jadero

And Canada, but we're really messed up. Most people I know across multiple generations use Fahrenheit for indoor temperature, cooking, and water you might swim in. Celsius is for outdoor air temperature, mostly, I think, because that's how weather is reported. There is a fair amount of variation, but I don't think I've heard anyone using Celsius for cooking.

That, too! I've taken to using any autotldr as a substitute for a "proper" title and author summary. If the autotldr looks like there might be based on something I find interesting, I'll go read the article.

Canada's Plant Hardiness Zone maps are in the process of being updated.

Two interesting points:

• USDA uses only 1 variable, extreme low temperature, while Canada uses 7 (lows, highs, rainfall, snowpack, wind, etc). To make comparisons easier, Canada publishes maps using both methods. The maps using USDA methods look a lot more forgiving than the Canadian ones. Both have 19 zones, although USDA is 0-9b while Canada's is 0a-9a.
• That website has links to interactive maps, including historical maps. Looking at old versions and current versions makes the northward shift of zones very obvious. Even regional variations in that shift are visible. Maybe I'm not looking closely enough, but it looks like the most dramatic shifts are at longitudes running from Western Alberta through Western Ontario.

The Canadian maps are calculated using 30-year windows with a 10-year overlap. I would be very interested in seeing these maps calculated with an annual 30-year sliding window to show the northward march as an animation. Assuming it's moving enough to make sense when rendered annually.

I sympathize. I've been caught out a couple of times by depending on autotldr as a substitute for reading the actual article. My own casual comparisons between autotldr and source articles suggest that autotldr is probably about 80% faithful to its source, on average.

I don't know if it's real or in my own mind, but it also seems to me that autotldr is faithful to the article inversely proportional to the quality of its source material. That is, the better and more complete the article, the more likely it is that autotldr trashes it.

Now that I've written it down, it strikes me that that may be an insurmountable problem. If we think of good articles as being "high information" and garbage articles as "low information", summarizing will always be more likely to cause important "damage" the higher the information content. Thus, hitting 95% on a good article might trash it, while hitting 60% on a trash article is just fine. This might be especially true if you consider that the best articles might already be as compact as is reasonable.

I find it interesting that our current definition of the inch is based on an industrial standard that had been in use for decades. And that that standard was, in effect, created by one man.

tldr: Carl Edvard Johansson was a Swedish manufacturer of gauge blocks who built his one-inch blocks by ignoring the differences between the UK standard inch and the US standard inch. Those standards were only a few millionths of an "inch" (pick one!) apart anyway, so throwing away most of the decimal places must have seemed like a good idea.

The same people and programs that got every other network to every household?

What is this stop business? I have it on good authority that it's turtles all the way down.

Thanks for helping me look at things from a different angle!

Never underestimate the power of obsession. I would not be the least bit surprised to learn that right now, as I write this, there is someone out there making their 4327th attempt to engrave "The Lord's Prayer" into a watermelon seed using a handheld sewing needle. And it's probably in an illuminated Gothic script.

I understand that point of view as well.

I guess my real issue is my own selfishness. I think the problems will ultimately be solved, but at my age, I doubt I'm likely to see anything other than the "worse" in "things will get worse before they get better," no matter how aggressively we act.

The pessimism I experience and most frequently encounter has nothing to do with the scientific or even the technical possibility of dealing with the problem, but the social and political.

We've known of the need to do something since the mid-1980s and earlier. Before internet! I gave my first presentation on anthropogenic climate change (when it was still known as global warming) to my high school's science club in 1973.

We know what we need to do. We know the majority of how to do it. And we've known the what and how for almost as long as we've been aware of the need.

My pessimism arises from the fact that those who are greedy for power, resources, and/or money are also, by definition, selfish assholes who tolerate nothing that affects their agenda and who have the resources to con the general public into following their agenda.

This is what word problems are.

Things may have changed since my graduation in 1974, but my experience was that word problems were contrived scenarios with little or no relevance to my life. I was pretty good at math and had very good reading comprehension, so I never actually struggled with any of it.

But not once was I ever asked to calculate the storage requirements for a collection of toys, where on the teeter-totter to sit to balance it, how long a ladder needed to be to safely used to get on top of a given roof, or safe maximum driving speed given standard reaction times under various conditions of low visibility.

Instead, it was all stuff that sounded like a surrealist riddle. (If a chicken-and-a-half can lay an egg-and-a-half in a day-and-a-half, how long will it take for a frog with a wooden leg to kick through a pickle?)

And besides being pretty good at it, I actually enjoyed math once other interests and working with my dad in the shop showed me just how useful it can be.