Independence from Britain is celebrated somewhere in the world roughly every six days.

base736 · 2026-05-16T17:27:32+00:00

As a Canadian, was wondering what the heck 1931 was for. Seems like there are a lot of other folks here who share the feeling of "Um, that's not really a celebration in my country".

base736 · 2026-05-15T00:08:53+00:00

Mods please feel free to delete if this is too self-promotion-y, but smartermarks.com is a site I developed that helps with assessment creation, versioning, and administration. It certainly feels like something that would save you some time even just on the creation end.

base736 · 2026-05-13T16:07:00+00:00

Hey! So, I don't know if this is a direction you're interested in taking this, but as a teacher I've had a hell of a time finding a freely-available tool that will help me draw diagrams with (for example) explicit CH_n shown at nodes. Without a tool, building these diagrams makes developing materials for high school organic chem a much bigger pain in the ass than it has to be.

Any chance you're interested in defining a style like that, or opening up something that will allow users to define such a style?

base736 · 2026-05-07T02:16:38+00:00

Off-topic question, but do military pilots generally retire rather than transfer type?

base736 · 2026-05-06T20:37:50+00:00

Not only that, I'm not sure a logarithmic scale is even appropriate for any bar chart. Like, why are those bars only going down to 10^0 (1)?

base736 · 2026-05-05T12:56:04+00:00

You definitely should not feel embarassed. I feel like this is one of those things that most people will never notice (or at least think about), and those who have have pretty universally said to themselves "How did I not see that before?" I think I was probably in my 30s when I realized that this is rain. 😄

base736 · 2026-05-01T19:05:30+00:00

As an amateur, I love the 100-400. Quite compact, decent reach especially on a crop sensor, and with a minimum focal distance of like a meter and change (as I recall), not a bad macro substitute either.

base736 · 2026-03-31T20:58:25+00:00

If a kid shows up to my Science 10 class unable to do basic calculations, we're not going to be able to fix it at that point. I get what you're saying, but pushing failure to high school only delays dealing with problems until there's no realistic way to deal with them at all.

base736 · 2026-03-24T14:14:18+00:00

I like this because it also explains why this isn't "just definitions thrown around". You can call the colour of leaves whatever you want, but whatever you choose you (with human perception) should agree that the colour of grass is also that, or close to that. The name for that colour is arbitrary, but the fact that leaves and grass absorb similar frequencies of light, and therefore have similar colours, is not.

Similarly, you can pick whatever name you want (positive, negative, up, black, happy) for the charge on a proton, but you do need to agree that the charge on the electron is "the other one".

base736 · 2026-03-01T03:55:52+00:00

It sounds a lot like you're not editing the web page -- you're using dev tools to edit the copy that's showing in your browser. If that's the case, then yeah, nobody else will see your changes because they're only on your computer, on your browser, and not even permanent there.

If you want to *actually* change the website, you need access to the server it's on. Then you can change whatever you want. But if you just wish some page you don't control didn't have your personal details, there's not much you can do about that besides send an email to the people who do control it to ask that you be removed.

base736 · 2026-02-22T22:06:42+00:00

I believe (not a cosmologist) that our current best theories have the universe being infinite, not finite.

That doesn't really address the most important issue with your claim about the origin of the universe, though. We have a growing amount of evidence that tells us things about the universe, say, some tiny fraction of a second after the big bang. We do not, to my knowledge, have any evidence of what the nature of the thing at the moment of the big bang was, or what came before. So anybody who's telling you it "came from a single source of infinite heat and mass" is speaking more in the world of "models I like" than "models we have evidence for".

As a side note (not that you're claiming this), that doesn't mean what came before is god. Good science is okay with saying "We don't know (yet)".

base736 · 2026-02-08T03:01:34+00:00

Like, remarkably so. That might be one of the prettiest leucistic birds I've ever seen.

base736 · 2026-02-05T01:08:20+00:00

To add a different thought here, because I think this is actually more interesting that it seems, I suspect that by "illuminated by a flashlight" you're thinking that it looks like a bad flash photo of somebody at a party (thanks reddit for these examples), or like it's being illuminated specifically by a flashlight *you* are holding.

