I'm a bit surprised at how much easier I become out of breath running when it is twenty-one degrees outside rather than thirty-five degrees. Saturday night, I ran in the freezing rain just over two and a half miles when it was thirty-five degrees with no problem other than my legs getting a bit numb from all the pavement pounding. This morning, I ran just over a mile and I'm was of breath and had to walk the mile back to the office. Or maybe it's the 500 foot difference in elevation between the neighborhood where I work (950ft above sea level) and the neighborhood where I live (450ft above sea level). The difference in elevation almost certainly accounts for the difference in the snow and ice still on the ground by where I work. Everything melted on my home turf. Running on top of snow and ice really blows chunks.

I'm fascinated by Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD) and it's variants. Turns out some variations are communicable via surgical instruments even after sterilization. See: Hospital in Milwaukee deals with rare disease. The interesting blurb to me is this: The degenerative brain ailment can be passed on by surgical instruments even after they have been sterilized by normal means. ... The instruments were treated in bleach and then sterilized again using the hospital's normal procedure. I don't know if the prions that cause normal CJD are as tough as the one's that cause Mad Cow. The Mad Cow prions have to be heated up to the point where the molecules become plasma to destroy them. Bleaching the instruments may not have done anything.

Newsflash: Almost Half of USians Google for Themselves. The real shocker from the article is that Pew also found that teens were more likely than adults to restrict who can see their profiles at an online hangout like Facebook or News Corp.'s MySpace. Really? Could it be that be adults don't have to worry so much about what their parents might find online?

I'm still getting used to not have to study every night. I should be studying some, though. But right now I  need to shift into high gear to get grad school apps out. The deadline approaches.