P. Oscar Boykin

This morning I ran to work for the first time. Jose Fortes says this officially qualifies me as an eccentric professor (which is something I’ve been working towards for years now). You can see the route from my house to Larsen Hall on the very useful Mapmyrun.

It took me about 53 minutes to run 7.22 miles, which is about 7:20 pace. Unfortunately my gps watch gave out of batteries early on, so I had to time my run by remembering which songs were playing when I started and stopped on my ipod (it was Bloc Party, Waiting for the 7.18 through all of Weekend in the City and then the first song of Silent Alarm, Like Eating Glass). Mapmyrun thinks that cost me 891 calories.

There are only two other practical matters to come to. First, I bought an Ortlieb waterproof backpack. Probably this is obvious, but I wanted something waterproof so I wouldn’t sweat through it and mess up my work clothes or for the cases I get caught in the rain. Second, I had to locate somewhere to shower on campus. Unfortunately, the shower I heard about (which I did not inspect prior to running in) was somewhere between prison and youth hostel on the scale of luxury. I’ve heard there are other options, into which I’ll be looking.

The backpack did start to feel pretty heavy by about 2/3 the way through the run. Fortunately it was very comfortable, as far as backpacks go. I am worried I’ll be a little sore tomorrow around the shoulders, and I’m slightly worried that my form will suffer a bit by compensating for the motion of the pack. The backback does have a strap across the chest which keeps the straps from digging into my shoulders. But I did have to tighten the straps several times to keep it snug.

Since I would have run today anyway, running to work saved me my commute time, which is probably 30 minutes door to door. I post an update later in the summer as to how this experiment is going. The only thing I’m worried about is a relapse of my ITBS.

A little over a year ago I bought a Toyota Prius. I’ve been tracking my gas usage for a year and recently I paid more then $3/gallon for the first time, so I thought it was time to report on the Prius.

There were two reasons I bought a Prius. First, it’s a fun car. It really feels like the future, and I love it. The dashboard is beautiful, the backup camera is fun, my in-dash MP3 cd changer is great, the smart key (I don’t need to remove it from my pocket to enter the car, lock the door or start the car) is great, I use the bluetooth speakerphone a lot, and it has plenty of room. It’s a great car. I really love it. Secondly, it gets much better gas mileage than most cars, so I potentially save money (I’ll discuss that more in a bit) and I reduce pollution due to me burning less gasoline. On the first point you will either agree with me or not, but on the second issue we can be a little more data oriented.

First, let’s take a look at gas prices in the US. I downloaded this retail gasoline data from the DOE.

The x-axis is weeks since August 20, 1990. For most of the 90s, gas prices were stable. Since then, they’ve been growing. From the data we can clearly see that something has changed in the past 2-3 years as the fluctuation in prices have grown dramatically. I did two fits to this data to predict prices over the next five years. Both are exponential fits, one looks at all the data since 1990, the other only the past 5 years. From this we might expect gas prices to be between 3-6 dollars in 5 years. Since gas prices are over 3 dollars today, I guess 3 dollars 5 years from now is going to be an underestimate.

Coming to the Prius, how has my personal gas mileage been? Here’s a summary:

I met the guy who runs FLHybrid, and he uses various tricks (keeps his tires inflated to a higher pressure, drives more carefully, etc.) to achieve over 50 MPG regularly.

So, I spent $823 to drive 15K miles in a year, and I got 46 MPG. If I bought a car that got 23 MPG, I would have paid $1646 to drive the same distance. Naively, if we extrapolate for 5 more years with constant gas prices, I’ll save $4938. In addition to these ongoing cost savings, I got a $3100 tax credit this year on my income taxes. So, adding that in, that’s $8038 saved by buying the Prius over 6 years. It is true that the sticker price of the Prius is higher (say 22-25K) than a Civic (say 15-17K), but when you add in the $8000 saved, it may well be worth it. Indeed, even ignoring the tax credit, Intellichoice says you have a lower total cost of ownership with the 2006 Prius ($19,897 over 5 years excluding tax credit) than the 2006 Civic 4 Door ($22,543 over 5 years) (ownership costs include expected maintenance, fuel costs, and depreciation amongst other things). In fact, the Prius is the cheapest car to own according to Intellichoice.

Of course, fuel costs are very difficult to predict. If we average 50% higher fuel costs over the next 5 years than we did over the last year I will save $6,100 over the next 5 years (more than one 1K more than I estimated above). Clearly there is risk involved in such predictions. One thing that is easy to predict is how many gallons of gas I’ll use over 6 years since mileage driven is not so variable. I can expect to use 1,974 gallons over 6 years of car ownership. Compared to a car that only gets 23 MPG (half what I get), I am saving almost 2000 gallons of gas from being burned. Burning a gallon of gas releases 6 lbs. of carbon into the atmosphere, so over 6 years I’ll release 12,000 lbs. (6 tons!) less carbon. I don’t know what you’re willing to pay to prevent 6 tons of carbon from going into the air, but I’m willing to pay more then zero (apparently, a carbon offset for 12,000 lbs would cost about 30 bucks). Since, I figure I’m already saving money by buying a Prius, this is gravy (and you and your progeny get the benefit too)! It’s a shame the hybrid comes with the extra up-front costs, because most people will opt for lower up-front costs even if it costs them more in the long run. Hopefully as gas gets more and more expensive, the difference will be too great to ignore.

So there you go. I’m a happy Prius owner, I did it because I loved the car, and I’d save money and pollute less. One year into it, I feel great. I still love the car.

I make frequent use of two computers: my laptop and my home desktop. In order to keep things sane, I keep my home directory organized on both and I use rsync to keep them synchronized. I use Firefox for web browsing. Firefox makes it very easy to install addons to add features to your web browser.

Until last night, I relied on Google Browser Sync to keep my bookmarks synchronized. This is nice, however, I need to have it installed on each computer I use to get the benefit. If, for instance, I use a friend’s computer, I can’t see my bookmarks without installing Google Browser Sync and entering my password. Last night, I discovered Del.icio.us Bookmarks. This allows you to use Del.icio.us as your bookmarks inside Firefox.

This is really useful, because if I use a computer without Del.icio.us Bookmarks installed, I can still visit my Del.icio.us page and find my bookmarks. Also, it means that I’m more actively using del.icio.us which helps my friends see what I’m interested in (and I also use it to see what my friends are interested in).

I want to highly recommend this tool to everyone.

Finally, I want to end with the following comment. Not everyone wants to produce content (be it science, music, movies, sculpture, etc…), but many more are willing to produce meta-content, or content about content. By using tools like del.icio.us, people can contribute to the value of the web by identifying interesting URLs and by labeling them. Related to this are systems like Google Reader with its shared items or Yahoo Pipes. Such tools allow you to be a sort of commentator or reviewer. Isn’t that so much more interesting than one-way media like television and radio? With these kinds of systems you can get in on the fun, showing the world what you find interesting. I recommend this to everyone.

If you make a del.icio.us page, or have any RSS feeds, please let me know. I like to see what my friends and colleagues are interested in. My del.icio.us feed is here and my Google Shared items feed is here (you can also browse my shared items). If you really want to get obsessive, you can watch which songs I’m listening to with my Last.fm RSS feed.