jeramey

Indeed. In the same vein, Jerome K. Jerome's "Three Men in a Boat" has made me laugh out loud more than a century after it was originally written.

That said, Shakespeare's humor, as an example, lands more flat with me. English idioms and grammar have changed quite a bit since the 16th century, and though I can intellectually approach his plays and recognize the humor, I rarely laugh out loud to it because there's additional mental load required just to understand what's been said. I suspect that may be true of "Who's on First" in another couple of hundred years, too. I'll report back in 2224 and let you know!

To be honest, if things have gone this sideways, "ps awwfux" are definitely some sounds that'll be coming out of my mouth, too.

Seaborn isn’t too bad. It’s basically a convenience wrapper over top of matplotlib.

It gets used a fair amount in the weather data space. Forecasting and climate reanalysis grids are typically large (gigabytes) N-dimensional arrays of float32 values and Blosc provides enough tunable knobs that it's fairly easy to find a combination that performs acceptably without writing a bunch of custom handling code to keep track of which underlying compression schemes and settings were used. Additionally, it supports byte- and bit-shuffling filters which can really help boost the compressibility of certain data sets.

I am a hobbyist carpenter and woodworker. My current project is probably the last one I will ever do without a table saw with these kinds of safety features. I have already changed over to using other tools like track saws and pull saws as much as I can for safety, but it is still hard to replace a well-calibrated table saw for certain tasks. My table saw is the only power tool I have that truly frightens me. Router tables and jointers can cause some nasty injuries as well, and I treat them with much respect, but total digit and limb loss is rarer with them.

The patent situation and much higher price are unfortunate, but it’s still a cost I am willing to bear. It’s cheap insurance compared to an ER visit and extended amounts of time spent feeling pain.

In all fairness, the person had obviously been awake for over 24 hours and was on their 1,001st cup of coffee. And since earlier in the summer I had crashed the entire ticket scanner network the night before the opening of the weekend festival we had put on by creating a network loop between a couple of non-spanning-tree-speaking network devices, I didn't feel I was in a place to be snarky about it!

Occasionally people don't understand how to plug extension power cables together, either, especially during times of high stress and low sleep.

Once upon a time, when I was in IT support, I got a call from someone in a satellite office across town saying that their computer wouldn't turn on. A new production had begun and everyone was a bit frantic, so this was an urgent request. After asking them to hold the power switch in for a few seconds and try to turn it on again, I asked them to make sure the power cable was secure and that the computer was plugged in. It was, of course, but the computer still wouldn't turn on, so it was time to jump on the bicycle and ride across town with a new power supply in tow, figuring it would be a quick fix.

When I arrive, I see that, indeed, the computer was plugged in to a power strip. And that power strip was plugged in to itself. From then on, I always made sure to ask, "Is the computer plugged into the wall?" Saved myself a few bicycle trips that way.

Seconded! I recently built a large 50" x 90" work surface in my garage and used MDO sign board (another phenolic resin product, not much more expensive than MDF and available at many construction-oriented lumber yards) for the top surface over top of a hardwood plywood subsurface and heavily milled Douglas Fir legs and trusses, all doweled and glued together. I've been quite happy. It was easy to use a router on to make channels for t-tracks, and has been quite stable for the past 6 months or so through the fall, winter, and spring weather changes with only an oil-filled radiant heater to keep things from getting too frigid.

Yes, there is. To negate, just use ! as with many other languages.

    if ! command …; then
        do_needed_things
    fi

The main problem with ERCOT's grid stability isn't that they are using a lot of renewables so much as it is that ERCOT isn't interconnected with other big power systems in Texas's efforts to avoid federal oversight, as that Washington Post article indicates. They can't benefit much at all from buying power in other markets to make up for generation shortfalls lest they risk the feds making them do things they don't want to do. (On the flip side, they also can't sell their cheap renewable power into other markets as easily when they have excess generation capacity!)

There's an awful lot of schadenfreude that happens within the renewable energy and power production communities during serious power system events in ERCOT because they willingly suffer problems other power systems don't have to.

If you're looking for something turn-keyish, you might be able to get some help with this from one or more of the big players in the renewable energy analysis and forecasting space, including (in no particular order) DNV, Vaisala, Bloomberg, and Ventyx. Beware, their offerings can get pretty expensive and there's often no standard list pricing. Also, I strongly encourage you to always do your own validation of any model data they might give you, so the work you're doing to produce your own models is probably not wasted.

I'll second that. I work in the renewable energy space where we get all manner of atmospheric and power data in a wide variety of units depending on the data source, so Pint is incredibly useful in normalizing them as well as making it clear in the code what and how unit conversion is happening. The fact that it integrates fairly nicely with Pandas and Numpy is great, too.

Oh cool, I hadn't heard of E-skip as a phenomenon before! Thanks for that info, it's really interesting.

VHF (FM radio in the US is in the VHF band) propagation can definitely change at different times of day.

One of my favorite activities in the summer is to go get lost in the Cascades, and when the sun goes down, settle in to a hammock with a little multi-band radio to see what I can pick up. As the evening wears on, I can typically start to receive FM radio stations in Canada several hundred kilometers away. Once the sun has risen again, I can no longer tune those stations no matter how much I fiddle with antenna orientation. NOAA weather bands also become easier to tune clearly at night.

As to why VHF frequencies seem to propagate better at night, I could only speculate, but they do seem to—at least on occasion.

Persistence and linear regression are very common methods used to extend forecasts out in computationally cheap ways. Most forecast models have really awful validation statistics after about 48-60 hours out—depending on initial conditions, location, and a few other factors—so in some sense the forecast after about 3 days out isn't ever going to be very good so it's perfectly valid to use those methods. I would not be at all surprised if that's what Weather Underground does.

Another method that's occasionally used is to just fill in with TMY (Typical Meteorological Year) data. Lots of those data sets are freely available, or if not, are very inexpensive to calculate if station data is available.

If you're looking for a minimally spammy, information dense forecast and you're in the US, it's pretty hard to beat weather.gov. (And make sure to occasionally read the zone and regional forecast discussion texts, too. They're really interesting and often educational!)