Wayne D's Blog

I was listening to Quirks and Quarks today and Gary Taubes was on the show talking about his book, Good Calories, Bad Calories: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Diet, Weight Control, and Disease. You can listen to the segment by clicking here. His hypothesis is that our obsession with fat as the cause of obesity has blinded us to the real culprit, carbohydrates. I encourage you to listen to the segment and draw your own conclusions. The book sounded interesting so I went to Amazon.ca to look it up and found it at a price of $20.13. With shipping and tax it came to $27.59. To check whether the purchasing power of the Canadian dollar had been reflected at Amazon I went to Amazon.com where the same book was priced at $18.45. With shipping included I could buy it for $27.43 U.S. I wasn't really surprised. The only reason I didn't buy it from Amazon.com was that the currency conversion fee on my credit card would have made it a wash in the end anyways.

I noticed the same price discrepancy this week when looking for a Novatel Wireless Merlin XU870 3G HSDPA 3.6/7.2 Mbps ExpressCard. Expansys.com has it for $379.95 on their U.S. website, $399.95 on their Canadian website. Both sites show 21 in stock, I bet they only have one warehouse and whether I buy in the U.S. or Canada their cost is the same.

You might have heard about the big tempest in the teapot over the release of an HD DVD code earlier this year. Geoff Smith made a song about it and Cali Lewis of Geekbrief.tvpodcast.