First ever butternut squash: many more to come. I've included my largest teapot (6 cups / 1.5 litres) for size comparison.

#squash #gardening #ottawa

On the day Canada finally walked away from so-called "trade talks" with our dysfunctional southern neighbour, I'm celebrating with a very local tomato sauce. Everything here (except 1 tsp of salt) grew within 20m of the pot.

#gardening #Ottawa #CanadaStrong #food

If you see an em-dash ("—") online, it means you're reading



a post from someone who cares deeply about typography and effective communication;


copy that went through an editorial-review process at a publisher; or


text generated by an AI-model that was instructed to recognise an em-dash in its training material as a sign of more dependable, authoritative writing.

It's a shame that no.3 has drowned out the others in ignorant "How to spot AI !!!" influencer posts—the em-dash is a useful bit of punctuation.

#punctuation #AI #emDash

Reminder: if you're a secondary-school teacher, and want to give your students a hands-on activity for learning logarithms, my site

https://cardboard-computer.org/

is free (libre and gratuit) and has no ads, analytics, or tracking cookies. You can download templates to build your own sliderule, and there are instructions and interactive exercises for using it.

(Tell them it's a steampunk calculator.)

#slideRules #teaching #math

"This a quiet residential neighbourhood, we don't need sidewalks," said every non-disabled, non-elderly, non stroller-pushing, car-owning resident. 😕

(Ottawa's Manor Park neighbourhood at the moment, but it happens all over. And shame on Counsellor King for pandering to them )

#Ottawa #ableism #accessibility

In 1948, a team of mostly-female German construction workers built Berlin Tegel Airport in the French Sector in only 90 days, after Tempelhof and Gatow were overwhelmed by the Berlin Airlift.

The Soviets refused to remove two of their radio towers blocking the approach, so French General Jean Ganeval simply ordered them blown up. Soviet General Alexander Kotikiv was furious: "How could you do such a thing?"

Ganeval replied "With dynamite."

#history #Berlin #airports #humour

(This post is for non-Americans.) Folks, it's time to stop agonising over everything the Americans do, and focus instead on building a world that works without them. Let's accept that we can no longer rely on them for anything: trade, global security, aid, medical research, a model of democracy, tech innovation … anything.

Even if the U.S. somehow achieves peaceful democratic transfers of power in 2026 and 2028 — and there are many good Americans fighting hard for that — there''ll be years or decades of cleaning up and rebuilding shattered democratic institutions from the ground up. Write them out of the global script for now and move on.

#USpolitics #trade #war #science