Thresholds

Temperature/humidity thresholds for sleeping are simultaneously a source of huge frustration and fascinating to me.

I hit a very distinct upper limit last night, when the ambient humidity was at 90% and the thermometer on the thermostat in the house said 84 degrees F. The thermometer outside said 75 degrees but I guess the large thermal mass of the house plus stagnant air meant that cooler outside air just wasn't moving in, even with a box fan in a window on high.

I wound up doing a horrible circuit of lying on the front porch on a camping pad, taking a quick shower, opening windows, and turning off ceiling fans (I'm convinced they block cross-breezers).

So it's probably time to resign myself to buying a window a/c unit. If you have any specific recommendations on that front, let me know. S managed to locate some sort of bed a/c contraption, mostly as a joke, but maybe those are actually a better idea from an energy efficiency standpoint?

I am getting so tired of buying small appliances. Humidifier (ha), room air filter, now an air conditioner, what will be next?

Escaping from diabolical software

So the main course I'll be teaching this fall again is a course my department has nicknamed "Scientific Writing." For the course, we use a book written by a Tufts professor called A Short Guide to Writing about Biology. It's a great book for the purpose, but over the years as the course has evolved faculty came to realize they had opinions about certain disciplinary-specific conventions that weren't emphasized or covered in Pechenik's book. (see, e.g., use of piratical statistical software language)

Eventually, those conventions evolved into a course pack handout we call "Guidelines."

Now, this is all well and good, except that this is not a small course pack. In the long term I would really love to convert it into a TeX file, but in the short term the notion is daunting because the various versions of the document were created using Diabolical Word-Processing Software by, shall we call it, a company known as VeryTinyNotHard (VTNH). This VeryTinyNotHard software program has a habit of adding a whole bunch of invisible gibberish to every file it creates.

I have spent the past week trying to wrestle this thing into submission so that I can hand students a booklet with a reasonably accurate table of contents, page numbers in logical locations, and activities embedded throughout so they are forced to turn past the pages full of extremely useful information, etc etc.

It is finally done. I have printed out a full proof. It is 181 pages long.

It is also still very ugly because it was made using the Diabolical Word-Processing Software, which is inherently very ugly.

I tried to install a program that might do a crude conversion of this soup into something digestible into LaTeX, but at this point it appears that my El Capitan may be far enough out-of-date that I'm in The Abyss. (I'm mostly in The Abyss because you'll have to tear my Mud Brick Creative Suite 5 from my cold, dead hands, although I know I know I should really just use the Open-Sores alternatives).

Anyway, that made for a tedious, exhausting week, especially because the VeryTinyNotHard software ate entire chunks of the file at one point.

Oh well.