jadero

Gotta lock those cells, even when the sheet never leaves your control.

I used to teach Excel at an adult vocational college. When I moved into the corporate world, I quickly learned why the University of Hawaii's research found that well over half of spreadsheets have critical errors. Even the people treated as Excel experts were often clueless.

I'm not saying that spreadsheets should be banned from the workplace, but they definitely need to be very tightly controlled.

Oh, and always, always lock formula cells, even in sheets that never leave your control. :) If possible, make use of Excel's native data forms, too.

There word "sticks" is being used in the sense "adheres". So the "coo" doesn't bounce around in a series of reflections, but instead remains attached to the first surface it strikes.

Current forecast for my location in southern Saskatchewan is 11°C (52F) for a high. About 6 weeks ago, we got a proper start to winter with a few cm of snow (maybe 1.5 in) and thought was given to plugging in the block heater. That was it.

Since then, temperatures have been a bit below freezing overnight and a bit over freezing during the day, with quite a few days like today, where it's way above freezing. Any sloughs and dugouts that had started freezing over are now pretty much ice free. The last few days have been nice enough for people to put their boats in to go fishing.

We heat with a pellet stove. So far, our pellet consumption is about 50% of last year's, about 30% of our worst year, and about 35% of our 15 year average.

And apart from a "cooler" day tomorrow with a small chance of snow, there is no end in sight. Even assuming that we get back to something normal by Xmas, it could be February before it's safe to go ice fishing.

You've had a couple of pretty good responses. I would add that the very fact that you can ask that question demonstrates a failure of the education system and the fundamental problem of depending on business ideals to manage society.

In the first case, a proper education would have included, at all grade levels, examples and discussion of the various purely intellectual pursuits that ultimately proved critical to some technological advance that improved quality of life.

In the second case, the naive "businessification" of society means that any pursuit that doesn't make clear at the outset what practical (ie profitable) goal is being pursued is dismissed as folly unworthy of funding and support and education. (See my point above.)

And Canada, but we're really messed up. Most people I know across multiple generations use Fahrenheit for indoor temperature, cooking, and water you might swim in. Celsius is for outdoor air temperature, mostly, I think, because that's how weather is reported. There is a fair amount of variation, but I don't think I've heard anyone using Celsius for cooking.

That, too! I've taken to using any autotldr as a substitute for a "proper" title and author summary. If the autotldr looks like there might be based on something I find interesting, I'll go read the article.

Canada's Plant Hardiness Zone maps are in the process of being updated.

Two interesting points:

• USDA uses only 1 variable, extreme low temperature, while Canada uses 7 (lows, highs, rainfall, snowpack, wind, etc). To make comparisons easier, Canada publishes maps using both methods. The maps using USDA methods look a lot more forgiving than the Canadian ones. Both have 19 zones, although USDA is 0-9b while Canada's is 0a-9a.
• That website has links to interactive maps, including historical maps. Looking at old versions and current versions makes the northward shift of zones very obvious. Even regional variations in that shift are visible. Maybe I'm not looking closely enough, but it looks like the most dramatic shifts are at longitudes running from Western Alberta through Western Ontario.

The Canadian maps are calculated using 30-year windows with a 10-year overlap. I would be very interested in seeing these maps calculated with an annual 30-year sliding window to show the northward march as an animation. Assuming it's moving enough to make sense when rendered annually.

I sympathize. I've been caught out a couple of times by depending on autotldr as a substitute for reading the actual article. My own casual comparisons between autotldr and source articles suggest that autotldr is probably about 80% faithful to its source, on average.

I don't know if it's real or in my own mind, but it also seems to me that autotldr is faithful to the article inversely proportional to the quality of its source material. That is, the better and more complete the article, the more likely it is that autotldr trashes it.

Now that I've written it down, it strikes me that that may be an insurmountable problem. If we think of good articles as being "high information" and garbage articles as "low information", summarizing will always be more likely to cause important "damage" the higher the information content. Thus, hitting 95% on a good article might trash it, while hitting 60% on a trash article is just fine. This might be especially true if you consider that the best articles might already be as compact as is reasonable.

I find it interesting that our current definition of the inch is based on an industrial standard that had been in use for decades. And that that standard was, in effect, created by one man.

tldr: Carl Edvard Johansson was a Swedish manufacturer of gauge blocks who built his one-inch blocks by ignoring the differences between the UK standard inch and the US standard inch. Those standards were only a few millionths of an "inch" (pick one!) apart anyway, so throwing away most of the decimal places must have seemed like a good idea.

What is this stop business? I have it on good authority that it's turtles all the way down.

Thanks for helping me look at things from a different angle!