| Guess what you can do with chicken feathers? Well, previously, not much. But somebody just discovered that if you heat them to 700 degrees, they carbonize in a way that can soak up hydrogen.
The most dense storage for hydrogen seems to be using nanotubes, but you can't pay a million dollars for a fuel tank. With chicken feathers it would be "good enough", and cost more like $100. Now all we need to do is get cracking on more serious energy production and do some serious electrolysis and I guess we're set...maybe. Slashdot has some more on this.
Personally I think this could play very well with wind farm technology, and interestingly enough, chicken feathers can be used in making wind mill blades...though some may look upon that as a sort of cannibalism.
PETA may raise a stink, but there are so many wasted chicken feathers already, it's not like we'll have to slaughter more chickens. | comments: Leave a comment   |
| Apple has not patched a serious six-month-old security vulnerability in Java. Read more here. It's recommended that Mac users disable Java in their browsers until Apple fixes this.
Mind you, the article claims that Java isn't terribly secure for any of us; it's just particularly easy to take advantage of for unpatched versions, which includes all Macs, and lazy Windows and Linux users. So Windows and Linux folks need to make sure you're running the newest, and maybe still disable it. | | comments: Leave a comment |
| Yesterday Cade had one of those long grabber things (the things you use to reach in tight places to pick stuff up), one with a dinosaur head for a grabber. He started singing, and opening and closing the dinosaur mouth to the words.
BTW, I want to mention that I would find this a challenge, because in doing, say, sock puppets, when you make most of the noise your mouth is open, so you exercise your muscles to open the puppet then. At least that's how I think about it. So to properly articulate the mouth on a grabber, you have to do the opposite: squeeze during the rests. Cade figured this out as he started singing and I saw him time it increasingly better as the song went on.
Just found that too cool to resist mentioning ;-) . | | comments: Leave a comment |
| Yes, Mac lovers, your machines are just as susceptible to being pwned as those of us Windows folks: see here.
As always, be careful what you download. | | comments: 4 comments or Leave a comment |
| Here's something I didn't know about, and apparently neither do most alcoholics. According to this, there are anti-addiction pills for alcoholism. Two different types, depending on the type of addiction. Note that these aren't intended to replace support groups etc., just improve their effectiveness. I thought it was interesting enough to share, as lots of folks have alcoholics in the family.
Now if only there was something equivalent for other drug addictions...(unless these are useful for other drugs as well; the article doesn't say)
There are apparently also some new cancer pills (not a lot of details on their effectiveness or for what types of cancers, unfortunately). But here the problem is that in the hospital, your medical plan covers the visit. Your prescription drug benefits are separate, however, so even though these pills can decrease the cost of cancer treatment, the drug insurers don't want to cover it because it increases their separate costs. And the doctors aren't thrilled about prescribing it either because it cuts into their more expensive, existing procedures. Mind you, as I work in the cancer industry, it's probably not terrific for my company either, but really...sad news. Hopefully it will change soon. At the moment, when people do go on these drugs, they're often paying thousands of dollars a month for them. | | comments: Leave a comment |
| | The snow melting off actually left my car all shiny, almost as good as a car wash. Usually it ends up grimy after the snow melts. | | comments: 2 comments or Leave a comment |
| Yay, the "0 degree" problem (from here) is in fact with my Samsung 215TW monitor and, as it has a whopping 3 year warranty, I'm not doomed to live with the problem forever. Downside is I have to ship it in for a repair (they can't send me a temporary monitor so I'll have to borrow one from my work machine).
Now I just have to deal with boxing it up and shipping it (ugh). | | comments: 2 comments or Leave a comment |
| I'm having a weird problem with my desktop computer.
Frequently, right in the middle of my monitor, will appear a transparent gray overlay containing a white 0° .
It very much seems to be triggered by motion...like if I bang on my desk or kick the floor I can sometimes trigger it. But often it is just triggered by typing, or a slight fidgeting of my body. Usually it appears twice in a row and then is gone for awhile.
Oh, and I'm running Vista. I have one internal HD and two external HDs as well (all Seagates)--I mention this because hard drives are the major thing I know of to have motion sensors (for free-fall situations). But how such a thing would trigger, and make its way to my display, has me baffled. But if not the hard drives, then I don't know what hardware would trigger this at all.
Does anyone have any ideas? I have googled for this numerous times and found nothing. It's really really obnoxious to have this thing distract me all the time. I would be tempted to call MS, but naively I purchased the OEM version of Vista, which does not include MS support incidents. | | comments: 4 comments or Leave a comment |
| This is so cool:
Google can predict flu outbreaks, based on geographic correlation of flu-related searches. See here for article and here for the map.
It's almost as amazing as Eric Silver who predicted the election results based on lots of mathematical analysis. Sorry I can't find the explanatory article anymore. | | comments: Leave a comment |
| I have used the Amazon.com universal wish list button exactly once and I already love it. Rather than absolutely require that every vendor sell through them, they let you use this button (which goes right in your browser's toolbar links) to add any URL, price, and description to your wish list so you can integrate just about anything into your Amazon.com wish list.
lifehacker review here.
This is definitely going to get more use in my future. | | comments: Leave a comment |
| This year it looks like we'll finally have a warm Halloween. Yay!
I have carved out a Mickey Mouse Jack-o-Lantern for Cade using a styrofoam pumpkin and a hot knife (I think that's its name anyway, it's an electric tool), and now have a bit of a headache. I hope this is the only side effect of breathing a few cyanide fumes (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) starherd warned me about this).
Just curious, are other people doing anything interesting for Halloween? starherd is going up to a haunted house in Denver later tonight after trick-or-treat, so I'm pretty much at home for the duration. And Cade is being super-cute...and clingy... | | comments: Leave a comment |
| | For those of you who saw the debate last night, and McCain's endless references to Joe the Plumber, read this. | | comments: 2 comments or Leave a comment |
| | Apparently Cade just came out of his speech therapy, looked at a red fire alarm, and read "F-I-R-E--fire". I don't even recall having helped sound out that word for him before. I wonder if they learned this at school... | | comments: Leave a comment |
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accomplished![[mood icon]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/growf/dwaggins/up.gif){kind=small}
impressed![[mood icon]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/growf/dwaggins/sad.gif){kind=small}
uncomfortable![[mood icon]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/growf/dwaggins/blah.gif){kind=small}
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productive![[mood icon]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/growf/dwaggins/angry.gif){kind=small}
infuriated