I made myself a standing treadmill desk for my faculty job, and generally liked it. I got a normal treadmill from Craigslist and a desk from IKEA. I tended to walk a good deal when I had typing to do and the work did not require a full mental effort. I could never get writing to go easily while walking, and there was something about the walking process on the treadmill that required some of my CPU cycles (in contrast to regular walking outside, which does not). So: marking papers using MS Word - yes, marking papers with pen - no, thinking hard about a research problem - no.

I tended to walk about 1-4 miles a day, depending on the type of work I had to do, and how much of it was in the office vs. lab vs. lecture room.

The main drawback with a cheap, regular (not designed for office use), used treadmill was the noise. It was pretty loud. I put some rubber mats under the base to deaden the noise a bit, which was sufficient for my downstairs neighbor, but it was still too loud for me next-door neighbor. That would be the main driver to get a "real" office walking treadmill, which are quieter, and are optimized for walking, not running speeds.

Pic here.

to prohibit labeling. That's my demographic.

Is somebody claiming that some of the cometary material is less than 1Ka (kilo-annum) old? I doubt that any of that material is younger than 3Ga, and probably older than 5Ga. Perhaps they mean that the material was mostly dislodged from the comet over 1000 years ago. Fine, but that's not the age of the material, which is generally taken to mean the age at which the material came to be in its present state (vs. location).

Here is the letter I just sent my representative (Rick Larsen). You might consider doing the same.

Hello, Rick. I am a Democrat and an Associate Professor of Geology at Western WA University and I just found out about HR 6845, introduced by John Conyers. This is a bad bill, because it takes a dramatic step backwards on the issue of scientific publication. Please take a stand against it.

The current state of science publication is untenable. Every year, journal costs rise faster than library budgets and we must cut our access to valuable journals, which hampers scientific research. Authors are not paid for their work, nor are peer reviewers, and yet the journals are making money hand over fist. Everybody knows that the ultimate solution lies in free and open internet-based publication, but getting there is tricky.

The government made a remarkable step forward a few years ago when the National Institutes of Health required that the results of any NIH-funded research be freely available to the public online at PubMedCentral after a one-year delay (to allow the publication in a print journal). This set a valuable precedent and was obviously fair: if the US taxpayers are funding the research, they should be able to see the results without paying again! The Conyers bill (HR 6845) would reverse this positive step.

I urge you to instead come out in favor of expanding this principle to the National Science Foundation. The progress of science will be dramatically enhanced if all NSF-funded research is also subject to the same free-access rule. I would welcome further discussions with you on this topic if you wish.