Their developer supporters must be salivating at the thought of building more single family houses though, which solves the housing/affordability crisis about as well as building bigger roads solves traffic congestion.

Storm surges can be insane. I’ve never been in a hurricane, but have witnessed the aftermath. My parents had some property in coastal Mexico that got hit. When we got there to assess damages, the town’s main street was essentially a giant sand dune over 2 storeys tall. The surge had basically lifted the entire beach and dumped it 2 blocks in. The town square was likewise covered in sand with all sorts of debris sticking out of it. And by debris, I mean stuff as large as a fridge.

(Regarding the property, we kind of lucked out. About a year before it hit, a hotel went up between the house and the beach, which blocked the view but had a major silver lining in terms of protecting all the houses behind it from the worst of the storm. And then speaking to the hotel owner, he said he’d spent a small fortune to build a giant concrete foundation that stretched almost a city block’s length under the beach. People thought he was insane to do that, but it was literally the only waterfront building still standing, so he clearly knew what he was doing.)

Heh yeah. I’ve asked her on a few occasions and she looks embarrassed and gives me a different answer every time. I figure she just needs a moment and so I’ve stopped prying.

I’ve caught my wife doing this on numerous occasions. The typical scenario is we’ll meet after work someplace for dinner. I’m on my bike and she’s driving. So we head home separately and she arrives first. But as I’m putting the bike away, I see a light turning on behind me and it’s her climbing out of the car.

I’ve seen this also at fast food parking lots and it puzzles me even more. There’s a guy just sitting there not eating or doing anything. Did he eat already? Was he not hungry and but his partner was so he’s just waiting for them?

Last time I saw one of these guys as I was entering the restaurant. I ate my lunch and sat around for maybe 20 min because I prefer not to cycle again immediately after eating. Then I come out and the dude is still there, staring off into space.

I’m a musician. I can’t afford top tier sound!

Tbh I can live with what I’ve got at home. A garden variety setup today still sounds better than something high-end did when I was growing up. Just give me some decent channel separation and I can zone out.

Where there is still significant room for improvement is in stage sound. Why do monitors always have to sound like sh*t? It’s like bands spend all their budget on amps and PAs and whatever dregs are left over go to the monitors. And house sound. Don’t even get me started. Maybe their gear was good once (probably not) but it’s invariably seen one beer spill too many.

I got to tour Bruce Nuclear. I still remember entering that building and feeling like I was on the Death Star with so much machinery stretching on and on.

Spent breakfast researching this:

• the plant would store 200 MWh
• given the 10-hour figure, one would assume it can feed up to 20 MW to the grid at any time
• they have already built a 4 MWh pilot plant in Italy
• the utility has also been building lithium-ion battery farms, so it stands to reason they see enough potential in this approach to continue pursuing it
• compressed CO2 storage has advantages over compressed air in that it can be stored indefinitely at ambient temperature and has a higher energy density in liquid form
• it has disadvantages in terms of plant safety

Dang, that reads like a commercial for pharmaceuticals.

Oh man I have that same problem in Apple Music! I make a playlist out of my set list and have it repeat all week until I have everything down, and then the algorithm picks from it for months after that.

I’m starting to think maybe I should use one streaming service for learning and another for enjoyment?

Know better than to be in Kursk?

I have mixed feelings on this. I grew up in a secular setting as my father had long ago given up on religion and my mother seemed ambivalent about it.

As an adult, I moved to a new city with my wife who is religious, though non-evangelical. She never tried to push me into it but would disappear every Sunday morning. But after a decade or so of feeling like a stranger in my adopted city, I attended a service where I discovered they were in desperate need for musicians. So I wound up volunteering some time and in the process, met a lot of people, and one thing led to another. Today, I do have friends in the city, play in various bands around town, etc.

Yet I still haven’t really bought into religion. I guess the value to me is that it gets my introverted ass out of the house and meeting people irl. As a community institution, it brings together people of varying ages and demographics. But it comes with a huge amount of baggage which I could frankly do without?

I just hope that if religion fades away, there will still be something at the community level that gathers together people regularly from all walks of life. There are all sorts of special interest groups, but many of these do not necessarily attract a wide cross-section of society.

Whatever the case, when a church closes as a religious institution, I hope that it can be repurposed to some other activity that is still community-building?

How can they do this? It’s a confirmed natural wonder in Civ6.

Ah thank you! I will have a look at those.

Are there any apps that support scaled? I’ve tried a few and no luck so far. I like the scaled view.

Putin: How goes the special military operation? Gerasimov: We have managed to advance -20 km into enemy territory.

A good place to start might be to look at the huge number of ethnic dishes built around beans. People around the world have been inventive in this regard for centuries.

For the North American diet, it would help if fast food offered more bean options. There’s Taco Bell and the like, I guess. And hummus and falafel are working their way into places that sell wraps. But while burger joints are increasingly offering veggie burgers that are presumably using some kind of bean or pea-based protein, I wonder why they don’t try offering a chili? We have a chilli festival where I live and it’s hugely popular with around half the recipes being bean-based.

Nice. I had been using the analogy that an introvert at a party acts as a sacrificial anode consuming corrosive extroversion until they are utterly exhausted. But I like your take on it!

I’ve been on long flights where I wished there had been designated seating for introverts. But then I considered the implications of packing all the extroverts together in one place nearby and thought better of it.

I have tried to bury memories about my life as a student, but posts like this bring it all back.

Like say for a term paper, it usually went something like this.

1. Pick from among the Prof’s suggested topics.
2. Attempt to find resources on said topic.
3. Fail at #2 and return to #1.
4. Finally find a well-covered topic and breathe a sigh of relief with 1 week to go.
5. Attend a lecture/TA session and discover to my horror that I’ve misunderstood the topic completely. Return to #1.
6. In desperation, try to find reference materials on all possible topics at once. 2 days to go.
7. Spend a day sifting through everything I’ve managed to gather hoping to find anything at all I could write 1000+ words about.
8. Final evening. Plunk down a 2L coke, heat up some Jamaican patties, and start pulling an all-nighter.

I guess for exams, there was less running around but more like #8 on repeat for a couple of weeks straight. After that, my mom calls telling me what great plans she has for Christmas. I’m usually just coming down with the flu by this point.

I think with 50 acres, you should be able to do a lot to combat the urban heat island effect. I say this based on my bike commute which alternates between suburban subdivisions and trails over conservation land. The trails always feel noticeably cooler, even where there are no trees casting shade. The coolest spots do tend to be where have trees and/or water nearby, but even open fields feel cooler.