Ted Aronson
May Likes TorontoWhat's the most niche topic that you can confidently talk about for 5 minutes?
I have many, but my most niche might be air pressure flows in a radioactive pharmaceuticals production facility.
"Musty Bits" McGee@mayintoronto that sounds interesting tho
@arichtman It is! it's very cool!
Tyrone Slothrop@mayintoronto Handling tax and transfer pricing for Inner Source platforms in a globocorp, along with the necessary export control process
@slothrop That's so niche, my eyes glazed over *and* I had a flashback to my IBM days.
@mayintoronto right??!
It’s not just super niche, it’s also a supremely boring niche.
I’m now cursed with Stockholm Syndrome-based attachment to the topic.
clewIntentionally radioactive?
@clew Cleanliness for pharmaceuticals, but containment for radioactivity.
Dave bauer@mayintoronto Oh cool!
Scott Francis@mayintoronto omg I want to hear this talk
@darkuncle This one's pushing the limits of 5 minutes though. It's old knowledge that I haven't interacted with in a long time.
morachbeag@mayintoronto ooo are guitars niche yet? (proceeds to talk about the difference between a Stratocaster made in early 1962 vs late 1962 vs reissues until everybody falls asleep 30 seconds later) 😅
@morachbeag That's their problem!
Analog AI@morachbeag @mayintoronto Yes! you definately get at least 5 minutes, regardless of whether the audience is enthusiastic (hopefully) or not (likely for most niche things).
ElectropictOne of my former topics; though it's been decades since I had occasion to talk about it and have forgotten most of it. Still ... grotesque exaggeration of head width!
[edit:] And fretboard radius! It's coming back to me...
Frank@mayintoronto
Now I want to learn more about this. 👀
Now I want to learn more about this. 👀
@derderwish Explained it a couple times in the thread. :)
brennen@mayintoronto while i am very far from expertise, i think i can do a tight 5 on the history, mechanics, and politics of the hyperlocal irrigation ditch economy.
Lee from Colorado@brennen @mayintoronto irrigation ditches are rather remarkable...
Richard W. Woodley 🇨🇦🌹🚴♂️Parliamentary indexing, when we actually used to do indexing.
jamienvc ⚧️@mayintoronto Probably the details of how ranking scores are calculated for the Highland Games
I know it’s niche because when I had to implement said scoring (rebuilding https://csaf.ca), the only complete info I could find was the code & database dump of the old site! Even the chairs of the organization don’t know all the nitty-gritty details…
@jamesnvc You might be winning on nichest.
@mayintoronto Niche enough that even other highland games athletes and organizers don't really want to hear me explain it all 😅
Colin Beveridge@jamesnvc I would LOVE to hear more about this.
@icecolbeveridge Well! The source is available if you dare look at how it's implemented 😅 (starts around here: https://github.com/jamesnvc/csaf-website/blob/main/src/csaf/server/db.clj#L1322)
The nub of it is that highland games uses "decathlon scoring" for official results, meaning the record for the event & category is worth 1000 points, anything else is a linear interpolation of that. Now "record for that event & category" seems straight-forward, but there are already edge-cases for classes that don't yet have records, when the record changes during a throwing season, and some of the new classes have set standards instead of using records, but let's set that aside for now...
So, I said the results are linearly interpolated from the "best result" for that event & class, but there are already some wrinkles. For one, the caber isn't scored by distance, but by a combination of the weight and length of the “stick” and the angle of the thrown result! Comparing these is difficult to the point that there isn't actually a record for caber (e.g. is a 11:45 on a 21’ 100lb caber better than 12:00 on a 19’ 125lb one?), so that one is purely calculated from the above factors, not based on the record. Then, the stone events (open & braemar) have variable weights (since it's literally just a neat rock the athletics director found), so there's a scaling based on the record distance and weight for those, except there's both a lower bounds for the weight (in which case it's worth zero) and an upper bound (in which case it just counts as the maximum weight).
So calculating the raw scores has lots of fiddly bits, but then we get to ranking! Now, lots of athletes compete in both Masters 1 (over 40) and Open, so when computing rankings for an athlete in a given class, their results throwing in a different class need to be re-scored as if they were thrown in that class as well and compared to see if they're better — keeping in mind that the classes have different weight standards for the events (so a throw might not count at all, or be scaled differently), as well as different records.
There are also some strange bugs that were ported from the old site (which was written in ColdFusion in the 90’s) that were kept in order to maintain consistency with historical results, but I think that's probably about five minutes now!
