Geez don't give him any ideas!

Public transit is not free where I live. I think there are two aspects to this matter of whether or not it should be free, or at least subsidized a little more. The video primarily addresses one of them, which is what the implications are for those with low income.

But the other aspect has to do with what it would take to get people who drive everywhere today to leave their cars at home and take transit instead for routine travel like commuting. I've done the math on this in terms of my personal monthly budget. In an either/or scenario of taking transit exclusively with no car ownership, there is no question that public transit is far more affordable. But once you have taken that leap and bought a car, it is no longer the slam dunk in favour of transit. What I mean by that is if you own a car but take the bus to work every day and only use the car for occasional errands that necessitate it, you will not necessarily be ahead financially at the end of the month.

At least not in my case. Some things could affect this calcuation. For example, if I had to pay for parking where I work, transit would almost certainly win. But it's a shame when I think others are likely going through the same calculations and drawing the same conclusions, leaving ridership numbers low and streets clogged with automobiles.

What I eventually concluded was that a third option—investing in a ebike for commuting/light errands—was indeed a slam dunk budget-wise, so I have gone with that. I still need to have a car at my disposal for certain things I do, but it stays in the driveway 80% of the time, and beyond the upfront cost of purchasing the bike, its operational costs are very close to zero. So it's basically free transportation once you've paid it off, and that is quite compelling to me.

Well, I managed to join a hispanic choir at a Portuguese church and I must say we're having a blast, language barriers notwithstanding. I am of neither ethnicity but I just play violin so it doesn't matter. And man, latino hymns rock!

Of course I don't understand a thing the priest is saying. This week I thought hang on, I'll just run Google Translate as he's speaking. But I think there's a problem. It could be he's speaking Spanish with a thick Portuguese accent and it wasn't coming out right? Unless he was actually saying:

…And sushi are big carts of yesterday and today as farms catalyzed for purposes. He is not saying about Jesus…

"Recall uses Copilot+ PC advanced processing capabilities to take images of your active screen every few seconds,"

Seems like a lot of extra disk thrashing that would shorten the life expectancy of an SSD? Like it would be considerably more than your usual background chatter of daemons writing to log files and what not. Unless I'm misunderstanding this?

I'm with you on this one. There are lyrics on almost every single track for crying out loud. Throw us instrumental lovers a bone won't you? Songs that are lyrically driven but are otherwise super-repetitive instrumentally tend to put me to sleep.

What I love about concerts is when the band goes off script and just starts jamming. Even a 5-minute drum solo will have me grinning ear to ear, and that's what I'll be remembering on the way home.

I did bike commute to a degree with a normal bike but I do so far more often now with the ebike. What's interesting to me is that my fitbit says I'm actually getting more exercise per week now since I ride more consistently, even if the intensity is not as great as it once was.

With the regular bike, I could get so wiped after one day that I'd be too tired/sore to ride the next. And there were other factors that would affect whether I would ride. Is there a stiff headwind today? Is it a heat wave or is the air quality low? Might I have to make a side-trip in the middle of my work day that will wear me out even more?

The ebike changed all that. It also changed the route I take to work. Now I ride through a ravine park I used to avoid because of all the climbing it would entail once I need to leave it. So it's a much more pleasant experience being far from traffic, which encourages me all the more. Honestly, I had no idea how transformative getting an ebike would be?

I live in the path of totality and the local tourism office is projecting anywhere from 70K to half a million visitors. It's insane! Also, I read Niagara Falls, which is obviously used to seeing a lot of tourists, has nevertheless declared a preemptive state of emergency. And there are advisories to be very careful if you're driving on highways at the time of totality, as there will inevitably be idiots who stop suddenly to gawk and burn out their eyeballs.

Mind you, it could all be a bust given the current weather forecast is for Monday to be cloudy across the whole region. I guess it'll still be cool to see everything go dark for a few minutes though.

That's some food for thought. Would a field covered in panels be warmer or cooler than the same field without? On the one hand, the albedo of a panel is super low. That's sort of the point as they don't want any of the sunlight lost. On the other hand, the panels are thin and have little heat retention, so one would expect them to shed whatever heat they build up during the day quickly at night compared to the ground. I suspect the shading effect on the ground would win out in the end, but I'm not sure?

Heat dissipation is an issue for solar panels, to the extent that some have tried deploying floating panels on a lake to get a better cooling effect from the water. Water bodies already have extremely low albedo, so the panels would likely have little effect in that regard. I suppose they might reduce evaporative cooling depending on how thorough the coverage is?

There is also research into materials with radiative cooling properties and whether these can be combined into PV cells. Radiative cooling exploits the infrared transparency of the atmosphere at certain wavelengths that thankfully aren't being blocked by greenhouse gases. I think this is a great idea and could reduce urban heat islands and save energy on A/C in hot climates, essentially for free.

Ok, so in most languages, you have some way to define a data structure. It could be anything. Maybe it stores the X and Y coordinates of a Cartesian vector. And now you want to do stuff with your vectors, so you write a bunch of functions you can call like get_vector_length(myvect) or add_vectors(vect1, vect2).

In OOP, you add that kind of functionality into the data structure itself. So now you can just write myvect.length() or vect1 + vect2 (by implementing the + operator for your data structure). At this point, the data structure is typically called a "class" and the functions you build into the class are "methods".

As you dig deeper into it, you learn about inheritance. When you have 2 related classes that share a lot of functionality, you can use inheritance to save a lot of duplication in your code.

In statically-typed languages, it can also come in useful to have a base class you can pack into a container, since most containers can only accept a single data type. If you had some graphics classes like Rectangle and Circle that all inherit from Shape, you could make a collection of Shape that's a mix of those. (In dynamically-typed languages, this tends to be less of an issue since you can put objects of any data type straight into the list. This might be why OOP isn't approached as soon in tutorials for such languages, since it's not as mission-critical? But it's still a good idea to have some sort of class hierarchy where it makes sense.)

This seems to come up with some regularity.

The U.S. says the measures are necessary to protect its lumber industry, because Canadian forests are mostly on public land, where buyers pay “stumpage fees” to provincial governments for the right to log.

Could someone explain the situation in the States? Was there some big land grab by private interests, or is there still plenty of public land but it's all either logged out or protected at this point? Or some other complication?

Flipboard. That's a news reader for phone/tablet right? I think I used to use it a number of years ago.

Then I started wanting finer control over my newsfeeds and got into RSS clients. But this is an interesting development in that it provides a lower-level way to access Flipboard content that might suit me better?

I wish Apple News would do something like this. I subscribe to it to get around certain paywalls, but it seems pretty unscriptable.

Salt lakes typically have rivers containing trace amounts of salt flowing into them but no rivers flowing out. That means the only way water can leave is through evaporation, but the salts get left behind and the salinity therefore builds up.

I learned this in Geography 101. Then I had a shower thought that the oceans of the world are just a giant salt lake.