[-] observantTrapezium@lemmy.ca 2 points 5 hours ago

Nice. It's going quite a bit uphill.

[-] observantTrapezium@lemmy.ca 5 points 1 day ago

That's what I thought, but where are the Silmarils though, did he just leave them home? I vaguely remember he never parted with them willingly, but I may be wrong.

[-] observantTrapezium@lemmy.ca 32 points 2 days ago

Just saw the scatter plot and line and my mind immediately screamed "bullshit" without knowing what this was about at all. Only then I read the text.

[-] observantTrapezium@lemmy.ca 4 points 5 days ago

Shame most of our streetcars don't have dedicated lanes.

[-] observantTrapezium@lemmy.ca 81 points 1 month ago

Sam also had the ring for a short time (longer than Déagol)

90

Inuvik, NWT, with a 2021 census population of 3,137 is the fifth largest settlement in Northern Canada (north of the 60th parallel). At "only" 68°22′ north, it doesn't even quite make it to Wikipedia's list of northernmost settlements. But that is the most populated town in Canada whose antipodal point lies within the continent of Antarctica. The antipodal point is the point you would get to if you could drill directly down through the centre of the Earth and come out the other side (also, it is the most distant point on the surface of the Earth, which is always approx. 20,000 km from the original point). Yellowknife and Iqaluit, the capitals of the Northwest Territories and Nunavut, respectively, have antipodal points that lie at sea close to the Antarctic mainland, within a few hundred kilometres from shore.

I found that interesting because while Inuvik is certainly cold most of the time, it's still surrounded by a lush boreal forest and the warmest couple of months of summer are fairly pleasant. I've personally never been, but a friend of a friend lived there for years and still goes there. The antipodal point though is a white desert. About 300 km from that point, on the much milder coast (the antipodal point itself is more than 2000 metres above sea level), one finds Dumont d'Urville Base, a a French scientific station, which is completely barren of vegetation and is barely above freezing during summer (at least they have penguins).

The reasons for the difference in climate are many, but the Antarctic Circumpolar Current is probably mainly to blame, together with the high elevation of the surface and high albedo of the ice.

[-] observantTrapezium@lemmy.ca 86 points 4 months ago

Astrophysicist here. Yes, space is crazy, but interesting things to keep in mind:

  1. The size of a star is determined by something called the photosphere. With those extremely massive stars, you can be hundreds of millions of kilometres "inside" and not yet know it.
  2. Similar story with supermassive black holes, from the perspective of an astronaut falling in, they wouldn't really be able to tell when they cross the horizon because the tidal forces there are very small (they will inevitably fall towards the centre and get spaghettified at some point)
[-] observantTrapezium@lemmy.ca 118 points 4 months ago

He got at least partially Canadianized mid post switching from miles to kilometres.

11

I turned on an old laptop and found a fairly sizable library of videos I accrued between 2013 and 2019. It contains 329 hours of content across 38 movies and 464 TV episodes (of 29 different shows), and that's even after removing 42 corrupted video files (about 14G). There are also 64 standalone videos, mostly stuff I downloaded off YouTube for the purpose of watching on the road (but that's just 10 hours of the content).

I'm kinda wondering what I should do with that. It's 230G, so not really small, but I'm not short on storage space.

A big chunk of the content is current events, like The Daily Show and Colbert Report (including an interview with Bill Cosby from 2014, yikes...) Would you re-watch that?

19

I'd like to hang vertical blinds on my floor-to-ceiling windows (272 cm in height). Ceiling is concrete and has a rail already mounted.

The off the shelf solutions I see have mounts that are fixed to a wall, not to the ceiling.

  • Can I fix a mount to the white window frame shown in the picture?
  • If not, is it a good idea to remove the existing rail, and use the existing holes in the concrete to hang a mount for the vertical blinds mount? Perhaps with a right angle bracket?
[-] observantTrapezium@lemmy.ca 96 points 5 months ago

You can't successfully use a home email server.

Mostly true (server can be home but using the ISP network directly probably won't work)

You can't successfully use an email server on a (cloud) VPS.

Bullshit

You can't successfully use an email server on a bare metal machine in your own datacenter.

Bullshit

As such, it is my distinct displeasure to declare the death of SMTP. The protocol is no longer usable. And as we can see, this devolution occurred organically.

Bullshit

[-] observantTrapezium@lemmy.ca 53 points 5 months ago

Wife should have Googled it, she's the buttface.

23

I don't seem to understand something regarding how interest is paid on a mortgage. Say the loan is for $100,000 at a 5% rate for 10 years, paid monthly.

I would think that on the first month, the interest I have to pay $100,000 × (0.05 ÷ 12) = $416.67. However the mortgage calculator says that the first payment is actually $412.39. While it's not a huge difference, it's a difference nonetheless and I can't really figure out where it comes from.

My intuition is that it's somehow related to the fact that interest is compounded daily, but when I take r = 0.05 ÷ 365 and N = 365 × 10 payments (keeping leap years in mind for later), and calculate the first 30 days, I get $409.70, and the first 31 days give $423.32. I guess that the "actual" number is some kind of weighted average since the calculator doesn't ask at which month your loan starts.

So where is this $412.39 coming from? In reality when paying a mortgage, do you see the interest fluctuating as it decreases, depending on the number of days every month?

47

I recommend watching the whole interview, it's hilarious.

[-] observantTrapezium@lemmy.ca 92 points 10 months ago

Pull a docker image of an old distro into an apptainer sandbox, install what you need within, then make a .sif image, should work pretty much in perpetuity. You can also try to make an Appimage.

[-] observantTrapezium@lemmy.ca 52 points 1 year ago

BJ almost certainly stands for Beijing here (although the company is apparently Qingdao-based). You see it a lot in China, including very oblivious "I ❤️ BJ" T-shirts worn by old ladies.

8

Pretty interesting talks, especially focusing on safety.

17

The picture is from very early in the episode, I'm trying not to spoil it to anybody. The new Star Trek show "Strange New Worlds" just released an episode that mostly takes place in present-day (more-or-less) Toronto, with familiar city sites in almost every scene. It's a pretty good episode for Kurtzman-era Trek, although it's hard to concentrate on the plot as Torontonians.

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observantTrapezium

joined 1 year ago