As the comments indicate, this video really is amazing. I don’t have the patience for this sort of thing, but I’m always in awe at craftsmen like this. And making vacuum tubes is becoming a lost art. I know that starting in the nineties, some of the more obscure types were available only from Russia. Fortunately, Sylvania and GE continued to make the most common ones.

OLEDs.

Unless there’s a big change in my finances for the better though, I suspect its a few years off for me. More here.

[Via Instapundit, who has me very envious this week, as he gets to go to the CES for Pop Mechanics]

I just lost four hours of work when Word 2007 12.0.6015.5000 died. Last time that happened that badly was when I was working on my dissertation in 1996. It not only killed the open file, but all of the open word files. No autorecover. Custom bullets then bam. Save early save often. My wife’s compact flash card is off to data recovery, too. Must have been that horseshoe that was pointed down. You might think Microsoft would tell me if my autorecovers are failing to save? Open the pod bay door HAL. Anyway, I didn’t have this problem with 2003. Ugh.

Four cases in Egypt.

Fortunately, it appears that they caught it from birds. But we can’t let our guard down.

A nice overview at The Economist.

I haven’t had much to say about Bob Zubrin’s new book, other than to point to reviews of it. This is mostly because I haven’t read it, or even the excerpt in the current issue of The New Atlantis. Well, here are a couple more. Neither Shubber Ali, or Ken Silber are that impressed.

An interesting result I hadn’t seen before. I’ll sometimes go all day without eating, just because I don’t have the time, or get around to it. But I never do a whole twenty-four hours. I wonder if the effect works at all for a two-thirds day fast? Of course, for people with blood-sugar problems, it would be kind of tough to do. Lots of other interesting stuff over at Future Pundit as well (as usual) including robot sex, eco-disaster tourism, huge battery breakthroughs, and other things.

There’s apparently a military application for what I thought was an advertising technology:

It appears that some of the troops in Iraq are using “spoken” (as opposed to “screeching”) LRAD to mess with enemy fighters. Islamic terrorists tend to be superstitious and, of course, very religious. LRAD can put the “word of God” into their heads. If God, in the form of a voice that only you can hear, tells you to surrender, or run away, what are you gonna do?

What’s cool about this weapon is that it’s one that will be particularly effective with this enemy. If it happened to me, the voice of God isn’t the first theory that I would come up with, since I’m an unbeliever, but with these guys, it probably would be.

Ron Paul’s supporters and a former Federal Election Commissioner are turning the operation of political speech inside out by turning individual donors into political organizations and the delivery vehicle (pun intended) into a for-profit universal-access media company. Bravo! Or as On the Media puts it:

…a campaign reform loophole as big as the Ron Paul blimp.

Expect ever tighter epicycles from the FEC to try to hold back the Internet and the innovative business processes that low transactions costs make available via personal computers and the Internet. They will nullify all limitations on free speech.

To the transistor, which will be sixty years old tomorrow.

It has to be in the top five all-time inventions.