My wife and I have an in-ground pool in a large Arizona Room. (An Indoor pool). While having an indoor pool is nice, we haven’t gotten to use it yet, because IT IS COLD! Being indoors it receives almost no sunlight, and so it doesn’t warm. Enter the solar water heater.
We did something similar to this:
Total cost was about $50.
$35 -- 500′ roll of 1/2″ “funny pipe” hose.
$15 -- Misc Fittings to go from pool filter to the heater.
The final result is great! The flow isn’t very much (it has less than 10psi of pressure). The pool water enters the filter at about 80 degrees (the top layer of water in the pool is warm, but once you go down about 6″ it drops to below 60). And the water leaving the heater is 95 degrees when the heater is in the sunlight. If there is no sunlight, the heater effectively stops working, even though the ambient temperature is 90+.
We placed the output of the heater into the bottom of the pool so that the hot water goes into the bottom where the cold water is, we are hoping this helps to mix the water some.
Pictures:
We want to make this a permanent part of the pool, and mount it on the roof instead of just placing it on the grass. We aren’t sure yet how to do it in a way that looks professional yet. We’re still working on it. We have a few ideas, but we aren’t set on anything yet. Fortunately, in a few more weeks, the pool should be warm enough, and we can pack the heater away until winter.
Scientists designed their own DNA for a new lfie form. (Including a “designed by humans” watermark so that it will never be confused for a natural organism.) They took this DNA they designed, created it, and then injected into bacteria cells. The bacteria cells original dna was destroyed (through some mystical bio chemistry/dna magic). And the bacteria began reproducing itself with the new DNA.
Unless I am missing something, and this isn’t actually totally awesome and new. This is a huge breakthrough that leads the way to custom building bacteria for specific tasks such as converting co2 to bio fuel (I think that’s a little stretch), cleaning up oil-spills (wouldn’t that be nice right now), etc…
After two years of being seperated I was able to go to VA and bring back my ShoTruck! Last night I spent some time on it, just doing the basics it needs after 2 years in storage. I am really excited to get it finished. I have to finish some basic electrical work, the throttle cable, fix a bad oil leak, and a little welding on the lower braces and it should drive…
May 11th – I was able to start the car today. A little starting fluid, and it fired right up! I need to fix the oil leak though. It is really really bad.
May 13th – Investigate the oil leak and discovered it is coming from the oil cooler… Did some research on how to remove it and fix it.
JavaScript was once nothing more than a cool toy. It’s uses were limited to things like scrolling status bar, and annoying popups. Today, it is what powers Web2.0. The creative genius at Stewdio in London has used it to recreate a classic game in a new way!
Imagine being able to control your game character with your mind. Or, fly an airplane by thinking. Well, the enabling technology to do this can now be purchased and used by anyone.
I first saw this technology when I was about 10 years old, on an episode of NOVA. A man had built a special EEG headband and a wireless link that allowed him to steer his yacht just by thinking. The military has investigated the technology but deemed it not beneficial for their uses.
I did a few simple experiments myself to try to make it work, but I didn’t have sensitive enough equipment. But! Emotiv invested in the technology and has made it work. Interestingly the headset is much better at detecting emotions then specific thoughts or intentions. I imagine games may emerge that allow your character to fly when you are happy, and be a terror when you are angry. Whether this will help people learn to control their emotions or create a generation of murdering psycho paths is yet to be seen. Emotiv has also added gyroscope controls similar to the Wii so that your computer can tell where your head is.
(This is an ultra high velocity air gun.) 1500+ fps… Will Shoot AA Batteries, or Big Nails, Or whatever else you can put in it… And, because it’s muzzle loading, it is not a firearm. This one gets my vote.
(A AA at 1000 FPS againsta milk jug.) Faster and MUCH More Energy than a 12Ga Slug. Details
Ensure some motivation (preferably public humiliation by the team) is in place when someone “breaks the build”
Continuum is EASY to setup (download the tarball, run bin/continuum.sh (or .bat) start (if on windows, continuum.bat install first) Then add your project
It’s best to do an automated build for every commit (either have Continuum poll the svn server, or setup an svn post commit hook to fire it off)
Continuum is very tightly integrated with Maven2
If you send out build failure notifications, put the addresses in continuum instead of the pom, because if they are in the pom, and other people download your code and build it witn continuum and don’t change the POM you get their build failure notifications.
