But doesn’t it resolve the vote-splitting problem? For example, a common scenario here is you have a right-wing candidate winning in a a left-leaning district because the left’s vote is split across more than one political party. Wouldn’t a ranked system solve that dilemma once all the dust has settled?

I think the Canadian system is very much modelled after the UK?

That’s interesting about Australia though. Btw I understand Australia has a ranked voting system in elections? Curious about how well that works. Our first-past-the-post is a nightmare with vote-splitting sending the “wrong” representative to the capital.

Was it red by any chance? The only red car I have ever owned got rear-ended 3 times.

Yeah. My wife is always wanting to go on a cruise and I’m having none of it.

One thing I will add regarding the nature of this curse is that it only manifests when I am the sole occupant of the bedroom. For example, I used to share a bedroom with my older sister, but within a week of her moving out and rejoicing at having the whole place to myself, the ceiling opened up.

So I suppose I would be safe on the ship as long as my wife is there with me? In our current home, she was my sole protection, but has recently taken to sleeping on the basement cot due to hot flashes. This leaves me staring nervously at the ceiling. It’s now or never, curse!

Every place I live, there will be this incident when a torrential deluge of water breaks through the ceiling of my bedroom in the middle of the night.

So it’s not the bedroom itself that is cursed, since it is a different room each time. And the causes have varied also. The cursed object, therefore, must either be me or something in my possession I have kept around since childhood? Hmm…

Ah fair enough. I guess I only learned about it in the 2020s when I read some expose on it and it made me throw up a little bit in my mouth.

Fast fashion. At least I hope it does? It’s such a wasteful abomination that we don’t need right now.

Something to be said for the wfh movement too.

I thought I read somewhere that when they were making one of the Toy Story movies, there was some catastrophic data loss that nearly tanked the whole production. But then one of the animators came back from maternity and said wait, I think I have most of it synced to my home server? And the next thing you know, John Lasseter himself is barrelling down the highway to her place and it turned out yeah, she did have it.

I understand the concept of riding a bus being free time to read or use the phone, but my experience for my commute has been standing room only for an hour.

Well at least that speaks to good ridership numbers where you are. I guess they need to add more buses, bus priority lanes, or other higher-capacity transit options.

I would love to be able to use an e bike to get to work, but I don’t like biking next to cars on anything more than a 30 mph road.

It’s worth investigating what possible routes you can take to get from A to B, as there are generally more options with a bike than a car but they are not necessarily obvious. For example, after having a close look at a satellite view, I realized that what I had assumed was a railway track was actually a decommissioned rail line that had been converted into a trail, and it actually cuts some distance off of the car route I had been taking to work.

Last night, I actually discovered a new route for getting home from band practice. I used to cut through a cemetery, but with the nights getting longer, it was starting to creep me out going through there in pitch black conditions, even though the bike has a headlight. (Cemeteries in the day time can be quite a pleasant ride though.) But I carefully surveyed an apartment complex that looked impassable. In fact, it had a foot path leading through it and beyond. This one was hard to spot on satellite since it runs through a tree tunnel.

The biggest problems are typically bridges, where you really have no other choice but to cross with the traffic. I am frequently advocating to city officials to improve cycling infrastructure along any such traffic choke points.

Cool! I can see how optical media could, in theory, be very long-lasting as long as you don’t use materials that oxidize or otherwise degrade over time.

Well I guess I’m picturing DNA encoding like a RAID billion in terms of redundancy, so with some checksumming, you ought be able to sort out any mutations? But I’m no geneticist.

That’s why I back up my data on stone tablets in Cunieform.

Seriously though, if you wanted data to last for centuries, what would be your best bet? Would it be some sort of 3D-printed mechanical storage? At least plastics are generally not biodegradable, though they are photodegradable, so I guess you’d want to stick your archive in a dry cave somewhere?

Or what about this idea of encoding the data in the DNA of some microbe and cutting it loose? What could possibly go wrong?

The time cost is certainly an important factor to consider. It’s interesting to me that my Gen Z kids have a markedly different perspective on transit vs driving in that regard. They say if you’re driving, that’s time lost, while if you are on the bus, you can be doing all sorts of things on your phone or what have you.

For me, a car commute works out to around 15-20 min if there is no traffic (a big if). The ebike is more like 25-30, but it is generally far more pleasant—at least in good weather—as I can cut through parks and trails. The bus is perhaps 45 min if I catch it right, but unlike the bike, it feels longer than it is.

One factor to consider is that if your work is of a sedentary nature, both transit and cycling factor in some exercise into your daily routine which I would say is not wasted time in that case. People who take transit are generally in better shape than people who drive everywhere, since there is an element of walking around, sometimes carrying stuff.

I wasn’t sure an ebike would give me any exercise, but I think it’s safe to say it does. In the video, they say free transit translates to 2x usage per individual. For me, that ratio coincidentally also describes the regular bike vs ebike experience. So while my old bike provided more intense workouts, the ebike provides more consistent (albeit lighter) exercise since it is really my primary transportation at this point with exception to the months of Jan and Feb when the car admittedly takes over again for the most part.

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.

You know, I’m not actually quite sure what I’m doing, but I can tell you I am not looking at the keyboard. I suppose it’s similar to how I play violin? I don’t look at where my hand is but it shifts to different positions depending on what makes the most sense for the pattern I’m trying to play, and yes, a different position does imply a different fingering to reach the same notes.

When learning to program, I initially tried to follow the touch typing guidelines, but they say that you should use the right pinky to reach every key towards the upper right end of the keyboard, which gets old fast given how frequently you need to access them. And just as with music, there are patterns. In programming, you may frequently need to type {}, :=, or even something like \{\}, and flailing around with the pinky is a good way to give yourself carpal tunnel. So your right hand learns to shift to hit those keys using a combination of fingers.

As a Gen X, I think my typing speed peaked around late high school/early university? I tried to teach myself touch typing and got moderately proficient. Then I got into programming where you need to reach all of those punctuation marks. So my right hand has drifted further to the right over the years, which is better for code but suboptimal for regular text.

One thing that’s really tanked for me though is writing in cursive. I used to be able to take notes in class as fast as the prof could speak. Now I can scarcely sign my own name.

I suppose it depends on how you look at it. Take solar, for example. On the one hand, you could argue that if your primary goal is to generate heat, you might as well use a solar thermal plant with lots of focusing mirrors over photovoltaics. The conversion to electricity first would inevitably be far less efficient.

On the other hand, if you’ve got your PV plants for electricity already but they are overproducing at times, there is the question of what to do with the excess power, and using it to run heat pumps may actually be a pretty efficient application at the point?

I paid a visit to Green Bank WV once out of an interest in astronomy. The giant radio telescopes are truly a sight to behold!

Less impressive were the people camped out nearby who saw the place as the promised land where they could cast off their tinfoil hats in the cellular-banned zone surrounding the complex.

There were breaking changes between C and C++ (and some divergent evolution since the initial split) as well as breaking changes between different releases of C++ itself. I am not saying these never happened, but the powers that be controlling the standard have worked hard to minimize these for better or worse.

If I took one of my earliest ANSI C programs from the 80s and ran it through a C++23 compiler, I would probably need to remove a bunch of register statements and maybe check if an assumption of 16-bit int is going to land me in some trouble, but otherwise, I think it would build as long as it’s not linking in any 3rd party libraries.