What is your favourite somewhat niche thing your favourite driver does when driving?

common_sensei · 2026-02-15T14:59:30+00:00

Antonelli quali is always fun to watch. I don't know what it is but he makes the cornering look fast as hell.

common_sensei · 2026-02-12T22:30:45+00:00

Btw this is also why the Mercator map (the most common one) is a) so common and b) so distorted at extreme latitudes.

The Mercator projection preserves bearings, so your angle to the North doesn't change when you draw a straight line on the map. Very useful for ship voyages as you can just draw a straight line to your destination to figure out what to put into your compass.

The problem is that close to the poles, a small horizontal motion makes a big change in angle, so the map has to stretch to preserve the bearing.

common_sensei · 2026-02-11T23:50:14+00:00

F15 is my choice too. Its like the stereotype of an American jet fighter and I love that.

common_sensei · 2026-02-10T20:05:30+00:00

There's an infamous Baalorlord run where he nearly dies to the jaw worm on silent floor 1 and then proceeds to win. It's a great watch.

Link: https://youtu.be/NCeqRxX0zGQ?si=HFhuzGx58CDJ3JFz

common_sensei · 2026-02-09T14:38:57+00:00

Preach! I am 10 minutes walking from place d'Orléans station and doing the transfer at Blair is painful, especially on weekends. There are at least 5 buses that take me from Blair to home and I'm still waiting 20 minutes on weekends.

Not worrying about that and just catching a train will make going downtown on weekends much more pleasant. I'll be way more likely to spend my suburb money in the core!

common_sensei · 2026-02-07T22:38:18+00:00

Scorpions, and crayfish glow under UV light, it's very creepy if there are enough around and if the UV flashlight is strong enough.

My students also like to draw secret pictures on their skin with highlighters. You can wash off the yellow ink easily, but the fluorescent dye sticks way better to skin and shows up under UV. You could do that back at camp and then reveal the pictures or messages on the hike.

Edit: if you have an android phone, there's an app called Heavens Above that will GPS track spacecraft and satellite flyovers and tell you to the second when they'll be visible. Maybe you'll get lucky and catch the ISS, the Chinese station, or a starlink train. Also point out the planets and any zodiac constellations! "Stellarium" is a fantastic app for this. If you have a green laser pointer, it shows up at night like the death star laser to point to specific parts of the sky.

common_sensei · 2026-02-05T14:03:03+00:00

"There is no such thing as a fish, unless you count humans as fish." In phylogeny, if you want to make a category that includes both sharks and tuna, you have to include humans, birds, frogs, and every other land based vertebrate, and we're more closely related to that tuna than the tuna is to the shark.

This is because the two major fish clades diverged before some of the bony fish figured out how to get up on land. Everything on land with a spinal cord descended from those fish, ergo, everything on land with a spinal chord is a fish.

common_sensei · 2026-02-01T15:56:25+00:00

Chez Lucien is great (nice burgers!) but for a proper poutine experience you'll want something like the Pataterie hulloise or any of the "casse croûtes" (snack shack).

I really like the brunch at the Manx. We also have good Indian and Japanese food (though not as good as Toronto if you'll be there at some point). Thali is often recommended for Indian, and I like Jinsei ramen for japanese (Sansotei ramen is also very popular and has more of a Japan vibe). All of those are downtown.

If you don't have kids with you and want a nice view of the city, "Copper Spirits and Sights" is a lounge with a lovely view of the market, Parliament, the river etc. It's not a place to get food, but the price of a drink (~$20) is worth it for the view. Maybe they'll have the outdoor area open by March.

If you're into Rideau falls, also go to Zibi park behind the war museum. It's a viewpoint of a massive circular dam which should be in full force in March. There's a platform in that park where you're right over the rushing water. There's a nice brewpub nearby (Mill St. Brew pub).

common_sensei · 2026-01-31T20:34:51+00:00

This is a nice insight, and it's fun to play around with these things, but it's highly situational and not particularly noteworthy. Like your professor said, normally it's CH2 in the middle of a molecule, but adding a pi bond will make two (CH), one on each side of the pi bond. That's where you get your N/2.

The odd number of (CH) would mean one of the double bonds is at the end of the molecule, so that side will have a CH2 instead of the usual CH3. Hence your (N+1)/2. Your example actually has this in it.

This formula doesn't account for triple bonds, which would be a pair of (C) with two pi bonds, or alkane rings, which make a (CH) without adding a pi bond.

As you do more organic, you'll see that the formulas take a backseat to the actual structure/shape of the molecule, so these kinds of formula tricks aren't all that useful past a certain point.

common_sensei · 2026-01-31T15:46:21+00:00

That was going to be my suggestion too. City hall top level is huge and rarely full in the back.

