More Audio Books

I am currently listening to "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court" by Mark Twain and downloaded from LibriVox. It is hilarious. I highly recommend reading or listening to it.

Yesterday, I listened to "The Invisible Man" by H. G. Wells. That was good. I didn't know more than that it was about a scientist who turned himself invisible and was desperately trying to undo his condition. I was not prepared for the latter half of the book. It reminded me of both "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" by Robert Louis Stevenson and "Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus" by Mary Shelley, which I had previously read. I recommend all three.

EDIT: Yesterday was the anniversary of my relocation to New York City on August 15th, 1999. Today is the first day of my 8th year of graduate school. Eighth year. Consider that I have been living in Washington Heights and studying furiously for 7 full years. Isn't that the duration of a biblical plague? Perhaps graduate school should be measured in units of 'biblical plagues.'

100.

Lately, my work has insisted entirely of counting cells. There are many ways that one can count cells: you can count them under a microscope, you can count them with a flow cytometer, you can count them on a slide. I do not like counting cells. I will not count them under a microscope, I will not count them with a flow cytometer, I will not count them on a slide. I do not like counting cells, I do not like them Mel I'm Swell. (I couldn't resist the parody, no matter how poorly done.)

No, I am counting cells from images I captured with a digital camera attached to our microscope. It takes me about 13-15 minutes per image. If I am focused I can go through 4-4.5 per hour. I have 180 images to count. Do the math.

Let me tell you, it is extremely boring. Incredibly intensely boring. Sadly, this causes my productivity to drop because I want to check my email, I want to surf the internet, I want to do a crossword puzzle; anything to engage my brain at all. Besides, staring very hard at a monitor for long stretches is not good for you, never mind doing so for 6+ hours straight.

As a result, I will occasionally get up, walk around, rub my eyes and look out the window at something off in the distance, get a drink of water, stretch my legs, etc. However, I can't get too distracted or I get less done, prolonging the agony of counting. So the boredom remains. Until I listened to an audio book.

I had on my computer an Agatha Christie murder mystery (a short story with Hercule Poirot) that was about half an hour long. I listened to it while I counted. I could count and count away while listening, without the need to do something else! My brain was not rotting! So I tried to find more audiobooks. I typed "free audiobooks" into Google and had almost no luck. I found a site with a few machine-read audiobooks and tried it out. Not bad, but the choices were limited.

I mentioned this to Hyunmi and she logged into iTunes so we could take a look. And we were shocked. The average relatively-new fictional audiobook was about $35! Harry Potter 6: $65. Are you for real? For a downloadable mp3 that has zero duplication cost you are going to charge me $65? Some very 'cheap' audiobooks could be got for $14 or so. What a rip off.

So naturally I decided to look harder for more free downloadable audiobooks. That is when I stumbled onto LibriVox. It is an organization that is trying to create downloadable audiobooks of literary works in the public domain, like those on Archive.org (which they are working with) or Project Gutenberg (whom they are also working with).

(If you haven't heard of either of those organizations, I highly recommend checking them out. Archive.org has tons of old films and commercials digitized and downloadable, and Project Gutenberg has almost any copyright free book available for download. Copyright free books in the U.S. are basically those published before 1923.)

Anyone can volunteer for reading a book, or just a chapter, at LibriVox's website. Most people just read one chapter, so each book is a group effort. It is strange to have an audiobook with different readers for each chapter, but you quickly get used to it. I would like to volunteer someday, perhaps when I finish my PhD. ;)

Yesterday I finished Agatha Christie's "The Secret Adversary" which is over 8 hours long. I then started on "Aesop's Fables". I'm not sure what I'll listen to next, but as long as it keeps me interested and focused while I count, I am not too concerned.

By the way, this is my 100th post on this blog.

