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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • I often hear americans (even scientists) say that they prefer the Fahrenheit scale for weather forecasts, but I believe the perceived higher accuracy is an illusion. Forecasts aren’t that accurate for any given micro climate.

    When I switched from Fahrenheit to Celsius I used a rough heuristic to get the Fahrenheit value from Celsius. What I discovered was that my heuristic, which was rounded and would skip entire degrees Fahrenheit, matched most weather apps’ Fahrenheit value.

    For example, if my app said 20°C, the other person’s said 68°F. If mine said 21°C, theirs said 70°F. If mine said 22°C, theirs said 72°F. If mine said 23°C, theirs said 73°F. It is very rare that mine has said, say, 21°C and theirs has said 69°F (or any temperature where the value was converted with decimals and then rounded).

    That is to say, my experience certainly seems to indicate that for people using the same weather sources but in Fahrenheit, the value was still rounded to the nearest degree Celsius, then converted to Fahrenheit and rounded again.

    That’s not to say you’ll never see 71°F or 69°F or other values that aren’t converted from an already rounded Celsius value, it all depends on what your data source is providing you. But nearly always, my rounded conversion from a rounded Celsius value matches what other people see in Fahrenheit.

    This makes complete sense, because most people cannot tell the difference between 70°F and 71°F. And it’s difficult to predict regardless.

    Edit: this could also just be a lack of sampling and dearth of values where the rounded-converted-rounded value differs from the converted-then-rounded value. I don’t know.


  • Copying this post I made elsewhere recently:

    I used to say this. But being a curious person, and one willing to test my own hypothesis, I decided to learn Celsius. Like, spend enough time with it to intuitively understand it, so that I could compare the two.

    Almost six years later, I haven’t switched back. I much prefer Celsius for weather. Having 0° at freezing is far more useful than I suspected it would be, and having less granular degrees gives them more meaning, which makes understanding them easier.

    Seriously, I struggle to express just how useful below-freezing temperatures being negative is. -5°C means so much more to me than 23°F, and that’s after thirty years of using Fahrenheit and only six of using Celsius.

    Edit: this isn’t to discount what you’re saying, just to offer my own opinion on the matter. Having experienced both, I much prefer Celsius. But obviously everyone will have their own opinions.




  • I am so thankful for the FR-S. I have a 2015 Scion tC, and when the FR-S dropped Scion updated the design language of the gen 2 tC (2011-2013) to the gen 2.5 (2014-2016) to copy some of the language of the FR-S, and it looks SO MUCH BETTER.

    (Such a fun little car. Not as much fun as the FR-S, I’m sure, but a 2-door Corolla with a Camry/RAV-4 engine and a six-speed manual transmission is a blast, let me tell you.)













  • They seriously streamlined the item stats, removing lots of the super specific affixes that made finding gear that worked for you a huge pain in the ass. They’ve also added ways to control some of those affixes through Masterworking, which lets you roll for one or two of the affixes from specific categories.

    They’ve also changed how paragon works. Now max level is 60, and relatively easily reached, and then you begin earning paragon levels that are now shared across your characters on the realm (eternal, seasonal, hardcore). This way you can get your full build in terms of skills pretty quickly, and then become more powerful through the paragon board.

    With I think the fourth season they added The Pit, tiered timed dungeons like in D3. With the fifth they added “Infernal Hordes,” a vaguely roguelite dungeon where you adjust the enemy mechanics as you go through waves until the boss fight, trying to earn currency to open chests at the end.

    The expansion added another dungeon type called Kurast Undercity, which starts with a certain amount of time and you gotta kill stuff to get more time. These have customizable rewards based on how you start them.

    They also added a thing, Dark Citadel I think it’s called, that requires multiple players and boss fights have mechanics that require you to work together. It’s fun, but I prefer to play single player.

    Helltides are always active somewhere now, and in all difficulty levels. Farming them is pretty great, and a fast way to level up.

    Getting materials to summon the endgame bosses has also been streamlined, so they’re easier to farm.

    Also the new class, Spiritborn, is stupid OP right now, which is always fun.

    Oh! And you no longer see mobs levels, to help the people who don’t like that enemies level with you and say it ruins the RPG part. Now enemies are just enemies. They’re always going to pose a similar challenge except they generally get easier to kill as you level up because of your gear and build.

    I’m sure I’m missing stuff, but that’s some of the improvements they’ve made.


  • Man, I really like Diablo 4.

    It had lots of issues at launch, but successive seasons have really streamlined it. And with the new expansion they fixed more of the problems. I think it’s a pretty good game.

    Obviously everyone is entitled to their own opinions. And admittedly a large part of why I like it is that it’s an excellent podcast/audiobook companion. But I’ve probably spent more hours this year on D4 than other games combined.


  • I said oldest English plural. Octopi is the oldest plural in English for the English word “octopus.”

    We took a word that sounded to us like a second declension Latin word and gave it a second declension plural. This wasn’t accurate in Latin, since it’s actually a third declension noun with weird Greek endings (as a word lifted from Greek).

    But English doesn’t use declensions the same way Latin does. We just know that many words that end in -us get pluralized as -i in English (alumnus -> alumni, etc.) and so “octopus” as “octopi” sounds right to English-speaking ears.

    Then some people were like, “Nah, it should follow English plural rules” and said “octopuses.” Then others were like, “Well, as a Latin word FROM a Greek word we should be using the proper third declension Greek ending plural from Latin” and we got to “octopodes,” which matches up with the Attic Greek masculine plural, «ὀκτώποδες» but pronounced differently because Latin didn’t differentiate the same way between Ο and Ω. And then we bastardize the pronunciation in English to blend the Latin and the Greek and our even further weakened English vowel to the point where we almost say “ah” for omega. (Which is why I wrote it that way.)

    Anyway, the point is we shouldn’t be prescriptivist about the plural of the word octopus in English. Just let octopi and octopuses and octopodes live in peace with one another.