tunetardis

joined 2 years ago
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The octobass is an imposing bowed string instrument designed to produce extremely low-pitched sounds that are unattainable for other instruments in its family in c/[email protected]
[–] tunetardis 17 points 3 days ago (1 children)

I saw one of these on display at the Musical Instrument Museum in Phoenix AZ, but never heard one played. It's so huge you can't reach those frets at the top there, so the inventor had to come up with a keyed mechanism you see the guy working in the photo.

If you could create an additional day of the week, what would you name it and why? in c/[email protected]
[–] tunetardis 1 points 5 days ago

Given how things are these days, I fear this would be the day you'd be forced to go into work to make up for any wfh you do.

Coca-Cola is on pace to dump 1.3 billion pounds of plastic into our oceans each year in c/[email protected]
[–] tunetardis 5 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Can't say I'm surprised by the push to plastics given the 25% tariff on aluminum.

A gentleman chinchilla in c/[email protected]
[–] tunetardis 10 points 1 week ago (1 children)

That's cute!

My daughter has a chinchilla who likes to hold up signs like this.

signs.

Computer models have been accurately predicting climate change for 50 years | A research scientist found that many 1970s-era models were ‘pretty much spot-on.’ Today’s models are far more advanced. in c/[email protected]
[–] tunetardis 55 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

Climatology and meteorology are separate disciplines with their own very different modelling. I studied the former way back when, and it wasn't even in the same department at my university (geography vs physics). Climatology is about long-term trends and focuses more on energy fluxes, general circulation patterns (both in the atmosphere and oceans), the hydrological cycle, the carbon cycle, etc. Meteorology is about the near-term. It focuses on the fluid and thermodynamics of specific weather systems, and how to process/interpret real-time data.

What's your superpower? in c/[email protected]
[–] tunetardis 6 points 1 week ago

Yeah. I think it started when I was playing 2nd violin in a community orchestra. I'd get lost and think just keep playing and look like you know what you're doing. As long as it doesn't clash…

Then I joined a band and they said there are no rules here. Make up whatever you want to go with the song. I was in Heaven!

One time, I was at some kind of open mic thing and an old guy walks up, introducing himself as the official city poet laureate. (Yes, that turned out to be legit!) He started reciting a poem about a local historic event and before you know it, I was playing along. He looked at me but continued. I think it sounded vaguely like something you might hear in a Ken Burns documentary, and when he was done, he came over.

Wow, that fit the words perfectly! What piece did you choose?

Oh what? No I just made it up on the spot.

Really! Could you play it again?

Yeah, no. But if someone made a recording, I'm sure I could harmonize to it! 👍

What's your superpower? in c/[email protected]
[–] tunetardis 12 points 1 week ago (2 children)

I can play a spontaneous and convincing harmony on my violin to any song I hear. Sometimes I can even do this as I'm hearing a new song for the first time and trying to join in. I also suck at reading sheet music, so this could be a survival adaptation?

Live Updates on the Global Market: China raises its retaliatory tariff on the US to 84% effective April 10 in c/[email protected]
[–] tunetardis 8 points 1 week ago

I can't find where I read this now, but my recollection is that in the previous round of tariffs, China not only implemented tit for tat counter-tariffs which I imagine Trump had been expecting, but took some additional measures like export controls on rare earths. Like it or not, they basically own the global market and Trump had no answer to that other than to threaten even more tariffs. And here we are.

Python 3.14.0a7, 3.13.3, 3.12.10, 3.11.12, 3.10.17 and 3.9.22 are now available in c/[email protected]
[–] tunetardis 8 points 1 week ago (2 children)

I've been playing around with the free-threaded build of 3.13 and it seems pretty stable with the standard library at least. Most of what I've read suggests the only problems have been with 3rd party libraries that make unsafe assumptions about the GIL being around. But I've tried it out with my own production code and it's been rock solid and performant (at least by Python standards).

Dire wolf revived through biotech company's de-extinction process in c/[email protected]
[–] tunetardis 13 points 1 week ago (1 children)

It sounds like they did some gene editing to select characteristics the dire wolf supposedly had, as opposed to finding an ancient DNA sample somewhere and working from that. So it's more of a genetic simulation than the real deal right?

Like just because you know of some gene that happens to give people pronounced brow ridges doesn't mean you can bring back the Neanderthal. Or am I not understanding this correctly?

am i stupid or are solar panel's efficiency independent on latitude in c/[email protected]
[–] tunetardis 4 points 1 week ago

I see what you're getting at here. The solar constant is the solar constant. If you've got a perfect angle to the sun, you should be getting the same amount of power regardless of latitude. I mean I suppose it's possible there might be a slight attenuation with the sun at a lower angle due to there being more atmosphere to traverse? Otoh solar panels don't function as efficiently at high temperatures, so it's possible they may be more efficient in some cases.

