I tried to grab the window and force it shut to no avail. Fortunately, I was close to my stop. A couple more turns and we arrived and I went on my merry way, a bit shaken but not stirred.

Some folks are claiming that rather than being near zero, US inflation is near double digits if an older measure is used. This would certainly make an interesting study, but my intuition is that it doesn't presently pan out. The prices on quite a bit of important items (e.g. housing and clothes) seems to be either stagnant or falling. I don't know that the commodities that are rising (e.g. power, food) are rising enough to add up to almost a 10% annual rate.

Newsflash: BMI isn't a perfect measure. The single most interesting factoid in the article is that BMI was designed to measure populations rather than individuals. I didn't know that. Bits on possible replacements are also interesting. For the most part, no alternative is as easy and inexpensive to calculate. This is why BMI will never die out. One, the body adiposity index, looks pretty interesting.

Taco Bell lawsuit withdrawn. Apparently their beef really was beef.

It's been about nine months since I've purchased my iPad. I've gotten mostly used to the way that it works and, knowing what I know now, I'd still buy it again if given a chance to have a do over. In some ways, it's been a bit of a disappointment. In other ways, however, it's been quite nice.

My chief complaint is that there is no good way to switch between applications. Double-tapping the home button brings up a bar with all recently used applications. This doesn't sound all that cumbersome but to get to the home button you have to take away your hands from what you're doing. The either on the screen or on the keyboard (I use a bluetooth keyboard with my iPad about 70% of the time I use my iPad) and moving to the home button is pants. I don't know why (a) there isn't a good gesture to switch apps and (b) the Expose button on the keyboard wasn't made to do something similar to what it does in OS X.

Another annoyance is that, once the keyboard is paired, there doesn't seem to be a way to use the on screen keyboard without turning bluetooth off. (There may be something I just don't know about.) If the keyboard is your only bluetooth device attached, this works fine. If you've also got bluetooth headphones, it's not so great.

Then there is the absence of Flash. I can honestly say that in the span of time that I've had it, there has only been once or twice where I've missed having Flash.

Lastly, document management is stuck in the late nineties. Transferring files for the most part is pretty awkward. Applications that use the cloud do fine. But if you've got "local" files, it's not so convenient. It reminds me of using my PalmPilot III back in 1999.

On the plus side, there seems to be an app for everything. There are a number of area restaurants (both locally owned and large franchises) with apps. I can put together my order and have it ready to be picked up (or even delivered) in moments. There is also an app for paying the county-run parking meters. It really is a paradigm shift.

Also, I finally got around to installing the Pandora app. It seems like they've massively increased their database since I last used it. The iPad version runs like a champ. It keeps surprising me with songs that I like that I've forgotten all about or songs that I didn't know that I liked.

I do fine at text processing, writing all my term papers in LaTeX, stored on Google Docs. True, I need a bit of time at a workstation with LaTeX installed to turn them into PDFs and print them. But, if I wanted, I could use one of the online LaTeX processing services.

And, it's small and light but still has a screen large enough to be useful.  Carrying it around is simply not a big deal. Even my old 12" G4 PowerMac used to weigh me down if I carried it long enough. This thing is a dream.

And the batteries last forever compared to a laptop. (To be fair, though, they burn through at lightning speed compared to the life that a PalmPilot III could milk out of a pair of AA's.)

I can see how if one runs a restaurant and puts margarita mix into a container labelled Apple Juice that a toddler might end up getting served a margarita but for the life of me, I can't figure out why anyone in the restaurant biz would put margarita mix into a container labelled Apple Juice.

You gotta love a town where you can take This Way three blocks and make a left on That Way until you get to Any Way. Too bad that the tradition is getting muddled. The road to the airport is no longer Run Way and the road that passes by the bank is no longer Which Way.

I never realized that one could make a decent guess about how lucky you were going to get on a date on the basis of the musical tastes of whom you're taking out. But, it turns out that Nirvana fans are most likely to put out; Coldplay fans are least likely.

I kept to my running regimen surprisingly well through the winter. Even when on holiday, I managed to run three times per week or more and quite frequently hit the gyms in various places. Then we spring and the weather turned very nice. And then the weather turned quite nasty and for a few weeks the IDONTWANNAs  overwhelmed me. Instead of running, I just used the weight machines in the gym.

