It’s Monday, it’s early and I’m back in Symbolic Computation.

There is an interesting post on Marginal Revolution about textbook prices and it seems that by avoiding buying new books (by buying them second hand) we are raising the price overall (since there are less sold and authors (evil publishing companies?) get less revenue.)

MR also mentions the book All My Life for Sale by John Freyer. In the book Freyer sells all of his possessions on ebay and then goes and visits all of the items with their new owners, which is a neat idea and kind of appealing (not that I would do it!)

Intermission, at which point Tuesday happens

So, last night I went to an Apple recrcuitment event. It was pretty interesting. I think it made me realise that I really don’t want to work for them. Although the guys who were talking were nice, funny and smart they really were selling the Apple brand (in a broad sense.) There were two employess who came along and gave a 2 hour presentation/question session. Once was a recruiter (who had previously worked at Sun) and the other was a software engineer (from their OS group.) I was surprised when thy sadi that their engineering groups were so small (the people working on the new wikis feature in Leopard numbers only 6 ish) and that they hire so many interns (around 200-300.) I think overall it galvanised my opinion about working for big business (or small business) is that there doesn’t really seem to be very much exciting science, it’s all about product.

Via Andrew Gelman’s blog I found RSeek which allows you to search through a lot of R documentation and website all at once, with added tasty AJAX.

Another exciting installment from the Microlab on Friday!

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Well, I am back to having lectures in the microlab (as was the case in first year) so it would appear I’m spending a little more time with my friend Google Reader…

In that vein, I found (via the Freakonomics blog) an interesting article about a coffee shop that doesn’t have any prices on their menu. This forces people to decide for themselves how much their food and drinks were worth and also feel the pressure from their fellow patrons. It’s an interesting idea and, unsurprisingly, thought up by a Google employee.

interlude, at which point Thursday happens

Math fangirls are very funny. I just overheard a conversation in the microlab along the lines of “I was in the Whey Pat last night and Dr Reinaud and Mr McCabe were there! And then Prof Dritschel came in too! We were like the only ones in the pub!” This reminds me a little of the article a read some time back about “slide-rule celebrities” about the number of popular economics blogs.

I’ve mentioned Swivel before and thanks to Statistical Modelling I have also discovered Data360 and Many Eyes from IBM.

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