But you have to consider that averaged out, you're looking at shorter daylight hours overall at high latitudes, even if there are periods in mid-summer when days can be super long, so that's a consideration. So yes, the panels should pull in similar amounts of power while the sun is up, but it's not up as much.

What causes musician face? in c/[email protected]
[–] tunetardis 6 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

My choirmaster years ago taught us that raising your eyebrows actually does help you reach the top of your vocal range, so that might actually be technique? Though I'm not a professional singer by any stretch, so who am I to say.

170
Carney slams Poilievre's 'irresponsible' lack of security clearance after reports India meddled in leadership (www.cbc.ca)
submitted 3 weeks ago by tunetardis to c/canada
22 comments fedilink
 

Original reporting by the Globe & Mail is behind a paywall. In any case, it's not a good look for Poilievre that India boosted his candidacy and then he wouldn't get security clearance to be informed of this fact.

11
A busy transition coming for City of Kingston's garbage and recycling collection services (www.kingstonist.com)
submitted 2 months ago by tunetardis to c/kingston_ontario
2 comments fedilink
 

Big changes are coming. To summarize the main points:

  • The city is switching to standardized bins for garbage and compost that can be lifted and dumped onto trucks mechanically.
  • This will be phased in over the next several years starting in the suburbs.
  • 120L bins will be standard issue: one for garbage and one for compost.
  • You can upgrade to a 240L bin if you need one, but it costs $120 initially + $196/year. The initial fee will be waived if you switch to the bigger bin within the first 3 months, however.
  • The city is outsourcing blue and grey box collection to a company called Emterra Environmental. Whether they choose to go with bins also is uncertain, but that wouldn't change before 2026.
  • You can still bring stuff to the residential drop-off at KARC for the time being.
16
Local News Is Dying. The Consequences Are Worse than You Think (thewalrus.ca)
submitted 2 months ago by tunetardis to c/kingston_ontario
0 comments fedilink
 

Section relevant to Kingston:

DONNA FORSTER and her husband, Joe Fardella, experienced the retrenchment of local journalism first hand on Thursday, July 18, 2024, when they settled in to watch the 6 p.m. local news in Kingston, Ontario. They expected to see Bill Hutchins, the affable news anchor on CKWS Global News Kingston, deliver the better part of an hour of local news and interviews from the station’s downtown broadcast centre, just as he’d done for twenty-seven years. Instead, their TV screen was blank.

“We just had no idea what had happened,” Forster says. The next day, they learned that the Kingston station had fallen victim to spending cuts by its troubled parent company, Corus Entertainment. When the revamped supper hour newscast appeared four days later, it was unrecognizable. About two dozen on-air personalities, reporters, and support staff at CKWS and the two local Corus-owned radio stations lost their jobs. Hutchins, then president of the broadcast centre’s Unifor local, says that as recently as 2023, the station had seven full- and part-time videographers covering Kingston and its environs. Following the July purge, there were three. What was a locally produced sixty-minute show that included local weather, sports, entertainment, and news about everything from city politics to community food drives now starts at 5:30 p.m. and lasts a half hour. The truncated newscast, anchored out of Peterborough, is recorded and shown again at 6:30 p.m. Producers in Toronto determine the story lineup.

“There’s far, far less information about Kingston now—they usually have one Kingston story, one Brockville story, and one Belleville story,” says Forster, a sixty-two-year-old social worker. By her reckoning, news about Kingston and the surrounding area now lasts about four minutes. As someone who eschews social media, Forster increasingly thinks of that blank television screen she saw back in July as a metaphor for feeling less connected and aware of what’s going on in her community.

She is not alone. “There’s not a day goes by that I don’t run into someone who wants to know what happened, why it happened,” Hutchins says. “When you take a seventy-year-old station with deep community roots, and I mean deep, and you just rip them out of the ground one day, people feel hurt, they feel abandoned, they feel lost.” CKWS, he says, specialized in “a little bit of everything that reflected the community,” and people tell him they are struggling to make sense of the remaining local news offerings.

Christine Sypnowich, a Queen’s University philosophy professor and chair of the Coalition of Kingston Communities, says the loss of a strong local television newscast creates “a really bad situation.” The coalition, which brings together nineteen neighbourhood groups, counted on CKWS to cover local issues that it then pursued further in its report cards on openness and transparency at city hall. The station also helped the coalition share its concerns with the public: a CKWS reporter typically sought an interview within hours of receiving a coalition press release. Nowadays, Sypnowich says, attracting media attention is more “hit and miss.”

The CKWS cuts are the latest symptom of decline in Kingston’s once-rich local media environment. The storied Kingston Whig Standard newspaper, winner of two prestigious Michener Awards for public service journalism and a host of other honours, is “less and less relevant,” Sypnowich says. The Postmedia Network–owned newspaper publishes daily only four times a week and is so diminished it sometimes runs Sypnowich’s press releases verbatim. There are just five unionized staff left in its newsroom, down from sixty-nine in 1992.