So when the weather turned and I was once again motivated run in the morning, I found my stamina far lower than it was previously. Last week week, I had one 5 mile day, two 4 mile days, two 3 mile days and one day where I decided to go back to bed and sleep instead.

One thing I had noticed about my running is that my times had been decreasing slowly. Looking back, I tried to assess what might be a likely cause. I settled on dropping the lower body exercises from my weight machine routine. So I decided to add them back. Time being a constraint, I added them back every other day. Instead of doing a full circuit, I now alternate upper body and lower body routines in the gym. Crunches, however, I do everyday that I go to the gym.

Weight wise, I've pretty much given up weighing myself regularly. The primary purpose of weighing myself was to see where I fell on the BMI charts. I think (I hope) that I've gotten to the point where those charts aren't very helpful. But that may just be wishful thinking.

I've also had the experience of out-growing a few pairs of pants. I can fit into some styles of 34" but 36" are far more comfy.

An argument that mixed martial arts is safer than boxing I'm not entirely convinced (the stats in the article are misleading, comparing numbers of deaths rather than numbers of deaths per 1000 participants). But it's the intuitive conclusion. Nice thick boxing gloves mean that boxers can take many more blows to the head without falling over until the match concludes.I suspect that there are more "hidden" injuries in boxing than MMA.

NY Times spotlights atheist student clubs in high schools. The times have changed.I remember when a couple of guys tried to start a freethinker's group back when I was in high school. They got shot down by the administration. They were also stereotypical Nietschean "will to power" sorts. I suspect that may have played a a role in the decision.

Mike Huckabee has an interesting view of education, "all Americans would be forced -- forced at gunpoint no less -- to listen to every David Barton message"

My eldest daughter has finally made up her mind where she's going to attend college, St. John's University. This past weekend, she took a train to the Big Apple to attend an honors' banquet and take a tour of the campus. She really dug the banquet. The campus tour, she had problems with. She overslept, not waking up until the point in time in which she was supposed to have been on campus. And she failed to check the bus schedules to see if the busses slated to get her from where she spent the night to the campus were running when she needed them to run.

Nonetheless, she's pretty jonesed about heading there. This is good, she was pretty disappointed by St. Mary's College. She knew it was a small school and that it was out in the middle of nowhere but she didn't fully realize just how out in the middle of nowhere it was or just how small of a school it was. She came back pretty deflated about it.

Good thing she likes St. John's.

American influence on Arab spring overstated. Some good points, but I think it misses the elephant in the room. It seems to me that the necessary condition for kicking off these revolts was the Wikileaks provided information that the US would not intervene to prop up its allies in various Arab states if the people rebelled.

Glenn Beck victim of improving economy. It would seem that people with hope don't pay as much attention to his rabid asshattery. Either that or the boycott of Beck's sponsors, not mentioned in the linked article, has done its job.

US Army is updating its physical fitness test. I'm able to pass the old one, for a soldier 20 years younger than I. It'll be interesting to see what the cutoffs for the new one are.

I finally made time to make a proper dinner and invite some friends over. The menu consisted of freshly made bread, stuffed roles of fish, orange broccoli, tossed salad and brownies made from scratch topped with ice cream. The fish recipe is one of my favorites, the stuffing is made from bread crumbs and pine nuts. It's supposed to be made from sole, but when I went to the fish market, they had no sole. That made me sad because I felt silly singing the Dead Milkmen while preparing fillets of St. Peter's fish.
It still tasted nice. And the company was good, friends from across the river that we haven't seen in far too long. They brought the wine.

When the Byzantine army is amassed before your town, even the lepers go to war. Necessity, however, is only one possible explanation. Perhaps not all medieval societies shunned lepers. Leprosy aside, I found the most interesting part of the article to be he details of the wounds and their treatment that these warriors survived before dying. Eighth century brain surgery impresses me.

I must just be too old fashioned. I was surprised that 3 in 5 women consume Internet portporn and 1 in 6 claims to be addicted. Perhaps, women are just less open about consuming porn then men. The female contingent of HuSi aside, most women I know get defensive and irritated talking about porn while most men I know are likely to offer an assessment of how good (or poor) the porn is.

A friend of mine is a history professor that specializes in ancient Cortinth. The notification he set up on Google to alert him to new developments sometimes brings back surprising results.