Night and day

I think the idea of a surveillance camera powered by the sun is not a bad one, but I would like to see the cell connected to a deep cycle battery so that after the sun goes down it could still function. Say if one had one posted at the foot of the driveway leading up to your illicit late night Old Maid/cricket fighting gamepit. Maybe an infrared spotlight too off of the same power source, for illumination, and a camouflage blind over the whole thing too.

All round-eye look same

Have you yourself been worried of giving offense because you, a white person, have difficulty remembering or distinguishing the characteristic facial features of those of Asian descent? Well you can relax now, as we find out that everybody is that way.

They’re Caucasians and they look alike. It’s not easy to distinguish them.

The person speaking is a government official of the Philippines referring to a meeting which may or may not have been held with representatives of the International Monetary Fund in Washington DC. Or perhaps it was the World Bank. Or some white guys with a bunch of money from somewhere apparently.

I blame faulty ethnology, and maybe a lack of name tags.

Note on the title of the post: I have only heard the imagined slur in jest. Also, I have no plans to register that domain, which does seem to be available.

Image generated at the Ultimate Flash Face site

While we're speaking of Italian, I have a question about Gli Bronchi

Denver Broncos logo, lit (2001),
originally uploaded by oddharmonic.

When the New England Patriots apply a drubbing to the Denver team, is that an outbreak of bronchitis? Or would it be the other way around, since -itis implies an inflammation?

I pose this question coming off of a week-plus long bout of bronchitis. The most valuable players on my team were Levofloxacin and Promethazine.

I hate earworms

"Indiana Jones" movie poster in Italian,
originally uploaded by kubacheck.

Maybe this is a couple of months late, or maybe a bit early, but I've been troubled by this every time they play the theme to that movie for years now. Either my Google-fu is weak or I'm the only one who hears it though.
Link (MIDI file)

Rendezvous with mouth

Essential tremor is a condition that can affect the ability to use one's hands in a steady fashion and often causes the person who has it to have problems feeding themselves, drinking, or grooming. Medical researchers are working on treatments involving neural stimulation as well as pharmaceuticals, but there are also technologically assisted methods of helping sufferers deal with the unwanted motion.

A device which fits on the person's body to attenuate the motion caused by essential tremor has been the subject of a Mechanical Engineering thesis. I was thinking, though, of a way to compensate for the tremors by using special utensils which were instrumented to correct for the shake much the same way that high-end digital cameras compensate for shaking, or perhaps like the automatic docking system used on the ESA's unmanned transports to ISS. I imagine a fork, knife, or spoon with 3-axis acceleratometers inside the handle, along with a miniature video camera pointing at the destination (the mouth), with an articulated drive holding the working end of the utensil steady despite hand tremor. Now that they have tiny motors built into mascara applicators, it cannot be too difficult to put one into a piece of flatware.

I can foresee one issue with the invention, however: would it be dishwasher-safe? Perhaps if the water-sensitive part were detachable from the spoon/knife/fork part in a way similar to the interchangeable heads on an electric toothbrush, one could get around this too.