observantTrapezium

joined 2 years ago
 

There are apparently underground passages connecting the hospitals on University Avenue and all the way to Queen's Park TTC station. I couldn't find a map or even many references to its existence. This Instagram post is the most I could find, but it's unclear if it's open to the public, or how to get there.

Anybody here has experience with it?

[–] observantTrapezium 3 points 1 week ago

So the document had been classified as written in Nabataean, but it's unclear if that turned out not to be the case in the end?

[–] observantTrapezium 7 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I downloaded the 70B model and tried politically "naughty" questions. Even without the chatbot guardrails, it mostly says things that the CCP would approve of, but you could trick it to be more honest (not super easy!). One interesting thing is that while it usually spews this blocks, for some politically sensitive questions ("is Taiwan part of China") it just spits the answer.

[–] observantTrapezium 1 points 1 week ago

شلون (shlon)

[–] observantTrapezium 1 points 1 week ago

Came in with very low expectations and was still disappointed.

Plot made little sense, characters awkward and unconvincing, gratuitous violence and team mistrust just don't feel Trekky to me.

Redeeming qualities: special effects and it was only 90 minutes long.

2/10

[–] observantTrapezium 2 points 1 week ago

I'm good with one large meal a day.

[–] observantTrapezium 91 points 3 weeks ago (4 children)

I'm so used to it I never realized it's unusual.

[–] observantTrapezium 3 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

I'm not a fan of any of these companies, by any means whatsoever, but this is not a good title for this graph. Climate change results when CO₂ is put into the atmosphere, not so much when petroleum is extracted from the ground. Oil companies definitely share a lot of the blame, but the buyers and users of their products are no less at fault. Saying that Shell or Chevron or whatever are responsible in proportion to their production is an oversimplification.

[–] observantTrapezium 12 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

No one likes paying taxes, but I think that for most people who can afford to buy a home in this city, property tax is still significantly lower than provincial and federal taxes, and arguably you get more for your buck (the money is spent closer to home, by definition).

[–] observantTrapezium 58 points 3 weeks ago (3 children)

No, it's not normal getting a fax in 2025.

[–] observantTrapezium 36 points 1 month ago

Why she’s only credited by her first name: because she asked and Mike McMahan agreed even though he didn't know why.

[–] observantTrapezium 7 points 1 month ago

That's actually interesting!

[–] observantTrapezium 16 points 1 month ago

Twist, the password is 3943333493494434449433344993449933399394393994343933393394334993394934994399949493349393994434443349

 

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.

 

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?

 

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?
 

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?

 

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

 

Pretty interesting talks, especially focusing on safety.

 

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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