Australia has registered an increase in music sales for the first half of 2009 compared to the same period last year.

A 7% drop in physical sales (compared to last year) was made up by an over 40% increase in digital sales.

I'm also very happy to see "ring tone" sales have dropped significantly, this most likely to be because pretty much every phone these days lets you use any file (MP3 for example) as a ring tone.

CD albums dropped 4.48% while digital albums were up 56.81%.

I've come around to the digital single. I would really rather it was in a lossless format but iTunes isn't completely horrible. The convenience of it is what has sold me. When iTunes doesn't have a track I want I'm usually very irritated as the alternatives are all very inconvenient.

That said, I still prefer to buy the CD if I want the whole album, which usually I do.

The idea of buying a digital album instead of the CD makes me ill, but perhaps in these economic times the cost difference (around $12-$16 vs. $18 to 22 for a CD) is just enough for most people... and people are dumb enough to not take the internet connection and CDr burning cost into account.

I was going to complain about the extra irritation I have when I buy a song on iTunes (buy, download, convert to WAV, burn, store, cost of CDr, cost of download etc.) but then I remembered that I rip the CDs I buy anyway and store those on an external hard drive.

To be fair, the time/effort ratio is probably pretty similar... except that when I'm ripping that CD I know that at the worst I can always do it again. When I'm burning that iTunes track to CD I'm doing it as a backup because if I lost it, that would be it.

I don't like that it is my responsibility to do that... it reminds me I haven't really bought anything physical, and as such I'm reminded that I think I really should have paid much less for it than I did.

A 155lb man doing high impact aerobics for 1 hour will burn 493 calories. That same man ice fishing (which was the closest thing to sitting and doing nothing that I could find on the list) would burn 141 calories in that hour. Walking the dog for an hour burns 246 calories.

My point is you could burn the same calories sitting doing nothing for four hours as you could doing high impact aerobics for an hour.

This was all based on a list of various calories per hour burn playing various sports. I picked ice fishing (141 calories per hour) as equivalent of "sitting doing nothing" as it was the lowest on the list.

In reality, a quick search of the net today finds a fairly consistent 70 calories per hour quoted for "sitting doing nothing", with 50 to 60 calories quoted for sleeping.

So in my original quote, I should have said eight hours, not four. This does rather tip the scales in favour of at least some exercise.

Using these numbers a 70kg person would just need to keep under 1520 calories a day (70 calories x 16 hours awake + 50 calories x 8 hours sleep) to keep their weight steady. A calorie requirement calculator I found says a 70kg person needs 1710 calories a day if they rested the entire time.

It is generally suggested you not drop below 1200 calories per day.

To put that in perspective, a KFC Twister with large chips is about 1200 calories.