cold

holy fsck, no wonder I'm cold, it's 59º in here! I'd recently rearranged part of Gabe's cage to encourage her to sit on the heated perch more, but she'd been alternating between it and a wood dowel, and usually sitting on the fat part of the heated perch when she did, where it isn't warm at all. When I just uncovered her cage she was on a skinny part. :-\ I emailed my landlord to ask him if we can try out the heat. I told T$ a while ago that I was willing to try as low as 60ºF to save on our heat bill, and it's already below that! I think I'll put the heat lamp back on her cage so she has that option as well.

Optimizing my commute IV

With some help from jethereal the other day, and his awesome TI-89, I have solved my commute. The optimal speed for me to drive based upon gas mileage and time spent is 95mph. Since I also want to take into account safety and tickets, this means drive as fast as I feel is safe and won't get me ticketed, so my current trend of going 75ish seems good to me, and I should *not* try to slow down.

( Solution )

The trivial solution is that I can minimize the cost of my trip in terms of both dollars and time if (x=0) I live in my office, or I work from home. A little further exploration showed that v=95 is a local minimum (good) and v=180 is a local maximum (bad). Despite the fact that the faster I drive, the worse my gas mileage, the time savings dominates until I reach 95pmh. At that point the gas mileage is bad enough that it makes the cost worse and worse until I hit 180mph - if I drive faster than that I should start saving money again.

So I think I determined the real reason that some people drive 95 mph on the highway: they're mathematicians!

x-posted to mathsex