Geek Drivel

I was at a Radio Shack today, and discovered a package labeled “High Speed USB 2.0 Beverage Warmer!” I had to read it several times before I convinced myself that I wasn’t misreading. A hot-plate plugged into your computer is fairly weird in and of itself, but it would only need to draw power from a USB port, so why would the person drawing up the packaging insist on pointing out that it’s specifically USB 2.0, instead of 1.x?

It wasn’t until I read the small type that I discovered that it was also a USB hub. It’s still humorous, but I found it a lot funnier before I saw that.

Some things just beg you to put on a puzzled and/or disbelieving expression and say “huh?”. This qualifies as one of them.

Vacationing in the buff? Hey, why not?

“Computer keyboards are filthier than toilets, according to a recent study.” Oh my, everybody break out the disinfectant wipes, pronto!

Has no one considered that the strength of your immune system, like many other biological systems, depends on how much exercise it gets? Regular exposure to common bacteria and viruses is what keeps it strong. Wipe out all of that, and the first cold virus that gets through your defenses will kill you. If you’ve got a healthy immune system, the only way to strengthen it (and keep it healthy) is to expose yourself to germs — the more minor germs you can get exposure to, the better. Then, when the next major and potentially fatal epidemic comes around, you’ve got a much better chance of being able to fight it off and survive.

Thanks, but I’ll keep my germ-covered keyboard just the way it is.

A look at the systematic and dishonest fiddling that has been done with climate data to make us think that there is a global warming problem, followed by a reminder that none of this is new:

Bear in mind that warming and cooling concerns are nothing new, as this alarming bulletin reminds us -

The Arctic ocean is warming up, icebergs are growing scarcer and in some places the seals are finding the water too hot, according to a report to the Commerce Department yesterday from Consul Ifft, at Bergen, Norway. Reports from fishermen, seal hunters and explorers, he declared, all point to a radical change in climate conditions and hitherto unheard-of temperatures in the Arctic zone. Exploration expeditions report that scarcely any ice has been met with as far north as 81 degrees 29 minutes. Soundings to a depth of 3,100 meters showed the gulf stream still very warm. Great masses of ice have been replaced by moraines of earth and stones, the report continued, while at many points well known glaciers have entirely disappeared. Very few seals and no white fish are found in the eastern Arctic, while vast shoals of herring and smelts, which have never before ventured so far north, are being encountered in the old seal fishing grounds.

A RealClimate blogger? No, that was the US Weather Bureau in 1922.

We saw a global cooling scare in 1924, a global warming scare in 1933, another global cooling in the early 1970s, and another warming scare today. The changes the USHCN promised Watts won’t help resolve anything for another decade or so, but perhaps future generations will be able to reduce the alarming increase in the number of climate alarms.

Maybe global warming is a real problem — but having dishonest scientists lie about it isn’t going to convince people of it.

Although the most obvious use for this is to replace flash memory, I suspect it’s going to be very important in the future, to a lot of different applications.

Poloni Ploni Almoni mentioned this page to me. I’m not an MBA, and I’ve never studied their way of thinking, so it was quite eye-opening, and finally explains a lot about cell phone providers that I’ve never understood before.