jeramey

Indeed. In the same vein, Jerome K. Jerome's "Three Men in a Boat" has made me laugh out loud more than a century after it was originally written.

That said, Shakespeare's humor, as an example, lands more flat with me. English idioms and grammar have changed quite a bit since the 16th century, and though I can intellectually approach his plays and recognize the humor, I rarely laugh out loud to it because there's additional mental load required just to understand what's been said. I suspect that may be true of "Who's on First" in another couple of hundred years, too. I'll report back in 2224 and let you know!

To be honest, if things have gone this sideways, "ps awwfux" are definitely some sounds that'll be coming out of my mouth, too.

Seaborn isn’t too bad. It’s basically a convenience wrapper over top of matplotlib.

It gets used a fair amount in the weather data space. Forecasting and climate reanalysis grids are typically large (gigabytes) N-dimensional arrays of float32 values and Blosc provides enough tunable knobs that it's fairly easy to find a combination that performs acceptably without writing a bunch of custom handling code to keep track of which underlying compression schemes and settings were used. Additionally, it supports byte- and bit-shuffling filters which can really help boost the compressibility of certain data sets.

I am a hobbyist carpenter and woodworker. My current project is probably the last one I will ever do without a table saw with these kinds of safety features. I have already changed over to using other tools like track saws and pull saws as much as I can for safety, but it is still hard to replace a well-calibrated table saw for certain tasks. My table saw is the only power tool I have that truly frightens me. Router tables and jointers can cause some nasty injuries as well, and I treat them with much respect, but total digit and limb loss is rarer with them.

The patent situation and much higher price are unfortunate, but it’s still a cost I am willing to bear. It’s cheap insurance compared to an ER visit and extended amounts of time spent feeling pain.

In all fairness, the person had obviously been awake for over 24 hours and was on their 1,001st cup of coffee. And since earlier in the summer I had crashed the entire ticket scanner network the night before the opening of the weekend festival we had put on by creating a network loop between a couple of non-spanning-tree-speaking network devices, I didn't feel I was in a place to be snarky about it!

Occasionally people don't understand how to plug extension power cables together, either, especially during times of high stress and low sleep.

Once upon a time, when I was in IT support, I got a call from someone in a satellite office across town saying that their computer wouldn't turn on. A new production had begun and everyone was a bit frantic, so this was an urgent request. After asking them to hold the power switch in for a few seconds and try to turn it on again, I asked them to make sure the power cable was secure and that the computer was plugged in. It was, of course, but the computer still wouldn't turn on, so it was time to jump on the bicycle and ride across town with a new power supply in tow, figuring it would be a quick fix.

When I arrive, I see that, indeed, the computer was plugged in to a power strip. And that power strip was plugged in to itself. From then on, I always made sure to ask, "Is the computer plugged into the wall?" Saved myself a few bicycle trips that way.

Seconded! I recently built a large 50" x 90" work surface in my garage and used MDO sign board (another phenolic resin product, not much more expensive than MDF and available at many construction-oriented lumber yards) for the top surface over top of a hardwood plywood subsurface and heavily milled Douglas Fir legs and trusses, all doweled and glued together. I've been quite happy. It was easy to use a router on to make channels for t-tracks, and has been quite stable for the past 6 months or so through the fall, winter, and spring weather changes with only an oil-filled radiant heater to keep things from getting too frigid.

Yes, there is. To negate, just use ! as with many other languages.

    if ! command …; then
        do_needed_things
    fi

The main problem with ERCOT's grid stability isn't that they are using a lot of renewables so much as it is that ERCOT isn't interconnected with other big power systems in Texas's efforts to avoid federal oversight, as that Washington Post article indicates. They can't benefit much at all from buying power in other markets to make up for generation shortfalls lest they risk the feds making them do things they don't want to do. (On the flip side, they also can't sell their cheap renewable power into other markets as easily when they have excess generation capacity!)

There's an awful lot of schadenfreude that happens within the renewable energy and power production communities during serious power system events in ERCOT because they willingly suffer problems other power systems don't have to.

If you're looking for something turn-keyish, you might be able to get some help with this from one or more of the big players in the renewable energy analysis and forecasting space, including (in no particular order) DNV, Vaisala, Bloomberg, and Ventyx. Beware, their offerings can get pretty expensive and there's often no standard list pricing. Also, I strongly encourage you to always do your own validation of any model data they might give you, so the work you're doing to produce your own models is probably not wasted.

I'll second that. I work in the renewable energy space where we get all manner of atmospheric and power data in a wide variety of units depending on the data source, so Pint is incredibly useful in normalizing them as well as making it clear in the code what and how unit conversion is happening. The fact that it integrates fairly nicely with Pandas and Numpy is great, too.

Oh cool, I hadn't heard of E-skip as a phenomenon before! Thanks for that info, it's really interesting.

VHF (FM radio in the US is in the VHF band) propagation can definitely change at different times of day.

One of my favorite activities in the summer is to go get lost in the Cascades, and when the sun goes down, settle in to a hammock with a little multi-band radio to see what I can pick up. As the evening wears on, I can typically start to receive FM radio stations in Canada several hundred kilometers away. Once the sun has risen again, I can no longer tune those stations no matter how much I fiddle with antenna orientation. NOAA weather bands also become easier to tune clearly at night.

As to why VHF frequencies seem to propagate better at night, I could only speculate, but they do seem to—at least on occasion.

