If it is, you should probably send it back to the manufacturer.
(Via.)
Is your plush uterus accessible to young children?
16 January 2009 — danSometimes, stupidity IS painful
5 January 2009 — danBen Goldacre has written about Christine Maggiore, that HIV-AIDS denialist lady who refused to take precautions to prevent her HIV infection being passed on to her children. One kid died at the age of three; Christine herself died the other day at the age of 52. Maggiore's followers insist that AIDS had nothing to do with either death, of course.
Now, I know you might, given this, feel tempted to leap to the conclusion that there might just possibly not be much substance to the many "alternative" theories regarding the causation and curability of AIDS. You might even find yourself tending towards the belief that the current conventional antiretroviral drugs may be in some small way useful.
But there are many, many immensely promising AIDS treatments that the great Conventional Medical Conspiracy won't even allow people to test, lest it become clear to everyone that you can cure AIDS in one night by a simple and entirely natural process.
So stick to your guns, HIV denialists! No-one can prove that you haven't found a cure!
You might like to cut back a bit on the toddler-killing, though. That's not good for your image.
(See also What's The Harm?, which aggregates news stories about woo-woo-related deaths. It has a subcategory for people killed by HIV/AIDS denial, which currently contains only 25 people, which I think is several orders of magnitude too small. This may be because What's The Harm don't know the exact vast number of people in sub-Saharan Africa who may not have much access to any sort of real AIDS treatment, but who only get HIV in the first place because the local woo-woo says you can't catch it if you have sex standing up, or something.)
(The Skeptic's Dictionary has a news archive on the subject of woo-woo risks, too, covering rip-offs and other forms of human misery as well as actual deaths. It's also called What's The Harm?.)
Osculate your Altair today!
24 December 2008 — dan
I think the best part of this mystifying advertisement from the latest DailyWTF post is the bit at the top where it asks you if you've kissed your computer lately.
Years ago, when I was working at ACAR/PC Review, we somehow ended up with dozens of boxed copies of an accounting package called, and I assure you I am not making this up, "Tungkiss Your Money".
On the box was a moderately realistic picture of a man holding his hands, full of gold coins, up to his mouth, so he could lovingly lick the bullion.
Andrew, the editor, was pretty good at finding ways to convert randomness like this into profit, or at least perks.
But we never could shift all those Tungkiss Your Moneys.
I get letters, I get letters...
23 December 2008 — danThere is still a drought of letters to me in my capacity as Atomic I/O letters answerer. (Probably because people just switch to e-mailing me at dan@dansdata.com after I answer one question.)
But my two Atomic addresses - dan@atomic as well as io@atomic - do receive the occasional missive. Usually they're spam. This time, there was this:
From: "bo"
To: dan
Subject: pg64 atomic magazine.
[That's the page my Ground Zero column fell on in the most recent magazine. This column was about sci-fi batteries and their theoretical limits. If you don't get Atomic, you'll have to wait another six months before I reprint it on dansdata.com.]
Date: Mon, 22 Dec 2008 19:55:36 +1300Hi Dan-
I can get you the battery technology that will take you well
beyond your 10x Lithium - ion battery.New - Technology- in comparison hundreds of volts compared with an ordinary 12 Volt battery
Yes its real. real technology and yes you can own it -
Let me know if you are interested.
Price is NZ$50,000 - and it is the knowledge of making
new materials that will enable you to construct a battery
that is well well beyond the current technology..So for that money I will give you the new material Knowledge
for to construct as many batteries as you require -
which is new material science..
-
Tradionally batteries have been made by top scientists -
the likes of Sandia National Nuclear Labs USA. - Using a lifetime of
knowledge and equations - substance purity and property etc etcSo if you want it - its yours for $50,000-
just a method ( which is the new material science) to make much better batteries.
Note: There is some Trial and Error - but you will get there in the end.Let me know if you are interested.
Its a matter of Trust - just like Auctions on the Internet -
you send me the money - and I will send you the method-Thanks
Beau
[an address @ xtra.co.nz]
Wow! Hundreds of volts, you say! Unprecedented!
Regrettably, I lack the resources to pay anybody fifty thousand dollars in any currency but that of Zimbabwe.
If anybody reading this would like to invest in this very promising-sounding enterprise, though, I suggest you send the $50,000 to me, so that I can pass it on to Beau.
Just like auctions on the Internet.
It'll be heavy water next
7 December 2008 — danHoly crap! You can get a CPU cooler that moves heat by pumping a sodium/potassium mix!
And here it is: The Danamics LM10, recently reviewed by NordicHardware. It certainly makes the old TS Heatronics Zen CPU Radiator look boring.
