There are apparently many different type of stink bugs. I thought this was a stink bug, but it’s a pinacate beetle or stink beetle…but also called stink bugs by people.
But I guess these are technically stink bugs:
As long as I’m dumping videos on the site…
Head and motion tracking are getting drastic improvements recently. XBox 360 Natal is amazing (if it delivers) with full body motion tracking using a normal camera combined with an infrared camera.
Even with a camera alone, some cool stuff is being done at the consumer level. Take this Logitech webcam software, for example:
A little while back, we visited a friend in Edgewood who’d installed passive solar water heating. He had hoses on a panel on the roof being heated by the sun. The water from the hoses was pumped into his water heater, making it so that it often doesn’t even need to turn on. He made the external water tank himself with wood and pond lining, keeping the cost really low. He opened the water tank to show me and the water was steaming just from the sun. Amazing! I think our water heater is used to heat our house, so such a setup could be an interesting idea. If I were to try to build it, I’d probably blow up our roof or something.
Our grampa made clocks for his grandchildren. I noticed that they seem to have recordable chimes, so here’s what we did to ours.
By the way, Youtube seems to scan the audio of videos that you upload. It recognized Phantom of the Opera, although I mentioned nothing about that in the video description.
If you were using over-the-air antenna for HDTV in Albuquerque, you may need to re-scan your channels if you’re suddenly not getting 7 and 13 any longer. KOAT-DT and KRQE-DT seem to have switched from UHF to VHF.
I was curious about solar panels vs. Home Owner Associations in Albuquerque. (Though not enough to actually buy solar panels…I was just curious.) Anyway, NM state law says you can put up solar panels and the homeowner assocations can’t stop you. Spiffy! If you happen to have lots o’ cash to buy solar panels, this page has a few local links of interest.
We use Outlook at work. To keep your mailbox from filling up, you have to constantly export to backup files. To keep these files from getting too large, you have to use multiple files. To search for something in the past, you have to search through each file individually. I also made the mistake of using Outlook journals to take notes, so it’s a problem in those too. Searching for something in the past? You better set aside some time! Lesson learned: Microsoft Outlook is bad. I was using Google Notebook for personal notes, but they’re ending development on that.
I was on a tech support call yesterday where the vendor remoted to my machine using gotomeeting. Yet another remote assistance product that works through firewalls and everything, filling in the huge gaping hole that is Microsoft Remote Assistance. These products are vital, but there is a danger to basing your whole product line on a gap in someone else’s product…they may eventually fix it.
I’ve been doing some Windows server administration at work for the first time. I’ve never heard so much clicking.
This page is getting too texty, so here are a couple of videos. Why didn’t you think of that, turkey? (Yeah, more Steve Brule.) (If it doesn’t work, it may require the newest flash player.)
I’ve been reading Trick or Treatment, which is a book about testing alternative medicine. It starts off with an interesting account of the death of George Washington (via bloodletting) and the history of mainstream medicine. (For a long time, mainstream medicine was just ancient Greek medicine that nobody had ever bothered to question and mainly involved bloodletting. It was horrible and ended up killing more people than it helped.) Then, one day, a dude thought, “Hey, maybe we should actually test this stuff.” Everybody else got mad and sued the dude. The book talks about acupuncture and chiropractic therapy, which are both the manipulation of magical energy (chi and “innate intelligence”) in the body that “can’t be detected through any physical means.” It talks about homeopathic medicine, which some German guy came up with in the 1700s (before we even knew about germs) and claims that the more you dilute homeopathic medicine, the more powerful it becomes. So, super-diluted homeopathic medicine (water) can cure almost anything because water has a “memory”. (Who knew?) The descriptions of chiropractic manipulation were just downright scary…having some guy shoving your spine around using 1800s pseudoscience. Sounds like a plan.
But the book also points out that these things actually help people feel better. How can this be? It turns out that if you really expect something to make you feel better, then it may do the job. The example cases were pretty amazing. Because of a lack of morphine at a military field hospitals, an anaesthetist in World War II, Henry Beecher, would sometimes inject saline into a patient and say he was giving a powerful painkiller. The patients relaxed and showed no signs of pain. The book also points out that there are is a wide variety in the quality of studies out there. There are many ways you can cheat in a study…even unintentionally. Biased researchers who want to make their theory come true, lack of any group who thinks they’re getting the treatment but aren’t really (to check for placebo), lack of reproducibility, stacking the deck with different types getting the treatment and the placebo. It takes careful examination of a study to make sure it’s of good quality and not cheating in some subtle way.
So what’s the harm in these treatments if they make people feel better? For one, people may think it’s working and forego something that might work better, as in the case of malaria or even something as simple as eczema. Another problem is the cost. It can all be very expensive for no real reason. As an example, a single duck’s liver goes into making millions of dollars worth of oscilicoccinum (a homeopathic flu remedy). (Remember, the more diluted, the more powerful.) That’s an expensive duck!
The book points out that clinical studies aren’t just a conspiracy to take down alternative medicine, but that such studies also take down conventional medicine theories that turn out to be invalid and even validate alternative medicine theories that turn out to be useful. The book is willing to admit when good clinical trials show a remedy to be effective, as in the case of some herbs that are actually effective in some cases…not because a bunch of anecdotes say so, but because of good testing.
