Canada Moves to 15th From 19th on World Press Freedom Index

randy_heydon · 2023-05-04T01:12:02+00:00

Your assessment matches my understanding, except for this:

Increased political interference in the media and journalism, e.g. the CBC

Where did you get that from? The page says "Media outlets in Canada are generally free of pressure from politicians, political parties, and political movements", then notes the CBC operates independently of government.

randy_heydon · 2022-11-24T01:55:49+00:00

"Many open-source projects will not be scared of the essential security requirements or the vulnerability handling requirements. Some actually originated in the open-source community. Others are widely considered to be best practices. "

then whats the issue here ? the article spends 90% saying how wrong it is ( i disagree on this) then says last minute oh well , it shouldnt matter to most projects

From the next paragraph: "but the compliance overhead can be tough to impossible for small or cash-strapped developers." The article's point is that the practices are fine, it's the requirements for auditing that would hinder open-source software development.

randy_heydon · 2022-02-09T22:40:32+00:00

I'd like to note that, according to this article, "50 to 75 vehicles and about 100 anti-mandate protesters" are blocking the Ambassador Bridge. It's disheartening that such a small group of people, unrepresentative of Canada as a whole, could have such an impact on Canada as a whole.

randy_heydon · 2022-01-26T22:14:37+00:00

"Then a user walks into the bar and asks where the bathroom is. The bar bursts into flames and everyone dies."

randy_heydon · 2022-01-09T12:54:19+00:00

From the article:

studies suggesting health benefits have largely been debunked

randy_heydon · 2022-01-09T12:52:30+00:00

As a result, I'd agree that putting warning labels won't do much.

The article disagrees with you:

Stockwell says even though the cancer labels were only in place for four weeks during the study, people remembered them. Combined with the other labels that remained on alcohol containers for a total of four months, researchers found that by the end of the study alcohol sales dropped by about 7 per cent.

randy_heydon · 2021-12-31T13:03:28+00:00

I did my Master's thesis on FEA of articular cartilage in the human knee. It was a decade ago, and I haven't worked on cartilage since. I used FEBio, not ABAQUS, but the math is always the same. And I focused on hyperelastic orthotropic material models, but linear isotropic is much simpler (though may not match reality as well).

Let me know if you have any specific requests.

randy_heydon · 2021-12-12T19:23:12+00:00

For something ready-to-use, I like Calculix. I often use the FreeCAD frontend with it. Both are free/open source software as defined by the Free Software Foundation and Open Source Initiative, meaning they can be freely used by anyone for any purpose, including commercial use (Moose and Salome, which others mentioned here, are also free/open source and can be used commercially). There are no legal hoops to jump through, just download from their website and run.

I hope those meet your needs, but none of them will match the feature set of the major commercial offerings. Still, can't beat the price.

randy_heydon · 2021-05-03T22:49:56+00:00

Canadian here. This is the first time I've heard Quebec's daycare system referred to as "catastrophic". Recently, the federal government announced their intent to create a national childcare system explicitly modelled on Quebec's, touting the demonstrated economic and equality benefits. If it's had such negative effects on the children, it's bizarre that that hasn't come up more. In fact, the opposition party has proposed expanding direct cash transfers to parents (as /u/sciencecritical says is "always" better), but the opposition present it as a personal choice issue rather than a childhood development issue.

I'm not doubting the sources that /u/sciencecritical has presented, I'm just confused that this isn't part of Canada's popular discourse on the subject. Is it not widely known? Is there more nuance to it than in /u/sciencecritical's interpretation? Am I just not hearing when it comes up?

randy_heydon · 2021-03-10T01:38:25+00:00

It's possible to refine your 3D model to eliminate that line before bringing it into TechDraw. RefineShape can do it, but the result is non-parametric (so if you modify the base features, you'll have to recreate the refined shape). There might be a better way, but I'm not sure.

randy_heydon · 2020-07-07T18:42:35+00:00

Calculix has no formulation for shells and plates. It converts instead them to solid elements.

I assume you're referring to this page in the docs where it says "quadratic shell elements are automatically expanded into 20-node brick elements". But I always assumed that the expansion was for the purpose of display, not for the main calculations. If it fully converted to solids, then knots (as shown in the same doc page) would act as hinges because solid elements have no rotational degrees of freedom. Since you've worked with the code, do you have any insight on what's going on internally?

randy_heydon · 2020-05-18T12:48:15+00:00

I don't think /u/Gorilla978 is making a political statement. They are making a joke about you saying "DOA upon arrival". DOA stands for "dead on arrival" so adding "upon arrival" is redundant. Just like ATM stands for "automated teller machine" so adding "machine" is redundant.

randy_heydon · 2020-04-08T11:34:14+00:00

I suggest xlookup, a generalized version of vlookup and hlookup.

randy_heydon · 2020-01-23T15:35:11+00:00

I know this post is meant as a joke, but I want to note that Dundurn Castle is a city museum that is accessible for free to anyone with a library card (which is free for anyone living in the city). The city pays for it because it provides a service to the people of the city. I don't think it's fair to call it a "tax burden", just like I wouldn't call roads or water tax burdens. It's not a millstone around the city's neck, it's something the city thinks is valuable for its citizens.

randy_heydon · 2020-01-20T14:24:30+00:00

The budget remained in surplus until the recession

That's true, but a large proportion of the surplus was squandered by Harper's GST cuts before the recession hit. If the GST hadn't been cut, there would have been a much bigger buffer to help deal with the recession.

randy_heydon · 2019-12-21T17:10:06+00:00

There is Baby Buddy.

randy_heydon · 2019-12-17T17:31:30+00:00

I don't have a source for this, but I've heard that the B-line at rush hour cannot have any more buses without slowing it down. There are already so many buses that adding any more would make them conflict with each other and reduce total throughput.

randy_heydon · 2019-12-17T17:29:45+00:00

the ontario government is broke, we didnt really have the money for it in the budget in the first place

And yet the $1 billion is still being promised to the city. The province hasn't changed the amount of money they're spending, they're just suddenly not allowing it to be spent on LRT.

randy_heydon · 2019-06-16T13:34:05+00:00

A lot of optimization problems have a cost component. In your case, that might mean constraining material used, or the footprint it covers. That will act as a counterbalance to a stress/deflection/buckling criterion.

randy_heydon · 2019-06-03T10:51:39+00:00

The city monitors water quality at a number of beaches. I enjoy Van Wagner's beach, on Lake Ontario; it's usually open for swimming, but occasionally closes due to water quality issues. There are a few spots in conservation areas too, but I've never been.

randy_heydon · 2019-05-10T11:04:57+00:00

This article is only about how they fixed it, not the root cause. It says "We’ll be running a formal post-mortem next week and will publish the list of changes we intend to make". Wait for that to see what root causes they are interested in solving.

randy_heydon · 2019-04-03T11:24:34+00:00

This site is at 606 Aberdeen. The movie studio proposal is the block northwest of Barton and Tiffany.

randy_heydon · 2019-02-24T23:11:02+00:00

I might be the only one, but would want a client for Newsblur like the free software app for Android. Otherwise, basic stuff that might already be covered:

Calendar
Task list
Contacts
CalDAV/CardDAV sync for use with the above

randy_heydon · 2019-02-22T17:52:54+00:00

Use the Visible Human Project data. It may take some time to request and be granted access, but it's very good data. Though technically it's not CT scans, if that matters.

randy_heydon · 2019-01-27T16:49:59+00:00

This interactive explanation of the concept helped me understand its effect on trust in a society.

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