Dirty Dirty NYC

I have always thought that NYC was a dirty place. In fact, I have never been to a dirtier place (although I am sure they exist): garbage on the streets, garbage on the subways, dog crap all over the sidewalks, stains of God-knows-what on the sidewalks where the trash is left out in front of bars and restaurants, etc, etc. But two recent events highlighted the filth that NYC is capable of harboring (and I'm not talking about people here):

• Last weekend I was in Central Park and I stopped by Turtle Pond (the algae covered pond next to Belevedere Castle). I was standing by the water on some rocks when I heard a rustle in the plants behind me and off to the right side. I turned around to see a dead pigeon lying next to the fence at the border of the plants. On the other side of the fence a rat was reaching through and eating the pigeon. Any city where you witness a rat eat a pigeon is a dirty city.


• This morning after Yilin and I finished our run, we were stretching in the park near our apartments (at 173rd and Fort Washington Ave), and we saw a squirrel hopping along with a piece of garbage in its mouth. Fine, squirrels eat garbage (I told you that NYC is a dirty place). But it wasn't any old piece of garbage, like a food wrapper. It was a used condom. We saw a squirrel chewing on and sticking its mouth in a used condom.

Anyone out there think that NYC is remotely clean?

My wedding ring

Roughly two months ago, Yilin and I were out looking at wedding rings for her. She was trying to decide what style she wanted, and what would compliment her engagement ring the best. Hopefully, the two would coincide. It seemed that she was favoring either a plain band (possibly titanium, as it is darker than her platinum engagement ring and she liked the contrast), or a platinum band encrusted with diamonds. Naturally, I was hoping she would choose the former, as tradition (supposedly) claims that the groom buys the bride's wedding ring, and vice versa. (Not that I am a cheapskate, but I am still paying for her engagement ring...)

I had heard that titanium wedding bands exist, and I know that Mike has one, so I was intrigued. I mean, how many guys don't think titanium is cool? Besides, it is ultra-practical. As a non-jewelry wearer and a rather practical guy, if I have to wear a wedding ring, I want a ring that I won't even know I am wearing. Lastly, what really represents 'love' better: a heavy ring which weighs down upon the hand and is made of a semi-precious metal drastically overpriced by consumer demand, or a ring that is virtually indestructible yet light as a feather?

Titanium is 93 times more abundant than copper in the Earth's crust, weighs about 55% of the equivalent volume of steel, and is uber-strong. Why would anyone choose another metal? Gold has an ultimate tensile strength of a mere 15,000 psi. Platinum? Barely stronger at 18,000 psi. Pure titanium has an ultimate tensile strength of 31,900 psi. The alloy most commonly used (grade 5 aerospace 6Al-4V-titanium alloy) has an ultimate tensile strength of 170,000 psi, and would be drastically lighter than a gold or platinum ring of equivalent size. Hell, I could probably use it as a piece of pro when rock climbing. ;)

Of course, knowing how cheap titanium really is (I have a $9 titanium spork for camping, and given its abundance it can't be that expensive), I knew that the $150-$200 that jewelry stores were charging was entirely too much for a simple unadorned rounded band. So I went to eBay. (The idea of buying one's wedding ring at eBay amuses me.)

Good God, there are thousands! I quickly realized that the exact style titanium wedding band I wanted could be had for about $20, even $10. But that wasn't cheap enough for me. So after about 20 minutes of Yilin saying "Just spend $20 and get that one!" I found the one ring for me (not to be confused with The One Ring).

With 27 minutes remaining and no bids on the auction, I signed on, bid, and won my wedding band for 99¢. That's right: not even a full dollar. The shipping was $10.50, which is 1061% the cost of the ring. The seller offered insurance for $3. I asked Yilin if she thought we should get the insurance and she replied, "It's 3 times the cost of the ring! We'll just buy a new one if it's lost in the mail." She had a point.

So in the end, I got the exact wedding ring I wanted, I bought it on eBay, and it was less than $1. What does all of this mean? (No, not that I am loony.) It means that Yilin got off easy, while I am looking forward to buying her diamond-encrusted platinum wedding ring. Oh joy.

I still love grad school

Some initial analysis leaves little hope for my experiments which thawed. I won't know the extent of the damage until I go through all of them. I am assuming the worst. So it goes.