Without serious effort, I seem to have lost a tenth of my peak mass in three years. I think the main change is that I no longer eat rice most days.

Awhile ago I worked out that, if you want to watch a different disc every evening using Netflix, your quota (the number of discs you have out at a time) needs to be at least five: three for the mail cycle plus two because Netflix does no processing on Saturday or Sunday. (This assumes no glitches and no holidays. It also assumes you do not get the disc back into the mail on the same day you received it.)

Now I see that Netflix has begun working on Saturdays, reducing the addict’s minimum quota to four. That means they’ll get $6/month less from each subscriber who applies my reasoning. Hm.

For two or three years I was never without a supply of navel oranges, because the Australian (or before that Chilean) crop came in just as the California crop was ending; but the antipodean goodies have not (yet) shown up this year. Is a weak dollar to blame?

Sunday: scurvy is averted: Chile came through.

Dr. Richard Klitzing lost his webhost, so I took custody of his polytope pages.

My left arm is very sore today, making me notice how many little things I habitually do with my ‘wrong’ hand. I wonder whether this says something about my brain.

They say women’s hemispheres are less specialized; maybe my partial ambidexterity, the weak dominance of my left eye, and the sparseness of my body hair are all related.

I got yet another wacky idea for a Martian calendar. Start with 24 months of 28 days each. Drop one day from every seventh month (so that a given month is short in one year out of seven), and add one day every 48 years. The result is longer than the mean tropical year by one day in 6176 years.

An analogous calendar for Earth: start with 12 months of 30 days, add 3 days to every 7 months (so the cycle is 30 30 31 30 31 30 31), and add one day every ten years; this is long by one day in 219130 years.

Many people have worked on the problem of packing equal circles efficiently in various regular shapes. David Cantrell asks, what is the ellipse of least area that can enclose n unit circles? Sometimes it’s a circle (n=1,7,19), sometimes it’s highly eccentric (n=23). Several of the results are rather pretty.