While 50 is north enough and the absolute majority of Canadians live south of it, “Northern Canada” generally refers to the three territories (as opposed to the ten provinces), that start at 60 (mostly, there are some islands south of that).

Could it be High Park in Toronto? I was just there yesterday and saw a Great Egret much like this one (also a Green Heron and a couple of beavers).

As it should be… Navigators could determine latitudes pretty accurately by using astronomy. It was the longitude that was a big problem (maybe that’s part of the reason Japan is placed in the middle of the Pacific).

Some natural cushioning is needed to appreciate the comfort of the floor, I imagine. I’m too boney for that.

I’m pretty sure I’m in my fourth pair now.

I’m sitting on an Aeron at work, it’s good, but I can’t in good conscience pay that much for a chair. I was recently on the market for a new office chair and extensively researched it. It really looks like it’s a hit or miss with every chair in every price range, and I was very seriously considering replacing my Hyken with another Hyken. I decided to go with the IKEA Markus and have been sitting on it for about a month. I’m only moderately happy with it, may even return it before the year is up although I’d hate doing it.

That is almost certainly Staples Hyken. Comfortable chair but cheaply made, mine started disintigrating in a couple of years.

Playing 4D chess /s

Rumania and Makedonia probability the closest to the country’s native name.

QWERTY on a cheap Dell keyboard I’ve had for 12 years.

I’m sure some of the alternatives are objectively superior, but with all due respect to enthusiasts, I’m simply not passionate about it and have yet to be convinced that the time and pain spent on getting used to a new layout would actually be worth it in the long run.

Haha, that’s right. Immediate noticed that.

I think younger people in Canada only know °F if their thermostat is set to it and they can’t or don’t bother to change. My stupid fridge is in Fahrenheit and that can’t be changed (even though the handbook shows the display in Celsius! A variation of the model is probably sold abroad).

I think Canada properly adopted Celsius, kilometres, litres and millilitres (at least here in Toronto), but all other metric units are the underdog. Even CBC, that is probably the only media outlet that tries to stick to metric will specify people’s height in feet and inches. Shameful.

Interestingly, that is not the case. Month names can differ in different languages. I discovered the hard way that Ukrainian has completely different names for months when I had to connect to a Linux machine in Kyiv with Ukrainian locale (I can read Cyrillic, but the abbreviated month names meant nothing to me). The name for August is “serpen” by the way, and it is similar in some other Slavic languages. Also Arabic has its own month names based on Akkadian, August is “ab” but an Arabized version of the word August is also commonly used and understood. Finally, in Mandarin and presumably other Chinese languages, Gregorian months are only referred to by their number, so we are in “bayue” (lit. eight(th) month).

The start of the calendar has to be arbitrary, there’s no way around that as it’s not feasible to measure the time since the beginning of the universe with good enough accuracy.

As others commented, the Julian Day is a time measure that is actually used in astronomy, and Unix time is a time stamp standard (not really a calendar, although it could be if we got used to it) that is mostly a way to store time points, not really to consume them before converting to a more readable form.

But as a scientist who is wholly irreligious, I’m not overly bothered by using the Gregorian calendar, even though it has Christian (and a lot of pre-Christian) elements. Its annoyances (different numbers of days in each month, weeks not aligning with years, leap years etc.) are due to the fact that we decided to measure time in these arbitrary units. At least it’s universal in the modern era (often in conjunction with another calendar), and everywhere you go people understand what “August 5, 2024” means (although August might have to be translated to the target language, since the names of the months are not universal).

That’s more than you can say about non-time units of measurement (I’m looking at you, imperial and US customary units!!)

I was a bit confused at first by car ride from the barbershop. I lived in 4 countries yet never more than 5 minutes walk from where I got my haircut.

Yes, I have a 14h reminder to drink 1L of water, which is my entire daily intake. I have this reminder because without it I may well drink nothing at all and not even realize.

This is a sign on the road to Budapesht near the border between Ukraine and Hungary. There’s the weird insistence in Ukraine to do a one-to-one transliteration of Cyrillic to Latin without much thought, so Ш just becomes SH… Google Maps link: https://maps.app.goo.gl/YyzH7xx7gWNJCcqA6

There’s an argument to be made that “no binario” is the more correct. Latin has a neutral grammatical gender (“bīnārium”) that has been mostly assimilated into the masculine gender in Spanish.

Not all galaxies are spirals, and spiral galaxies may (kinda) stop spinning after galactic mergers make them into ellipticals with low net angular momentum.

It’s exaggerated but yes, this map really reminds me of many large Chinese cities. It’s probably true every major city has a People’s Square. I think the map is based on Beijing.