roter

We ordered one of the first batch in Canada. $$$. They gave us a Vic20 loaner until it arrived. We didn't time it well but the family had a history of that. In fact, my accountant dad bought a Wang mainframe for a small fortune right before everyone was switching to ibm clone desktops.

> Canadians also don’t seem to understand that this situation is only going to get worse and America can no longer be considered a friend.

As a Canadian, I very much understand that this will/can get worse, and not just for the US. The problems of America do not stop at Trump. He is merely the distracting, mercurial figurehead of a dysfunctional government and populist movement.

It is not a matter of friendship --- the average American isn't that different than the average Canadian. Some of my best friends and favoured colleagues are Americans. We can't turn this into Americans v. Canadians. We're all just getting exposed to the same social media cues that feed on fear and despair driven by profit and bad actors which leads to an erosion of trust and goodwill. America may just be a few short years ahead of the rest of us. We need to recognize who/what is driving us apart and fight that.

Most building professionals, urban/city/master planners/engineers are explicitly incorporating resilience into their designs at all levels. This includes both new designs and retrofitting old buildings.

Places of emergency cooling refuge, parks, backup power to ensure energy/water continue, passive features like solar heating, natural ventilation, bioswales, air quality filtering, cool roofs/roads, water features, overhangs/louvers/awnings, insulation, thermal mass, etc, etc.

These are things grass roots can do now to mitigate impacts while governments dither and punt hard decisions into the future.

The confirmation email takes a few minutes.

I saw a note from an earlier year's discussion saying the css has been changed over the years. Perhaps it was easier then to discern fact or myth, truth or fiction.

> ... potential collapse of the Atlantic Gulf Stream, also known as the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation or AMOC.

The Gulf Stream is not also known as the AMOC. The nature of the Gulf Stream (intense surface current flowing off the eastern coast of North America) is largely driven by wind torque (westerlies in the mid-latitudes, easterlies in the tropics and polar regions) with the intensification due to Coriolis and coastal friction. What we're talking about collapsing is the overturning part largely driven by the differences in salt & temperature between the surface and the abyss. This overturning intensifies the heat transport from tropics to poles and pulls the Gulf Stream farther north:

  All Ireland is washed by the Gulf Stream
  -- Ulysses, James Joyce

Somewhat similar for Canada:

https://worktree.ca/taffer/canadian-alternatives

Browsing is slow. Can browse folders but can't open individual files. Pink unicorns with fiery manes.

Hitting the "I'd Buy" button gets me "Your bank account is filing a restraining order". Lovely.

Isn't the main reason because you're not eating?

The whispey ones are largely transparent to incoming shortwave radiation but largely opaque to outgoing longwave radiation. You just need to put on your ~10 micron wavelength goggles.

The pros for heat pumps are numerous. There is the issue of resilience to extreme weather. ASHRAE is funding a project, just getting underway, to create a map, first of the USA but anticipated to be expanded to worldwide, of heat pump resilience in the face of an expected change in the frequency of extreme events. Those wanting to learn more:

https://www.ashrae.org/file%20library/technical%20resources/...

And I went straight to storing large numerical arrays, i.e. replacement for Zarr, NetCDF, HDF, etc

There is also the theory that the British just had more practice at gunnery and sailhandling while blockading the French/Spanish in the various ports.

Clouds have two main impacts: reflect incoming, shortwave radiation back to space and absorb (and re-radiation up and down) outgoing, longwave radiation from the surface. The interplay and relative proportion between these two impacts has long been a challenge and depends upon the cloud altitude (low/high), composition (water,ice), and optical depth.

Units provided were power not energy. The number provided is just the product of the solar constant and the cross-sectional area of Earth [0], roughly.

[0] https://bionumbers.hms.harvard.edu/bionumber.aspx?id=100943

I always found this 2/3rds statistic hard to believe but it counts all coastlines as a border zone [0].

As a Canadian, I'm more concerned with the vast percentage of us who live within 100 miles of the US border.

[0] https://www.aclu.org/know-your-rights/border-zone

Very interesting and promising package.

I especially like that there is a PyQt interface which might provide an alternative to another great package: pyqtgraph[0].

[0] https://github.com/pyqtgraph/pyqtgraph

One of his (Sir Terry) sources for inspiration was Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable [0]. Indeed he wrote a foreword for one of them.

[0] Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable

How do you stop so you don't go whizzing past Alpha Centauri at near light speed? :)

When running Orbit on the comments in this page:

> The Orbit add-on by Mozilla is a new AI-powered tool that summarizes and answers queries about web content, including articles and videos. It uses a Mistral LLM (Mistral 7B) hosted on Mozilla's GCP instance. The add-on is free to use and works on various websites, including Gmail, Wikipedia, NY Times, YouTube, and more. However, some users have raised concerns about the size of the model and its privacy implications, as well as the fact that it requires an internet connection to function. Additionally, some users have suggested that Mozilla should focus on improving the browser itself rather than developing new add-ons.

s/malice/avarice.

There is support for the OP's statement, in the case of Celsius at least [0], emphasis mine:

> Because of this dual usage, one must not rely upon the unit name or its symbol to denote that a quantity is a temperature interval; it must be unambiguous through context or explicit statement that the quantity is an interval. This is sometimes solved by using the symbol °C (pronounced "degrees Celsius") for a temperature, and C° (pronounced "Celsius degrees") for a temperature interval, although this usage is non-standard. Another way to express the same is "40 °C ± 3 K", which can be commonly found in literature.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celsius#Temperatures_and_inter...

Rankine.

I remember having more luck at Bakka Books back in the 80s when it was on Queen St. Looks like it still exists in perhaps a reduced form [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bakka-Phoenix

I too need to do percentiles. One option is loop through the grids but bin/histogram it. You'll get a really good 99% from a 1 Kelvin bin width.

Also, I've found the diurnal profile from ERA5 analysis can be abysmal in some locations. ERA5-Land is much better, high resolution, though only available over... er... land.

To your point about not relying on cloud. Noted in the Google option [1] link above:

> Update Frequency: The ERA5 dataset is currently not refreshed in the Google Cloud Public Dataset Program. The program provides ERA5 data spanning from 1940 to May 2023.

Another alternative, Amazon [2], also deprecated:

> The provider of this dataset will no longer maintain this dataset. We are open to talking with anyone else who might be willing to provide this dataset to the community.

[2] https://registry.opendata.aws/ecmwf-era5/

I too use the ERA5 reanalysis data and I too need quick time series. As the data comes in [lat, lon] grids, stacked by whatever period you've chosen, e.g. [month of hourly data, lat, lon], it becomes a massive matrix transpose problem if you want 20+ years.

What I do is download each netCDF file, transpose, and insert into a massive 3D HDF file organized as [lat, lon, hour]. On my workstation it takes about 30 minutes to create one year for one variable (no parallel I/O or processes) but then takes milliseconds to pull a single (lat, lon) location. Initial pain for long-term gain. Simplistic, but I'm just a climatologist not a database guru.

If I read correctly, they are using the ERA5 dataset [0]. It is freely available and can be downloaded through a Python API called cdsapi.

[0] https://cds.climate.copernicus.eu/cdsapp#!/dataset/reanalysi...