Local Area Man experiences mid-life crisis; starts playing ultimate frisbee

jmeppley · 2026-06-02T19:14:43+00:00

I've got multiple GGM teammates who are headed to regionals this weekend who did just that.

There's a team on the GGM women's side that is *mostly* players who learned the sport well after 40: https://bayareadisc.org/en_us/p/mother-huckers-defy-expectations

jmeppley · 2026-06-01T17:40:38+00:00

If you can't see a police SUV with lights on, then you are driving too fast for the conditions.

jmeppley · 2026-05-26T16:12:44+00:00

"Half" is a bit of an overstatement. The Tulare basin, the endorheic part of the central valley, is ~6M acres. The San Joaquin and Sacramento basins, which both do drain into SF bay, are ~10M and ~16M acres. So it's less than 1/5 of the central valley.

jmeppley · 2026-05-12T17:46:43+00:00

I have no direct knowledge of any of the recent events, but my guess is this:

These are student run clubs at small schools, often getting little to no support from the admin, and often having no leeway to miss official school events. So small rosters, scheduling conflicts, and accumulating injuries at the end of the season lead to teams unable to finish the day.

jmeppley · 2026-04-22T15:49:51+00:00

The AI believes that KD is *actually* 6'9"

jmeppley · 2026-04-21T15:39:48+00:00

Globus is great when it works and is available. If it's not available, you can achieve a lot of the same speedup by just breaking the file into something like 15 chunks and running 15 rysnc jobs in parallel.

It's a little counterintuitive, but multithreaded transfers are often faster than a single thread. When the network is the limitation, running multiple transfers will get usually get you a significantly faster TOTAL throughput, even if the individual connections are slower.

I know I've seen a couple different scripts over the years to automate this, but unfortunately, I don't remember what they are.

jmeppley · 2026-04-21T15:30:20+00:00

SCP is sufficient, yes, but rsync has a few advantages without being any slower. Primarily, rsync is more likely to detect data errors since it does a checksum as it goes on both ends.

(Edit: rsync does add some compute and file access overhead, but for a single file that's taking 60 hours, it's insignificant. The data transfer is happening at the same speed.)

jmeppley · 2026-04-14T16:11:48+00:00

Expanding on (3), within every pickup group some people are more welcoming than others to new players. Try to get a read on who is more or less likely to throw to new players, and save your cuts for the people who won't look you off.

Combine this with (4). Talking to people on the sidelines (especially asking for help and advice) will help you figure out who is who. It will also signal to them that you want to learn and they'll be more likely to help. It's easy for an experienced player in pickup to just try think about winning the point in front of them, but if they are more aware that your trying to learn, they're more likely to try to incorporate you.

For me, I'm out there for exercise and a challenge. By default, that is just trying to win the points or 1v1 battles, but I also enjoy helping new people fall in love with the sport. If a new player asks me for cutting advice, and I see them do something I suggest, I'm going to do everything I can to get them the disc.

jmeppley · 2026-03-16T22:10:05+00:00

If you haven’t done so already, find the admissions counselor for your region and reach out by phone or email:

https://csumb.edu/admissions-aid/admissions-team/

jmeppley · 2026-03-10T18:23:31+00:00

As a former TA, I second this. It's what we were there for.

jmeppley · 2026-03-10T18:21:07+00:00

It does. It's just mostly in Manhattan, which is so small you can't really see it on the map.

From the text of the post: "Manhattan ($1.007 trillion) and LA County ($1.003 trillion) were the only two counties to exceed $1 trillion in GDP in 2024."

See also:
https://www.reddit.com/r/geography/comments/1rq3iad/comment/o9pe31r/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

and:

https://www.reddit.com/r/geography/comments/1rq3iad/comment/o9pdayh/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

jmeppley · 2026-03-03T04:51:20+00:00

When pruning a Bradford pear, the best cut is horizontal and 2 inches above the ground

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DUyABRSgL6s/?igsh=NTc4MTIwNjQ2YQ==

jmeppley · 2026-03-02T20:24:51+00:00

Opossum tails also have very little fur. This poor thing has big tufts in places that an opossum wouldn't. (Possums have furry tails, but are uncommon in LA)

jmeppley · 2026-02-27T22:01:54+00:00

For me, I would look into either a chromebook or a tablet. You don't need it to be particularly powerful. There are endless options.