There are many other CI choices other then Continuum, use something!
Domain Driven Design
by: Don Weinmann
Very cool session with lots of cool ideas. The whole idea of Aggregates was new to me. I wish I could sum it up here… But it was very in depth, view below links if your interested in learning more.
No, Jeremy’s not disillusioned… Functional Programming is really cool and has very practical applications. Namely reliability and concurrency… YAWS (a websever written in erlang) can handle 80,000 concurrent connections. Whereas apache chokes at about 4,000. Rumered to be the webserver that powers facebook. The telecom industry makes extensive use of functional programming as well.
by: Aaron Cure
You can get an 18F2455 Microchip (made by Microchip) and with five extra components connect it to a USB port and interact with it from C# (this means controlling all 16 of the I/O pins as well as accessing an analog input.) You do have to burn an initial image to the chip, BUT! Once you burn the initial image, you can reload the code on the device via the usb port without needing a sperate flasher. Code for the chip, and code to get you started on LOTS of PIC projects can be found in the JALlib.
Totally Awesome!
Use a TRIac to control AC current with it.
Use it for anything.
Build a red light green light broken build indicator to work with you CI server.
This has been one of my favorite reads of all time. At first I bought it solely as a book to get a laugh from people with, but as I began to read it I discovered there were lots of ways to lie with statistics that I hadn’t thought of myself yet. As always, I am not a proponent of activities such as this, but I feel it is very valuable to be aware…
Here are a few of the ways he gives to lie with statistics…
Use images instead of graphs.
Lets say you want to illustrate that salleries have doubled in 10 years. But you want it to make an impact… So you prepare an image that has a dollar sign over a label that says “Then” and then you have a dollar sign that you have scaled by 2x with the label “Now”. This is very misleading, because when you scaled the money bag by 2x, you didn’t just make it 2x as tall, you made it 2x as wide… Effectively making it 4x it’s original size! This makes for a MUCH better impact than just a simple bar graph.
When presenting a graph make the scale very small or don’t include one at all.
You can make almost any “growth” look phenomenal if you pick the right scale. Lets say your sales grew $100 dollars. This is huge if you are a ten year old running a lemonade stand, but insignificant if your a fortune 500 company. So, draw your graph like you are a lemonade stand… Make the bottom of the graph be last years sales, and make the top of the graph last years sales + $100. It’s easy! Be careful with this one though, because if you go too far, it will be obvious.
Never play when the odds are fair.
One of my favorite Star Wars characters once said something along the lines of “Never play if the odds are fair.” (He said this prior to fixing an election on a small planet.) The same is true with marketing. You never ever want to commission a survey with the intent of publishing the results without first doing something to ensure your own success.
There are lots of ways of commissioning this study with the odds in your favor.
First, send salesmen to 100 dentists and give them hundreds of samples of your toothpaste. Explain to them all the benefits of your tooth patse, and then ask them if they would recommend your toothpaste to clients.
Ask your sales dept for a list of all the dentists that have ordered your toothpaste and send them surveys asking them what toothpaste they recomment.
Hire four dentists on your staff, and after 3 months ask them which toothpaste they would recommend.
Send lots of your toothpaste to a small third world country. Then, send surveys (with promises of more toothpaste for each returned survey) to each of the dentists that received the paste.
Pick the average that suites you best
What most of us (unless your a marketer) have forgotten from high school math is that there are 3 different ways to get an average… (Watch the video.)
Mean Median and Mode
As that video illustrates… When you say “Average” you actually get to take your pick from one of three numbers (mean, median, and mode)… And you aren’t required to say which! So, just pick the one that looks best, and stick with it.
What does this mean for me?
Dig behind the numbers. Never take a statement from an untrusted source at face value. (and never trust an advertisement) If it’s true, there will be evidence to support it. In the words of a very very very smart person… “By their fruits, ye shall know them.”
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