Hard and brittle plastic

From their Movers and Shakers page:

The Movers & Shakers index identifies, by category, the biggest gainers in sales rank at Amazon.com in the past 24 hours. For example, suppose a music item has a sales rank of 10 today, but was ranked as low as 30 yesterday. Its Movers & Shakers increase would be 200 percent.

I never knew that you could use percentages on ordinal numbers.

(I'm tempted to send this to a certain Karen, but given that we haven't really been in touch for a while, it would be a weird thing to send out of the blue.)

...would I get in if I bought The Physics of the Buffyverse for my library?

Probably not that much, considering that someone bought The Physics of Star Trek when it came out.

Actually, I'm pretty sure no one would really care, since it only costs $15. So I'll probably buy it. :)

In 2006, the number of housing units in the U.S. increased by over 2 million units from 2005.

The number of occupied housing units increased by less than 1.4 million units.

So, 600,000 more units are sitting around unoccupied, compared to the end of 2005. Massive overbuilding, massive oversupply.

(In 2006, 6.48 million existing homes were sold. So, 600K is a significant chunk. Yes, that's existing homes, not new homes, but I couldn't find the number of total homes sold and I want to go home. (I'm at work, but I've been a little bored.))

http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/housing/hvs/annual06/ann06t9.html