Oh, snap!

Yesterday, ambient temp at 5380 hit the low fifties. Snow melted, dogs walked, seraphi bugled. This morning, the thermometer read single digits with some wicked cold breezes. What happened between?

Brrr! That data comes from my localmost weather station on weather underground. Every site should provide their raw data so well.

Textbook clearance

I'd heard of, but never used, half.com before. It's owned by Ebay and is similar thereto: it caters to books and book-like merchandise, and instead of auctioning, one just lists the item at a set price, then it sits there forever until someone nibbles. There's no cost to list, but when your book sells (and someone pays for it), Half takes 10-15% of the selling price. Buyers pay the site, then the site takes their cut and deposits the remainder into the seller's account, plus a couple bucks to cover shipping.

It seems like a good system; many of the sellers appear to be big used booksellers (or fly-by-night drop shippers), but I've sold three books now with my small-number-of-feedback account - two to actual people and one to a 'super seller' who requested a drop-ship to the real buyer. The prices amaze me (so do Ebay prices) sometimes - many books are listed at near or above the Amazon price, though few sales appear to occur there. I sold two used physics textbooks for about $50 each (after the fees and shipping), and just sold the third, which sells new on amazon for $110, for $85 (say, $75 after fees). I wouldn't normally be motivated to offload old textbooks, but 75 bucks buys me a nice new used chunky cell biology text.

By the way, Joe, if you need your copies of Griffiths or Bernstein, you can have mine.

Redesign

I've repainted my main page (still without any significant content); but, I'm partway toward my goal of having a basic personal webpage with a semi-integrated blog. In lieu of integrated blog/page co-publishing (like Wordpress or Movable type would offer), I hacked together similar styles in Blogger and my main.css.

A simple gradient-filled png (underlying my blog title at the top of the page) is 336k. Ouch! I can turn on compression when I save it in Gimp, but it compresses some of the gradient levels to some visual effect. Maybe each of the small number of people who view the page will cache it, or maybe everyone has so much bandwidth these days that it doesn't matter... and, after all that effort to remove the little round-corner gifs present in the default blogger template.

The new scheme is light-on-dark (looks better on 3/4 of my regular monitors; the Dell Ultrasharp renders dark-on-light competently):
text light (#ceebeb)
highlights light blue (#1e90ff)
text background very dark blue-green (#222d2d)
page bg slightly-lighter blue-green (#293838)

Friday distraction

This XKCD, from a few days ago, is now printed out for my office wall. I like it.

Drug use

The side of my take-out coffee cup (sorry, Earth!) says

FRESHLY ROASTED LIQUID INTELLIGENCE

I'm not a fan, philosophically speaking, of drug use: my reasoning therefor (and sometimes / oncetimes excuse) includes something about our bodies being complex enough to experience as it is, such that modifications to perception add unnecessarily confounding variables to the experiment of self-perception (or perhaps awareness or remembering, depending on, I think, only your preference for terminology, or perhaps more hard-wired bias); but, a little caffeine seems to go a long way toward an statistically-significantly increased a.m. productivity, even leaving me a few minutes to blog between journal club presentation and lunchtime seminar.

Yes, that was one sentence. This round to you, Bill.

Someday I will be able to hop into that state whenever I want, or need, to. Turning up Hammerklavier for an hour before anyone else arrives at our shared lab/office will be enough to guarantee a factor of two rate of typing speed, conceptual organization and matlab coding.

Alas, not today. Mmm, tasty liquid intelligence.

Literature search

File under "science of yore".

An excerpt on marmota monax:

DESCRIPTION. Body clumsy; low set; snout rather longer than in the Marmot properly so called; ears rounded; nails long and sharp; colour ferruginous-brown, less deep on the flanks and inferior parts of the back, bluish-gray about the snout; tail covered with blackish hairs.

And, further on, under "habit":

feed on herbs and fruits, but delight in clover, of which they destroy immense quantities; the femal produces five or six at birth: when tamed, they become sufficiently docile, and never eat animal food; when intercepted from their holes, they prefer giving battle to a dog rather than attempt to effect their escape by retreating; they are more than a match for a dog a size larger than themselves.

Alas, Dr. Harlan's poor field hound!

Measuring running distance

I primarily use three methods to determine my running distance: gmap it afterwards by pointing and clicking the USATF site, measure using the Nike+ shoelace-mounted accelerometer, or GPS.

On Sunday's run, the GPS and Nike+ (I wore them both, just for this experiment) staying with 0.1 mi over about 5 miles, until I started some steep hills; then the GPS fell behind: seems reasonable, since my toe speeds were surely much higher than my map speed. However, it continued to fall behind on the return jog, perhaps related to more sidewalk-to-street weaving to avoid traffic, or a slower overall pace.

Gmaps 10.21 mi
Nike+ 10.84 mi
GPS 10.36 mi