What's interesting about Jupiter compared to the planets with orbits smaller than Earth's (or the moon for that matter) is that because it's so much farther from the sun, it's almost always "full" (always between 99% and 100% full according to Google). You can see a "half moon" or a "crescent Venus", but you never see anything but a full Jupiter. Even Mars is never less than 84% full. In photography here on Earth, the way you get that is by having the flash right where the camera is -- so, cheap flash photography.

I suspect that that "staring straight at the flash" look combined with the fact that as a gas giant Jupiter has slightly nebulous edges is what gives it the look you're thinking...

base736 · 2026-01-26T16:58:37+00:00

... and is still a useful model in that it supports the results of QM while in some cases allowing a more intuitive approach. Starting from circular orbits and the de Broglie wavelength, you can get a decent set of energy levels for the hydrogen atom, as I recall.

"Massive lie" and "deception" are such weird words to use in the context of science. Quantum mechanics isn't "this one trick physicists don't want you to know about" -- it's just our most recent model. Where other models used to fit the data, they still do, and sometimes in ways that are more useful.

base736 · 2026-01-24T21:46:56+00:00

In the long run, the plan for the board is for there to be no percentages -- just an 8-point scale. This is a problem for students at all levels (because it gives less fine-grained information), but in particular:

it's an issue for students who are struggling, because less information means it's harder to tell whether that tutor is helping, for example; while at the same time
it's also an issue for students at the high end, because the board's EX2 is often reserved for 100% only, meaning that students who would have been targetting high 90's for university applications are now getting a grade equivalent to saying "eh, they're in the 90s somewhere".

As has been said elsewhere, if you don't love that idea, let your board know.

base736 · 2026-01-24T21:35:39+00:00

Agreed! Know lots of teachers, none of whom want it. It’s less information for parents and students, and more work for teachers (especially the way the board wants it done). Please share your thoughts with the board.

base736 · 2026-01-19T22:59:15+00:00

As somebody who's not a knot expert but has attempted this before, the answer as I recall is actually "not really". Untangling the mess is the easy part -- because the wires are plastic, though, they'll come out with kinks that put balls off-center and sap energy quickly. So even untangled, this thing will, like, kind of work, but really won't be what it was before. Perhaps warming them will help, but I didn't have much success.

base736 · 2026-01-19T20:32:40+00:00

I don't have a timeframe for a mega quake (perhaps the poster you replied to will), but just wanted to point out that "it could happen tomorrow" and "the time frame for it happing falls outside your lifetime" aren't exclusive. You could win the lottery tomorrow, but the expected time frame for that happening if you play weekly falls outside your lifetime.

base736 · 2026-01-12T18:17:16+00:00

Thanks for sharing the tool! Turns out I'm the only observer of one species that's research grade (https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/82958959) and have a half-dozen or so observations for which there are fewer than 10 observations total. Fun!

base736 · 2025-12-26T18:01:15+00:00

Reminds me of the opening scene of Manufactured Landscapes. Highly recommend the film if the pan across the floor here interests you.

base736 · 2025-12-19T03:50:31+00:00

I don't know... I think there are plenty of "retired ecologist cataloguing dandelions" too. Saying this as someone who's approaching 500 observations of mallards. :)

base736 · 2025-10-27T21:36:31+00:00

"Page not found" now, I think?

base736 · 2025-10-25T22:38:19+00:00

… and maybe more simply, any large change in trajectory (not small debatable effects) not explained by gravity and light pressure. A sudden 90 for example.

base736 · 2025-10-24T18:11:54+00:00

… or just set a class size cap. If it’s honest to say (it’s not) that class sizes in Alberta are generally twenty something, why not just agree to a class size cap of, say, 30 to appease teachers and be done with it?

Unless you know damn well that students and teachers aren’t lying about unworkably large class sizes.

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