The sodium/potassium mixture, called "NaK" from the chemical symbols of the elements, can have a melting point as low as -12.6°C. So it's not incredible that you can use it to cool a PC processor. NaK isn't even very difficult to pump, partly because it's less dense than water. It's highly electrically conductive, so the Danamics cooler shifts it with a non-contact electromagnetic pump.
But NaK is usually used as a coolant in nuclear reactors, not PCs. When you only want to move CPU heat to room-temperature air via a pumpable coolant, and how that coolant interacts with fast neutrons is not very important to you, then about all you can say for NaK is that it's better than mercury.
As the NordicHardware reviewer points out, the high specific heat capacity of water makes it the obvious choice for this application, and many others. Water is streets ahead of every other inexpensive liquid for most coolant applications.
And water also has the advantage that it will not explode if it's ever exposed to even dry air. You can't say that about NaK. (Don't even ask about NaK and moisture.)
The gripping hand, though, is that there's very little reason to make a CPU cooler that uses pumped liquid coolant, unless the coolant is being pumped to a large separate radiator. This is how normal PC water cooling systems, and automotive water cooling for that matter, work; using pumped coolant allows you to have a radiator much larger, and more conveniently located, than you could if all of the cooling fins had to be strapped straight onto the CPU, or engine.
(Sodium has a role in automotive cooling too; some engine valves are hollow, and sodium-filled.)
If all you're doing is moving heat to the fins on the top of a CPU cooler, though, you can just use solid metal and/or heat pipes, because the mountain and Muhammad are pretty much in the same place already.
Years ago, I looked at a water cooler that worked in this way. It was pretty useless. The LM10 is much better than that; NordicHardware concluded that it did at least work about as well as a high-end conventional air cooler.
But the LM10 costs 2,199 Danish kroner, which as I write this is $US375. You can get a whole good-quality CPU water-cooling rig for about a hundred bucks less than that, and top-end conventional coolers are of course far less expensive.
But conventional coolers won't make your computer explode if someone hits it with an axe.
So I suppose the choice is yours.
Get down, baby wood ducks!
6 December 2008 — danThis is probably the most harmless problem ever described on The Daily WTF, but it's also one of the strangest. It's like frightening yourself with ask.com, only... different.
Google now have their own search-autocomplete thingy, which benefits from the somewhat higher average IQ of Google users versus those who, I presume, start every search by typing askjeeves.com into the address bar.
It would appear that the Google search-string database isn't quite as up-to-date as it might be, though.
Update: Oh, look - YouTube does it too!
YouTube connects to to a Google server for its autocompletes, as you'd expect since Google own YouTube, but clearly the results are divided to more effectively serve the two sites' differing demographics.
Google:
And YouTube:
(See also "drinking beer tricks", "eating peanuts tricks", and of course "shooting smack tricks".)
Smiley sky
2 December 2008 — dan
This is my picture of the Moon/Venus/Jupiter "smiley face" conjunction that just happened. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
(The 500-pixel-high version doesn't look like much. The full-size one is better. There was a little cloud, though.)
I wasn't planning to take this picture, but I went for a walk to Echo Point and found a person there hopelessly trying to photograph the conjunction with a full-auto compact camera. Which actually did have a "Starry Sky" mode (among many others, including one called "Food"...) - but said mode was, of course, useless.
So I promised to take a proper picture and e-mail it to her. And when I got back to Echo Point with my DSLR and tripod there was a family there trying to take the same picture, and failing for the same reason. So I harvested an e-mail address from them too.
A few times, I've gone to Echo Point and it's been cloudy or foggy or otherwise not the ideal time to take a picture of the Three Sisters. On those occasions, I've offered to send disappointed photographers a picture I took on another date, because I've got some excellent ones.
My favourite is this one, which I took at 2:37 in the morning, by moonlight, with a thirty-second exposure.
Everyone I've made this offer to so far has declined, though. And fair enough, I suppose; the Three Sisters I photographed last year is not the same Three Sisters you would have photographed had you been able to see it through the bleeding fog. But the Smiley Conjunction I photographed is, within a fairly small time window, the same one that the people I sent it to saw.
The explosion'll get you before the poison does
30 November 2008 — danI just now belatedly noticed that Derek Lowe has written another of his occasional, but always entertaining, posts in his Things I Won't Work With category. (See also.)
This one's about triazadienyl fluoride.
You know how sometimes when you react one dangerous substance, like chlorine, with another dangerous substance, like sodium, you get something perfectly harmless, like table salt?
Well, that's not what happens when you react fluorine with hydrazoic acid.