(Homeopathy is an alternative medicine, which treats diseases with ultra-pure water.)

In digging deeper, I found this was not an aberration, that there are practitioners of veterinary homeopathy in many parts of North America. One disturbing thing I found was in a question-and-answer page on the web site of the person responsible for training many of these practitioners:

Q 12. If you are treating an animal with homeopathy and they need dentistry (perhaps teeth removed), or are thought to have Lyme disease, or develop an infection or abscess, would you then change over to using antibiotics and other allopathic treatments?

There are many veterinarians that offer homeopathy that do not really rely on it when “times get tough”, when there is what appears to be an infection or severe inflammatory condition. This, of course, is their professional opinion but going back and forth between homeopathy and the usual use of drugs does not really work well and is not the most skillful approach. You may not have choice in this regard but if you do, especially with animals having a chronic condition, try to find a veterinarian that firmly believes in and uses homeopathy even in what appears to be serious illness.

(The term “allopathic” is a term used by homeopathic proponents to describe standard medicine.)

For human beings, we might expect some benefit from homeopathy just because of the placebo effect. However for non-human beings, presumably homeopathy will have absolutely no effect because they will not have a placebo response.

I hope there are not too many animals that suffer unnecessarily as a result of being given pure water instead of real veterinary care.

Challenging Dogma,
originally uploaded by andrewrosspoetry.

I somehow got sucked into a rather exhausting debate on evolution with creationist Andrew Ross in the comment section of one of his photographs on Flickr.

Come Gather Round Me, Parnellites

The Beta 0.5 will soon be available for installation from the Palm application web page.

Changes:

1. Internal changes to how the search radius is adjusted according to the local density of photographs.
2. Make the refresh button semi-transparent.
3. Miscellaneous bug fixes.

Please add any questions or comments below.

Update:

There is now a new dedicated web page for the app, as well as a video clip demo:

The Beta 0.4 is now available for installation from the Palm application web page.

Changes:

1. Photos do not now automatically refresh when new photos are available, but instead the user controls the refresh explicitly by pressing a button.
2. Included with the title of a photo is an indication of how far away and in what direction is the photo.
3. Miscellaneous bug fixes.

Please add any questions or comments below.

A much improved 0.3 version is now ready for installation from the Palm application web page.

Changes in 0.3:

1. Display the photo title, which is also a hyperlink to the Flick photo page.
2. Improve algorithm for selecting photographs to include closeness as well as interestingness, and to automatically adjust the radius of search depending on the density of nearby photos.
3. Display a status message when communicating with Flickr so when you have a slow network connection you can tell what is happening.
4. Display some dummy photos in case you have no network connection or if there are no photos within 32 km.
5. Use photos to which I have copyright (my own) as the example photos and dummy photos.
6. Fixed some bugs encountered when flicking through photos.
7. Fixed some bugs accessing Flickr.

Please add any comments or questions below.

(Update: There is now an later release)

You can install the beta release from the Palm application web page.

This is a personal open-source project. The code is on GitHub.

(Update: there is now a new improved release.)

I like the Pimsleur courses a lot. They allow you to get to a very basic speaking level in a language very quickly.

The courses are audio-only — in fact, they expressly discourage you from reading the language while you are listening to the course.

Nevertheless, now that I am finished the first eight lessons I feel
the need to actually see what the written Chinese (both pinyin and
characters) looks like. So here is the vocabulary from Pimseur Quick
and Simple Chinese Mandarin, Lesson 1. I show both the standard
pinyin and in my own phonetic impression of how the words sound.

Doing that, you might be annoyed at the fact that the API available online does not just include the public and protected members, but also includes package-private and private members. While this would be useful to people working on the internals of iText, it is just a lot of useless clutter to most people who are just going to use the API.

So I regenerated the Javadoc from the 5.0.1 source, using the default settings which hides the private stuff. You can access this at:

http://eamonn.org/itextpdf-5.0.1-api/

That sounded a bit fishy to me. Let’s look at some numbers. First, how much power does a WiFi hotspot put out? According to moonblinkwifi.com a typical output is 200 mW.

Now say this device is 3 metres (10 feet) away from the hotspot. This 200 mW of power will be spread on the surface of a 3 metre-radius sphere with a surface area of about 110 square metres.

Now, this device looks to be about 10cm X 5cm which is about 1/22000 of the area of the sphere across which the 200 mW is spread. Which means the amount of power hitting the device is about 9.1 μW

Now according to the Wikipedia battery article a small AAA rechargeable battery stores about 6700 J of energy. How long would it take to recharge a AAA battery with our 9.1 μW of power, assuming you could miraculously capture 100% of the power?

The answer: 24 years.

OK, there are some approximations here. The WiFi antenna does not actually broadcast equally in all directions, and you might have the device closer to the antenna, and there might be multiple WiFi signals you could receive. On the other hand, you probably want to recharge a battery that has more capacity than a little AAA battery.

So I call bullshit. A battery charger that takes on the order of a decade to recharge a battery, is a useless device.

The sad thing is how many tech journalist sites reported uncritically on the Airnergy.

See this on a separate page with links to shorter and longer lists of characters.

(Note, this may look ugly if you are using Internet Explorer. It should look better on Firefox, Chrome, or Safari. I need to do a bit more CSS-hacking to make it work on IE.)