Actually, electricity is one of the major costs of running a large data center - the amortized cost of a single server is probably only a few hundred bucks a year over its lifetime. The energy to operate it is typically a comparable amount, and the energy for cooling is even greater.

Now I wouldn't expect anyone to upgrade their cooling efficiency on a regular basis, but it's foolish not to consider both operating and cooling efficiency during a major upgrade - you may end up paying a larger sticker price, but it can lower your amortized costs significantly.

Certainly, I'm not a city slicker by birth, Denver was my first (and probably last) long-term city experience, and I was savaged by "something" in my first week there that decided to chew up a sizable portion of my torso. At first bed bugs seemed like the leading candidate, so I learned quite a bit about them. Enough to discover how ridiculously unstoppable they are (I mean come on! They each feed only a few times a year and lay eggs almost continuously? How is that fair?), and that house centipedes and cockroaches are their primary predators. And I wasn't big on inviting cockroaches into my apartment. Kind of ironic - bedbugs have a bit of a stigma attached to them but the truth is that they're perfectly happy living in a spotlessly clean house, whereas somone living in a filthy roach-infested cesspool is fairly well defended against them.

You're probably right that house cenitpedes wouldn't completely eradicate a bedbug infestation, the little bastards can hide in too many inaccessible places. But I figure having them on-duty means that (1) any bedbug attempting to move in has a fair chance of getting eaten before establishing a population, and (2) any wandering bedbug might well be able to smell the local predators and look for safer territory. At any rate I managed two years in Denver as somebody who loves second-hand stores without any problems, though that could obviously have been a side-effect of my elephant-repelling rock.

As far as I can tell in the war against bedbugs we seem to have only four truly effective weapons: DDT, diatomaceous earth, cockroaches, and house centipedes. Of those only the diatoms and centipedes are welcome in my home, and diatomaceous earth is still pretty nasty stuff to go around using it preventatively. Besides, if bedbugs are making a comeback sooner or later we're going to have to simply accept the fact, and a few bedbugs aren't actually a problem - you get a few bites per year with a 50/50 chance that you're not allergic and will never notice them, and unlike most bloodsuckers they don't even spread disease. It's only a major infestation that's a problem, and a thriving centipede population should keep those from developing nicely.

Well that's about right then - a smartPHONE generally sucks at being a phone. I think someone changed the meaning of "smart" when we weren't looking...

Indeed. I've yet to come across a smartphone that actually works half as well as a *phone* as your average "free with $15 prepaid card" flip phone.

Reminds me of a comment I read somewhere: The only thing I like about bluetooth earpieces is that now I can walk around talking to myself and nobody looks at me funny.

Congratulations, sounds like your cockroach, termite, or other infestation won't last long (or your neighbor's infestation is being held in check).

I don't actually know all that much about centipedes in general, I've just become enamored of house centipedes, especially after spending a couple years in Denver where bedbugs are making a serious comeback (seriously annoying little critters - immune to cleanliness, bait, and just about any poison short of DDT.) I agree on the second one - in fact it looked like it already had most of it's legs ripped off. As for the first, maybe it just got unlucky? It appeared to be stuck on it's back, probably the cameraman dropped it into an existing swarm. And really most centipedes aren't actually all that fast, just look at the size and shape of the legs - house centipedes are built to RUN, whereas most species are more like heavily armored caterpillar tanks.

Heh heh.

In seriousness though, why would you object to a house centipede infestation? They're harmless and provide a valuable service. If you have enough of them to really be considered an infestation then that's practically a guarantee that you have a serious infestation of something far more objectionable that they're chowing down on. When that infestation is gone the vast majority of centipedes will go looking for greener pastures. It's like a farmer complaining about the cat infestation in his grain silo.

In fairness a house centipede is a very different breed than most - probably one of the few species that can outrun an ant. Hell, they can catch cockroaches so you know they're fast. Still probably wouldn't fair well if cornered by a swarm, but ants are in fact part of their normal diet.

Aww come on, as bugs go it's almost cute. Like the love child of a spider and caterpillar.

Hell yes I have (well stung technically, centipedes don't bite). Nasty little bastards. But house cenitpedes are to "normal" centipedes what daddy longlegs are to spiders. As a general rule they can't penetrate human skin to deliver their venom, and they're non-aggressive - as long as you're gentle you can even pick them up and play with them without them trying to attack you.

*Somebody* had to say it.

Sounds like they eat mostly bugs, grains, and small animals.

For natural pest control may I suggest house centipedes? Those fast, long-legged, grey-brown guys with the racing stripes. They are non-aggressive and typically incapable of stinging humans until they get quite large (they can live for almost a decade), they carry no known human diseases or parasites, and are voracious hunters whose favorite prey include termites, silverfish, bedbugs, and young cockroachs. And unlike ants they're completely uninterested in your food.

Or as an alternative - when you find an "ant highway" entering your home crush some of them and smear them around the area where they are entering. It may not work for all species, but for most it seems to effectively communicate that this is not a healthy place to be in their native "language". I've never used pesticides of any sort, and rarely have more than a couple brief (under 48 hour) "invasions" per year. Then again I also allow spiders, house centipedes, and other human-harmless predators to live unmolested in my home as long as long as they keep a low profile (my cat does most of the enforcing on that front), so it probably doesn't have nearly the "land of milk and honey" appeal of many modern homes to begin with.

Probably wouldn't work for crazy ants though, sounds like their death phermones actively attract more ants, though perhaps it's electrocution specifically that has that effect.

Were they? Or was the "War on Drugs" instituted (or at least leveraged) as an excuse to get the exceptions? As a rule I avoid wearing a tinfoil hat, but I've never heard any non-tinfoil explanations that make sense. Certainly there were a *lot* of competing interests that banded together to to demonize cannabis, and after that... A few of the extremely addictive or damaging substances perhaps you could make a case for on public heath or national security grounds - China for example has a history of using foreign opium addiction for political leverage, but the rest?

Binding energies involved within a single molecule are likewise negligible, though I can't be bothered to work out a direct comparison atthe moment. More important to the functioning of a protein or RNA molecule though - vibrational energies in normal functioning are at least an order of magnitude or two below binding energies.

As for resonant effects - the whole danger of resonant effects, and the reason any engineer worth their salt takes them *very* seriously, is that they are cumulative. On a macroscopic scale even a small vibration source, if precisely tuned to a resonant frequency of a large structure like a bridge or building, is quite capable of ripping it apart if sufficient damping isn't present in the system. It may take hours or even days, but since energy delivered to an undamped system doesn't significantly dissipate, sooner or later something has to give. And on a molecular scale we don't get the benefit of the friction-based damping that virtually every macroscopic structure benefits from.