I'm playing around with parsing a dump of Wikipedia, and I'm digging through the description of their (rather chaotic) syntax for citations. There are a lot of domain-specific identifiers (ISBN just doesn't cut it), and I just learned that a PubMed ID is a unique integer assigned to articles in the life sciences. They started at 1; as of 2005, they were up to 15 million and something.

For some reason, this is making me tear up.

This morning Ars Technica covered an interesting paper on why some people have partial resistance to this year's H1N1 variant, S-OIV, without having been exposed to it. Short answer: there's resistance because some of the epitopes (characteristic proteins) are also present in seasonal flu; it's only partial because those proteins are on the inside of the virus, so only the T-cells see them; the B-cells don't.

It also has an interesting historical tidbit:

It turns out that, prior to 1957, more seasonal flu variants shared epitopes with S-OIV. There was a flu pandemic in 1957 that seems to have pushed these strains off the scene, meaning that younger individuals are less likely to have a well-primed immune system, at least from the H1N1/S-OIV perspective.

From the window of ITA's cafeteria, I can see four separate buildings with solar panels on the roofs.

(None of these appear to be MIT buildings, either. They're ordinary low-rise apartment buildings.)

cvirtue brought out the parmesan tonight, which our kids refer to as "shaker cheese", and tossed out the idea of a song to the tune of "Simple Gifts". So I came up with this:

'Tis the cheese that is grated,
'Tis the cheese that's a treat,
'Tis the cheese we pour on what we want to eat.
And when we pour it out on the food just right,
'Twill be on the pasta of love and delight.

When grated parmesan is served,
We all shall get as much as we deserve.
To pour, pour will be our delight,
'Till by pouring, pouring, our food tastes right.

(Edited: "ground parmesan" instead of "parmesan cheese"; not quite accurate, but puts the stress on the right syllable.)

(Edited again: "grated parmesan".)

"I noticed that David had lost a lot of weight over the past couple of months, especially when he came in with his arm torn off,"

I just spotted a truck labelled "Seafood Express". Ah, yes, the less successful alternative to the Pony Express.

I just needed to search for something about regular expressions. Without really thinking about it, I gave Google a string including "regexp", which is a common abbreviation for "regular expression"—the other common one being "regex". At the bottom of the page, I found this note:

Tip: These results include the word "regex". Show results that include only "regexp".

Google knows that "regexp" and "regex" are synonyms. I love it.

My Gateway laptop is 3 years old now. When I bought it, its battery life was about 2 hours. As recently as a year ago, it was long enough that I could use it on the train both to and from work, and not have to charge it during the day. Now, it's just barely enough to last one way.

So yesterday I started looking for a new battery. I found some good options, but, along the way, I also found a Gateway manual that mentioned that shortened battery life was sometimes due to miscalibration, and explained how to have the laptop recalibrate the battery. OK, I thought, I'll try that; maybe I won't have to spend $90.

The calibrator takes several hours, and the laptop needs to be plugged in, so I put it off until I got to work today. A while ago, it finally finished, and announced that it had its numbers. It had previously believed the battery capacity was 2090 mAh (down from 4400 mAh). Now it knows that was wrong; the actual capacity is 1894 mAh.

Sigh. You were supposed to figure out how to get more energy out of the battery, not less!

Copied from martianfencer, with custom stuff added the way she did:

Place an X by all the things you've done and remove the X from the ones you have not.

( Things you have done during your lifetime: )

Bruce Tognazzini has designed an improved app management UI for the iPhone. Apparently, the current UI (a) has a hard limit of 180 apps, and (b) offers no good way to organize them. In the latest version of the OS, Apple provides a solution for this: you can search for apps, and you can have "invisible" apps that don't show up in the list, so they don't count against your 180-app limit.

However, if you search for an app, you have to know its name. The example he gives is that the AAA app isn't called "AAA"; it's called "Roadside".

In other words, it's a command line. They've taken a Unix kernel, put a gorgeous UI on top of it, gotten people to go, "ooh, ahh, pretty, here's my money"...and then discovered that their UI is so limited that it needs a command line after all.