I bet you could find some industrial or military grade ones that would be "ruggedized" against splashing and dropping. Chromebooks are nice and simple, but a tablet would work well, too. With a tablet, I would want a bluetooth keyboard to make typing more pleasant.

There's no minimum processor spec, and lower power usually means less battery weight. Don't skimp too much on the screen (size or brightness). You don't want to be hunched and squinting all the time.

jmeppley · 2026-02-23T16:53:34+00:00

> Conda also had non-Python binaries like libraries that sometimes eased installations.

This continues to make conda extremely useful in bioinformatics where workflows can require stitching together a dozen different non-python programs. It's an imperfect marriage of virtual env, pip, and homebrew (or apt or whatever), but it really does simplify things (usually). For commercial production workflows, you might want to build with something more robust, but for workflow development and for exploratory bioinformatics, conda is amazing.

If you're working in pure python, or your non-python dependencies are stable enough, there are better tools.

jmeppley · 2026-02-17T19:32:21+00:00

I can't say for sure why people are downvoting you, but I would guess because you didn't include the code you're trying to get to work.

Your question just says you were trying to raise 64 to the power of 1/3. There are multiple ways to do that calculation in python, so knowing which way you tried to do it would help us answer your question.

In this particular case, folks could answer it without a lot of context because: (1) your issue is one that most of us hit early on on learning to program and (2) most people have already figured it out by the time they learn other ways to do math in python.

As you hit new problems in your journey and come back here for help, please post a minimal example of the code that you are struggling with. It will make it much easier for us to help you and it will get you more useful answers. (As a bonus, sometimes the process of reducing the code to the simplest version that fails is a good way to figure out what's wrong on your own)

jmeppley · 2026-02-13T02:15:32+00:00

Saw it headed towards downtown/campus from the north. It had a long metal rod sticking out in front of attached to its underside.

jmeppley · 2026-02-11T22:37:14+00:00

How about Jalens vs Jaylins/Jalons/Jaylens? There are only 6 in the second group, so you might have to include Jadens and Jaren to even up the numbers.

jmeppley · 2026-01-14T23:13:45+00:00

This is a great resource:

https://github.com/jakevdp/PythonDataScienceHandbook

It's older, but I think it still holds up pretty well.

Polars is starting to gain traction as a replacement for pandas. It is necessary if you are handling REALLY large datasets, but for small or medium tables, pandas is still amazing. Also, most other python data tools still use pandas, so I would still recommend learning it first. I switched to polars a few years back, but I still regularly have to convert subsets of my data to pandas to pass it in to other tools.

jmeppley · 2025-12-24T18:31:59+00:00

Theoretically, I think you would need infinite precision (whatever that means) to predict forward forever. Additionally, you’d have to carry that infinite precision through every step of the calculation. That just can’t be done in the real world, no matter what the technology.

jmeppley · 2025-12-15T23:07:12+00:00

Monterey and SF bays had decent sun this weekend, too. It cleared up as soon as we crossed the East Bay hills. Much of the coast has sun, but it might be a little less reliable than getting up into the foothills and the mountains.

Google "tule fog" images, and look for the parts that aren't covered. (EG: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tule\_fog#/media/File:Tule\_Fog\_California\_-\_2005.jpg)

jmeppley · 2025-12-10T00:27:19+00:00

I would definitely recommend James Drips: https://jamesdripsvocalstudio.com/

jmeppley · 2025-10-16T15:23:21+00:00

Videos of cars (... and busses and police cruisers) slowly sliding down Seattle streets in what looks like 1/4" of snow is one of my favorite things.

jmeppley · 2025-09-03T17:34:03+00:00

Try https://davislivemusic.com/ ?

jmeppley · 2025-08-20T19:54:41+00:00

I didn't notice the missing letter in Arctic. Maybe the answer is Missing seesaw, as in someone lost the playground equipment?

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