follows back, getting lots of followers without following anyone back gives you a score equal to the number of followers, and the same number of following and followers gives a score equal to half the followers. I don’t think the number of tweets or retweets are impotant in determining the score because they both affect the number of followers. So making the number of followers most important parameter should cover it.

Plotting this equation gives the following graph:

I have made my own test bot. It has been running for five days, and it is now following 1.737 people with 706 people following it back. This gives it a score of  just 152 according to the above formula. The bot is still running, so I will not reveal its name yet because I don’t want to influence its performance by promoting it.

What do you think?

The score could of course also be used to rank normal twitter accounts. Let me know if you think this is a useful way of ranking twitter users.

Now it’s just a matter of someone else building a bots to compete with this score. Let me know if you are half as geeky as I am these days and join in. I’ll gladly share some rules and the code to get this going.

Oh, and you can follow my updates on twitter if you want to.

The graphic above was displayed in place of the image in a series of pictures I imported from Canon 5D Mark II. This kept me puzzled for a while until I remembered that I had switched from RAW to sRAW because I knew I would not need the full 21 Megapixels. I did a test by taking a picture at each RAW setting, and it turned out that sRAW1 and sRAW2 are unsupported by Apple in Aperture. This apparently goes for all other Canon cameras with the sRAW option too.

I am posting this because others might be wondering why they get this lovely burgundy rectangle instead of their images. My first thought was that the images were corrupted, but the images open just fine in Photoshop.

I have not been able to verify if Lightroom supports sRAW. If you know, please drop a comment below!

Skeptoid Podcast

I have been looking around for a good skeptic podcast, and my search ended with Skeptoid. It is well presented and entertaining and it is a good example of applied critical thinking. So many of the others, including the skeptic society, is simply a pain to listen to because of terrible sound quality. But you might want to check out James Randi’s podcast, which is also good.

Are you wondering what to do while you are waiting for the Alien Abduction Lamp?

Maybe a short stay with our green or grey little friends could be a good way of killing time. I don’t have any connections to help you get there, but I have put together this t-shirt for you to wear so that you can let them know who to get if they are in the neighborhood…

The text is glow-in-the-dark, and it is printed to be easily viewed from space.

Freshome were among the first to write about the Alien Abduction Lamp back in june 2007, and I have been following them since then. They have now included the Alien Abduction Lamp in their list of 40 of the most creative lamp designs ever. I recommend this article to get a look at the other lamps. I am very happy to see the Alien Abduction Lamp in such great company.

Two Alien Abduction Lamp prototypes arrive at Oslo airport

Standing before me on my desk at home is a fully functional prototype of the Alien Abduction Lamp – complete with lights and alien pilots.

As the designer of this lamp, I am not going to begin to describe the feeling of holding a physical version of the lamp that I have been working with renderings and models of for the the last year and a half. 

I suppose that your first reaction is to want to see a picture or a video, but I am afraid that I can not show any images yet. This is after all a prototype, and as with all prototypes, the overall look is somewhat different from what a final product.

Please trust me for now when I say that the lamp looks fantastic! I am convinced that those of you who wanted a lamp after seeing the computer generated images will definitely want to own the real thing.

When will it be available?

I have had a long and productive meeting with the representative from the company in London who is in charge of sourcing this lamp from a highly experienced lamp factory in China. We were both very happy with how the lamps look, and we agreed on a relatively short list of amendments that need to be made before we can say it is finished.

Messages keep ticking in daily from abductionlamp.com to ask me if this lamp is available yet, so I know there are many people wondering how long it is going to be before we start shipping the lamp. Drew agrees with me that making the product as good as possible is more important than rushing to meet a specific date.

All I can say right now is that the heaviest work is behind us, and that we are rapidly ironing out the last minor issues. We are working to have the lamp ready as soon as possible, but we have not set a final deadline yet. I think you will agree with our priorities and be happy that we are making no compromises once you see the final product.

Limited edition

We are considering a special opportunity for all of you who have followed the lamp faithfully by sending messages at abductionlamp.com and by posting comments with your email here at herrklein.com. You will be the first to know, and we will invite all of you to be the first to get a chance to order a limited edition sample with a certificate that I will personally sign for you as soon as we get the lamp ready.

Kind regards,

Lasse

This morning, however, we were rickrolled. Not in the usual boring way where you are unknowingly taken to the original Rick Astley video. This one was far better simply by being well executed and by keeping the rickrolling in context: