This just turned up on the radio, and it’s too great for me to keep to myself:
This just turned up on the radio, and it’s too great for me to keep to myself:
In the UK the ER is called A&E (Accident & Emergency). It serves as Urgent Care as well as ER, which is why I found myself there yesterday having smacked my hand something fierce earlier in the day. The nurse practitioner looked at it, ordered an x-ray, then when that came back clear (no breaks, just a bruise) told me to stop being such a girly-man and just take an aspirin. She may not have used any of those words, but the meaning was clear.
Yes, I am falling apart.
Via Neatorama, here’s a summary of the five scariest bugs in the world. I can’t encourage you to watch the videos, because I couldn’t get to the end of any of them:
It’s the size of your thumb and it can spray flesh-melting poison. We really wish we were making that up for, you know, dramatic effect because goddamn, what a terrible thing a three-inch acid-shooting hornet would be, you know? Oh, hey, did we mention it shoots it into your eyes? Or that the poison also has a pheromone cocktail in it that’ll call every hornet in the hive to come over and sting you until you are no longer alive?
I went for a checkup on my dodgy knee today. The good news is that the MRI showed nothing. The bad news is that my knee still hurts. So after a little discussion I’m signed up for four months of physio to see if that can fix things.
That’s the injury. The insult is that the only aerobic exercise left to me is swimming, which I strongly dislike. But if there’s one thing I dislike more than swimming, it’s swimming front crawl; I am, as those of you who know me will be unsurprised to hear, a breast-stroking man. So can you guess which stroke is not actually helping my knee, and which one I should do instead? That’s right.
I was out all day yesterday learning how to use a Hippotizer. It’s a machine/software combination used to control video displays at concerts, plays, TV events etc. It allows you to place filters on the video, combine sources, and route them to different displays including LED boards.
It’s an impressively clever bit of technology, but what struck me most is that almost all of the clever is hidden. The app has very few arbitrary limits on it; a lot of software stops you doing certain things for perfectly good technical reasons, but from the user’s point of view there’s no obvious reason why not. The Hippotizer doesn’t really have that; it works with a certain number of inputs and outputs, but apart from that if you can think of a way to manipulate the tools it provides it will probably let you.
The second key feature is the amount of work it can do. Recent versions can handle multiple HD feeds, applying filters to each one and to the master output. That’s a huge amount of data to be slinging around, yet it manages it while keeping lag down to just one or 2 frames (they’re currently working on a feature that isn’t yet fast enough, because it lags by 5 frames, or around 1/5th of a second – too slow). And if that’s not enough, you can network multiple units together.
Oh, in case you’re wondering, I’m not on commission.