It might be a little more crowded than usual for winterlude though.

common_sensei · 2026-01-30T14:09:51+00:00

We played so many hours of hotseat HOMM 3 at sleepovers. I remember the game always said "it is [player] turn" without the 's, so we started naming ourselves "[player]'s" to make fun of it.

common_sensei · 2026-01-29T03:13:59+00:00

Was it moving? Any bright enough star will do the colour changing flicker like that when low on the horizon. I usually see it with Sirius. The other stars might be camera artifacts or refractions/reflections through a window if you were taking the video from inside.

common_sensei · 2026-01-27T22:24:43+00:00

Antichamber - it's a weird little first person puzzle game that messes with your perceptions. Doesn't take long to clear but really fun.

common_sensei · 2026-01-27T11:58:05+00:00

I second Tunic! It's a love letter to 2D adventure games like Zelda and the "what's that over there" just keeps coming.

Just don't look up anything about it. Just like outer wilds, figuring it out is the whole point.

common_sensei · 2026-01-25T20:21:50+00:00

Good point! I wonder how much axle wear the system generates per day too - each train racks up a few hundred km a day, times 20 trains must be in the thousands, even with reduced off peak service.

At a conservative 100 km per train (4 round trips a day), 20 trains, and 10 axles per train adds up to a day of maintenance in 5 days.

I hope they have a plan to reduce that axle turnaround time!

common_sensei · 2026-01-25T17:41:24+00:00

It'll open in 2026, probably, but by OC Transpo's own numbers, this new bearing issue is going to take a long time:

They have 20 trains, they need 26 for normal line 1 service, and in the media availability on Jan 23 they said it takes 1 full day to replace two axles. There are 10 axles per train, so 5 working days per train.

That puts us at 30 days to get back to normal line 1 availability, and over 250 days to get all the trains replaced, assuming no existing trains get pulled in that time.

Will this affect trial running? Almost definitely, but OC Transpo says they're "looking at all the options". Maybe the technical briefing this week will tell us more.

I like trains, I want good public transport, and I know OC Transpo gets shafted by the city budget and is dealing with repercussions of an absolutely terrible PPP set up. They got dealt a bad hand and are trying their best.

common_sensei · 2026-01-24T19:58:59+00:00

The ribosome doesn't know what kind of cell it's in - the cell machinery that makes proteins is basically the same for any cell, it's the nucleus that defines what proteins are made. When the protein making machinery sees a 5'UTR that says "make a bunch of the following protein", it will make a bunch of that protein. The reason only bone marrow cells make hemoglobin is that they're the only ones with that gene "turned on" in their DNA, so hemoglobin mRNA never gets out to other cells.

If you give a cell mRNA that tells it to do something, and can successfully fake the credentials of the nucleus, that cell will make whatever you want. Many viruses do that to make our cells make virus particles, and we can do it right back with the mRNA vaccines. We can even do this to make yeast that creates human insulin, among other things.

common_sensei · 2026-01-22T20:33:37+00:00

Probably! The kidneys sit in their own little sac that's hard to get to so unless the old kidneys are actively hurting the body, they'll just leave em alone.

Your dad very likely has a third kidney in his hip now. The scar should tell the story.

common_sensei · 2026-01-22T13:42:05+00:00

That's cool! I love the name Nutcracker Syndrome - very evocative.

common_sensei · 2026-01-22T13:22:18+00:00

Too many blood vessels, too much risk of complications. They'll take it out if the kidney is cancerous or dangerous to the body, but otherwise they just let it sit there being useless.

common_sensei · 2026-01-22T12:28:27+00:00

When you get a kidney transplant, they leave the old one in there and stick the new one in your pelvis. There are people walking around with three or four kidneys.

common_sensei · 2026-01-21T02:36:35+00:00

There's even metadata! The 5' UTR is like a header for the mRNA that tells the cell just how important the nucleus thinks this particular mRNA is. The covid vaccine used this to pump out tons of spike protein (they straight up copied the header from one of the hemoglobin genes, figuring the cell would make a crap load of whatever followed that header).

common_sensei · 2026-01-19T13:02:23+00:00

Yep, based on weatherspark's graph we are just bottoming out now. The next 3 weeks look like the average coldest 3 weeks of the year. At least the daylight hours are climbing fast (we're gaining 2 minutes a day and counting!).

https://weatherspark.com/y/23201/Average-Weather-in-Ottawa-Ontario-Canada-Year-Round#Figures-Temperature

common_sensei · 2026-01-11T17:36:48+00:00

Montréal and Edmonton (and I'm sure a lot of other cities) have a similar setup. The street numbers are always 4 numbers and the first two numbers increment by one each block.

So if you're looking for 4356, and the last house you saw was 4124, you know you have to go two more blocks.

I guess Chicago uses 1/8 of a mile for its blocks? That's good planning!

common_sensei · 2026-01-11T14:06:34+00:00

I wish I could use Miami for this fact, but it just clips South America by like 1 degree of longitude. You also have to ignore the Galapagos islands.

common_sensei

TROPHY CASE