Kingstonist.com, a digital news outlet, is working hard to fill the gaps, Sypnowich says. But it is a relatively small operation, with just three full-time journalists, a manager who occasionally helps out with news coverage, and a budget for freelancers. Forster and Fardella recently stepped up to support the publication, but their willingness to pay for digital news makes them a rarity. While almost three quarters of Canadians (72 percent) access news online, a majority still believe journalism is best served up free, with 57 percent indicating they won’t pay anything at all for it. Nationwide, only 15 percent of us opened our wallets to support digital news, according to data published in 2024. Just over half of those subscriptions (54 percent) were discounted.

IMO the Kingstonist is awesome! Definitely worth supporting them with a subscription if you have the means. If not, visit them anyway and stay informed.

35
UCalgary alum Sasha Ivanov creates an app to help shoppers identify Canadian products (ucalgary.ca)
submitted 2 months ago by tunetardis to c/buycanadian
3 comments fedilink
 

The app is called Maple Scan. Just downloaded it but have yet to give it a whirl.

297
South Africa suspends American businesses and mineral exports (www.maravipost.com)
 

I wish I could find another source to confirm this, but if true, that's basically the nuclear option to kick out all American companies and halt all mineral exports to the US.

23
ICC issues arrest warrants for Israeli prime minister and Hamas chief over alleged war crimes (www.cbc.ca)
submitted 5 months ago by tunetardis to c/canadapolitics
0 comments fedilink
 

If I'm not mistaken, this means Netanyahu would be arrested on the spot if he set foot on Canadian soil. Trudeau has indicated as much. For its part, The US does not recognize the ICC's authority.

6
One day at Ribfest (self.lemmy_guess)
 

Every year in September, the city where I live holds a ribs and craft beer festival on the fairgrounds. This year, the band I play with landed a gig there.

Everything was going well until, partway through a set, I noticed one guy who looked a little out of place at such a venue. He was dressed in a 3 piece suit, brandishing a large briefcase, and walking around purposefully. He looked like a lawyer. And wouldn't you know it, he's striding right up towards the stage. Uh-oh…

What happened next stopped the show and left us all with jaws dropped. I'll leave it at that for now.

21
Maternity madness (self.lemmy_guess)
 

I seem to recall an incident the day my daughter was born that saw 3 large axe-wielding men bursting open doors in the maternity ward as alarms blazed across the hospital. And yes, it was my fault.

236
Lemmy should have a community called lemmy_guess (self.showerthoughts)
 

Posts would describe bizarre situations people have found themselves in, and commenters would take a stab at what put them there.

46
Getting into the Senate is the politician equivalent of an academic getting tenure (self.showerthoughts)
 

I have no idea how true this is? It is just a random shower thought.

It may be more true where I am in Canada than in the US? Here, senators are essentially appointed for life. I understand US senators are elected but have longer terms and generally more stable careers than their counterparts? In either case, there seems to be a lot of prestige that comes with the position.

39
Major Russian disinfo site featuring anti-Trudeau articles prompts calls for new focus at public inquiry (www.cbc.ca)
submitted 7 months ago by tunetardis to c/canada
5 comments fedilink
12
Canadian university cities facing surprising rental market downturn (www.theglobeandmail.com)
submitted 7 months ago by tunetardis to c/kingston_ontario
3 comments fedilink
 

Of relevance to Kingston:

For the last 10 years, Amélie Brack’s property-management company had no trouble renting out both halves of a duplex near St. Lawrence College in Kingston, one of Canada’s most notable student-dominated cities renowned for its high proportion of out-of-town students, with both St. Lawrence and Queen’s University in the area. This year, it’s still not rented out as the fall school term is about to start – a first for her. It’s not the only unit going empty, after demand for student housing in Kingston drastically fell in the past few months. “Up until last year, we would get 25 to 50 inquiries per week in August. This year, it’s been crickets. It’s quite a surprise,” said Ms. Brack, leasing manager for Limestone Property Management.

It’s a phenomenon that hasn’t shown up yet in any official statistical reports. But it’s one that many at ground level are observing, a noticeable U-turn from the last few years where there were often frantic bidding wars for student housing in the months leading up to the start of the fall term. They point to the cap on international students as a significant factor behind the drop. “The international student reduction has definitely affected us,” said Ms. Brack, who said that large, multibedroom houses in what’s called the student ghetto in Kingston are also going unrented and owners are finding themselves having to list them for rents closer to what a family could afford, rather than what five desperate students (or their parents) might be willing to pay: $2,700 a month for a four-bedroom, rather than the previous $4,000.

The cap for 2024 was set at 360,000 study permits for the country, a 35-per-cent reduction from the previous year.

In Ontario, internet searches for student housing near universities in Waterloo, Hamilton, and Kingston are down 46 per cent to 55 per cent, Ms. Yiu said.

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