Persistence and linear regression are very common methods used to extend forecasts out in computationally cheap ways. Most forecast models have really awful validation statistics after about 48-60 hours out—depending on initial conditions, location, and a few other factors—so in some sense the forecast after about 3 days out isn't ever going to be very good so it's perfectly valid to use those methods. I would not be at all surprised if that's what Weather Underground does.

Another method that's occasionally used is to just fill in with TMY (Typical Meteorological Year) data. Lots of those data sets are freely available, or if not, are very inexpensive to calculate if station data is available.

If you're looking for a minimally spammy, information dense forecast and you're in the US, it's pretty hard to beat weather.gov. (And make sure to occasionally read the zone and regional forecast discussion texts, too. They're really interesting and often educational!)

If you fell down this rabbit hole, beware the High Voltage SID Collection[1], or you might never come up for air!

[1] https://www.hvsc.c64.org/

At least until you heard the click of death, that is!

One example that's bitten me is that working with large integers is fraught with peril. If you can't be sure that your integer values can be exactly represented in an IEEE 754 double precision float and you might be exchanging data with a JavaScript implementation, mysterious truncations start to happen. If you've ever seen a JSON API and wondered why some integer values are encoded as strings rather than a native JSON number, that's why.

I love the alpine butterfly. It also helps improve the security and strength of a trucker's hitch compared to the usual slipped overhand knot loop which can be handy occasionally with heavy loads!

The closest thing I've found to what you're asking for is "The Complete Book of Knots" by Geoffrey Budworth which is generally organized into sections related to typical activities such as sailing, general outdoors, and home use. It's not nearly as comprehensive as Ashley's Book of Knots, but in brevity there is power in helping to find the right knot for the right purpose without being overwhelming.

You’d probably need to do this with an AC-DC-AC transformer to also get the circuit converted to the 50hz cycle European power systems use, but it’d just be a waste because of the power losses involved (not to mention the expense of the transformers). Also, a typical 15A circuit in a home will handle ~1.8kw of sustained load, so as long as you can dedicate a circuit to such a rig, you’d be fine.

If you're in the Apple ecosystem, subscribing and unsubscribing to several of these news sources, so long as you read them in Apple's News app, becomes a lot easier, though it can be more expensive than going direct to the publisher. But hey, you get dark mode! And no major hassle when you want to stop a subscription!

As far as quality of news, I'd echo the sentiment others have given that Wall Street Journal's factual reporting is stellar, but their opinion and editorial pieces leave a lot to be desired. I'd say the same about The Washington Post and Los Angeles Times.

The Atlantic is decent for thoughtful editorials as can be The New Yorker, but honestly, you're just going to run into some sensationalism and knee-jerk, politically-motivated slant no matter what editorial/opinion sources you choose, so caveat emptor.

I'd be a little worried that I might be tempted to unconsciously order the values in some way which would bias the results. But you could build a box with four separate cells and a clear plexiglass top, shake them all up, and always read left-to-right or right-to-left! Sounds like a fun weekend project!

I haven’t seen Rime mentioned yet and you might check that out. It is a little bit of a puzzle game and a little bit of a walking simulator and has a surprisingly heart-wrenching story in the end.

This is very true, and my saucier skills are poor, but once upon a time I swore by thin aluminum or copper cookware for making eggs--especially omelettes. A couple of years ago, we decided to install an induction range in our home and, of course, those pieces of cookware were no longer usable and my eggs suffered until I learned about carbon steel pans and modified my technique a little bit. Induction with carbon steel isn't quite as responsive as copper or quality aluminum pieces, but it's dang close when used with a good induction system, and I also haven't had a flare up when frying at high temps since the change over.

Flip side is that cookware maintenance is now higher, and I spend a lot more time ensuring my pans have a good seasoning on them. But good food is worth the effort!

For certain sauces though--especially acidic ones--I'm not sure there's a better option than a gas hob just yet.

The US government accepted AT&T’s natural monopoly of telephone communications (this is the Kingsbury Commitment of 1913 mentioned in the link you provide) in exchange for their divestment of their control of other forms of telecommunication—namely telegraph communications via their controlling interest in Western Union—which was the other major important telecommunication technology at the time in the early 20th century. I can only imagine what things might be like if AT&T was allowed to keep an unchallenged natural monopoly over all forms of telecommunication and further allowed to hold that monopoly to the present day.

That’s a very interesting example you choose. I wonder if you’d have a choice of mobile phones today had the US government not exercised its anti-monopoly authority with the Kingsbury Commitment and later the break-up of the Bell System.

Prior to 1983, nearly everyone in the US and Canada had to lease their physical telephones (wired and wireless) from Ma Bell, and if you didn’t like the phone Ma Bell gave you, tough luck. Your other choice was to simply not have access to the PSTN.

Americans. The primary social measuring stick used is acquisition of wealth, and they have no real social safety nets to speak of. They have an overriding belief that free markets will ultimately solve any real problems peacefully. Grift is sometimes (ok often) admired and winked at, though generally officially denounced. There are substantial oppressive problems with regards to females fully participating equally in society, and they’re slow to change but there are occasional signs of progress and leaders bucking those trends.

Sounds a lot like my American culture to me!

As my fuzzier-with-every-passing-year memory recalls, there were a wide variety of interpretations of what "GAIM" meant, with "GTK+ AOL Instant Messenger" being the least offensive one. Mark Spencer, the original author, was always a bit cagey about it--amusingly so to my mind!

Hello, fellow Dwarfer!