16 states affected, yet no Canadian provinces, apparently. Good thing smoke can’t cross 5000 miles of open border…

I watched a documentary on this awhile back. The municipality asked the public if it would be enough for them to dump treated water into a lake and then draw from that lake? And then someone with expertise in the matter commented that this would necessitate another treatment phase, since any wild animal could take a dump in the lake. So he seemed to think closing the loop made the most sense from a practical standpoint.

I think people here tend to question and fact-check posts and comments a lot, which is a healthy thing. Now some say reality skews left, in which case could it be that the right have left because the left is right?

Most recently? My wife was wfh and out of the kindness of my heart I brought her a coke. She was on a zoom call with her entire team. I was pantsless.

literally good for you

I actually asked my family doctor at one point about the health effects of masturbation. She said that as a guy, if you are not otherwise sexually active, it’s good for the prostate to keep the plumbing working down there.

I started in C and switch to C++. It’s easy to think that the latter sort of picked up where the former left off, and that since the advent of C++11, it’s unfathomably further ahead. But C continues to develop and occasionally gets some new feature of its own. One example I can think of is the restrict key word that allows for certain optimizations. Afaik it’s not included in the C++ standard to date, though most compilers support it some non-standard way because of its usefulness. (With Rust, the language design itself obviates the need for such a key word, which is pretty cool.)

Another feature added to C was the ability to initialize a struct with something like FooBar fb = {.foo=1, .bar=2};. I’ve seen modern C code that gives you something close to key word args like in Python using structs. As of C++20, they sort of added this but with the restriction that the named fields have to come in the same order as they were originally defined in the struct, which is a bit annoying.

Over all though, C++ is way ahead of C in almost every respect.

If you want to see something really trippy, though, have a look at all the crazy stuff that’s happened to FORTRAN. Yes, it’s still around and had a major revision in 2018.

Many renewables are stuck in the “interconnection queue,” a long line of projects waiting to get connected to the grid. According to Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, more than 1,500 gigawatts of power, mostly renewables, are waiting for approval to connect. (That’s more than one-third of all the power produced in the United States.)

That is really unfortunate. I’m in Canada, but it wouldn’t surprise me if we are in the same boat. Where I live, there is a lot of wind and solar going in, but my understanding is that this is in part because it’s one of the rare areas with an under-capacity grid that is not too far from several major urban centres.

And you can see how important the grid layout is in that solar farms are popping up mostly along large transmission corridors, presumably to allow for easier connection. This is less evident with wind, since geography plays a bigger role in where you want to put a wind farm for optimal results.

It makes me speculate that renewables like wind and hydroelectric (including pumped hydro storage) which are less negotiable in terms of location compared to solar are more likely to be waiting a long time on this interconnection queue? I don’t know if that is actually the case though.

Fair, though I guess my interpretation was that void* is kind of like a black hole in that anything can fall into it in an unsettling way that loses information about what it was?

If I were chronically sad in the evenings, I would actually bring it up with the doctor. I wouldn’t make a special appointment for it necessarily unless its progressing towards suicidal thoughts or something, but during a regular visit I would bring it up. I’m no stranger to mood disorders, and frankly, I wish I had approached a professional sooner about it. Would have saved a lot of grief not just for me but for family members who also suffered through my episodes.

For something that seems too minor for a doctor visit, I would suggest speaking to a pharmacist. They are readily available without appointment or long waits, and have an encyclopedic knowledge of all sorts of over-the-counter remedies that are backed up by an advanced degree in medicine. Definitely an underutilized resource. Of course they may well suggest you talk to a doctor, but in my experience at least, they give thoughtful consideration to what you have to say and make such a recommendation not out of some lazy buck-passing but rather a genuine concern for your condition. So you would do well to heed their advice, whatever it might be.

I totally get where people are going with eliminating dictators and what not, but knowing myself as well as I do… yeah, you’d probably find me down at the Chinese buffet.

Great read! That explains a lot.

I’ve been deep diving a bit myself and found this article that explains another thing that’s puzzled me over the years. Some birds have crazy vibrant coloration that almost glistens, like pearemoved feathers. Outside of the zoo, I’ve noticed it a bit in common grackles. They look black on first glance, but when you study them closely, they have this kind of purple sheen around their heads. Apparently, it’s still melanin at work here, but it’s structured in a very special way.

Right? I guess that’s what puzzles me the most about it. It must be really hard for mammals to become green since you would think it would confer an advantage in many environments you find them in.

I guess there are a lot of mammal species that kind of make themselves scarce during the broad daylight hours, so maybe green camouflage is less relevant if you’re only out between dusk and dawn?

Ha!! You really had to go down the “rabbit hole” for that one I bet! Awesome.

That’s why we need passive daytime radiative cooling. In theory, it could completely eliminate the urban heat island, but it still seems to be mostly at the pilot project stage so far. I did read somewhere that you can DIY with some packaging tape (which somehow has the right properties?) over a reflective backing. Maybe I’ll experiment a bit this summer.

Compiler/interpreter: Can’t find variable farfignewton.

Earlier:

Me: Declare variables near, far

IDE: Oh! You mean farfignewton right? I found that in some completely unrelated library you didn’t write. Allow me complete that for you while you’re not paying attention.

“Higher-pressure showers were definitely shorter,” said Walker. “The open question is really: why is it shorter? Is it that it just rinses products off quicker? Is it that it’s more satisfying, and you feel clean quicker?”

Or is it that it’s less comfortable and relaxing, and people just want to get it over with? I would not automatically assume the shortness is due to a superior experience.