Pinchy63 🇨🇦@mayintoronto
Meditation.
Meditation.
@Pinchy63 Is it really that niche?
@mayintoronto
Yes. For the simple fact of not many people understand what it is or practice it on a regular basis. There’s so many different kinds of meditations too. I taught a walking and sitting meditation class then moved onto Vipassana which is an insight meditation. I don’t teach anymore only practice. It’s such a fascinating thing. There’s levels of meditation and also branches. As an example: a person can learn to transcend their body or just calm their nervous systems. Both can be achieved with the right teacher and willingness of the participants. I describe meditation like exercise. The more you do it the better you become. The body requires movement the mind needs rest. Meditation is very simple but our monkey minds complicate it. I could go on but it think my five minutes are up. 🧘😁
Yes. For the simple fact of not many people understand what it is or practice it on a regular basis. There’s so many different kinds of meditations too. I taught a walking and sitting meditation class then moved onto Vipassana which is an insight meditation. I don’t teach anymore only practice. It’s such a fascinating thing. There’s levels of meditation and also branches. As an example: a person can learn to transcend their body or just calm their nervous systems. Both can be achieved with the right teacher and willingness of the participants. I describe meditation like exercise. The more you do it the better you become. The body requires movement the mind needs rest. Meditation is very simple but our monkey minds complicate it. I could go on but it think my five minutes are up. 🧘😁
@Pinchy63 *Standing ovation* Perfection.
Real Syntactic@mayintoronto bellringing, letterpress, relations between metaphor and psychoanalysis.
@mirijb2 Bell ringing?! 👀
@mayintoronto like CrossFit + math games + the most truly collaborative music making I’ve ever been part of. https://www.scacr.org/learning-training/getting-started/what-is-bellringing
Granny Art (Shrimp) (Joni)@mirijb2 Oooh, is that why people like bell ringing? @mayintoronto
@artcollisions @mayintoronto yes! It puts mind and body into collaborative total focus with each other and with other people’s minds and bodies.
@mirijb2 ah, I think I might experience that with either contra dance or English Country Dance and certainly to some extent with Shape Note singing. I think people should have access to these sorts of things on a regular basis. @mayintoronto
@artcollisions @mayintoronto a lot of bellringers I know/ have met do contradance! I didn’t know about shape note singing, but alternative notation is part of the bells as well. And I also love the chance to pull at different speeds and be lightly pulled/experience traction over several hours’ dynamic exercise. It’s fairly accessible (people ring who are not sighted and people ring from wheelchairs) and good for folks with strong osteoporosis family histories.
Rebecca Banner@mirijb2 @artcollisions @mayintoronto and if you're very lucky in certain circumstances you can enter a flow state. But be careful about waking up out of it - it's easy to forget where you are in the piece of ringing and go wrong!
epicdemiologist@artcollisions @mirijb2 @mayintoronto Or like me, they read The Nine Tailors at an impressionable age! (All respect to real bellringers!)
@epicdemiologist @artcollisions @mayintoronto I never read it till I started ringing. But there is a copy in our ringing room. Probably in every ringing room.
Dave Alvarado@mayintoronto I'd have to do some refresher research, but probably old-style vs. new-style claidhmores in the text-based MMO game "Gemstone IV".
Th3BFG@dave @mayintoronto TIL the original/correct way to spell 'claymore'. Oh, and about Gemstone IV too.
@Th3BFG @mayintoronto oh I have no idea what the correct way to spell that is. That's just how it's spelled in the game.
@dave @mayintoronto the modern version Claymore comes from the original Gaelic version, Claidhmore. At least that's what I just read about.
🏳️🌈 Bri 🌞🚴🌱✨
Jessica 
🇺🇦 🇵🇸 ✡️@mayintoronto Like many people in this space there are probably a ton, but the first that comes to mind is Second Temple Judaism.
Kim Possible 
@mayintoronto I used to be somewhat of an expert on wine. Got out of the biz in 2007. But, a lot of the info. sticks.
Reay@kimlockhartga @mayintoronto Could’ve used you a few days ago.
At the LCBO we’re of course trained in various alcohols as part of the on-boarding process, but not deeply on any one. And particularly not deeply on wines, I’m guessing due to their huge variety. Four years at the job, and there are varietals mentioned to me that I’ve still never heard of before.
Anyway, last week a polite young guy came in and over to me where I was stocking a shelf and asked if I was a sommelier.
I held back a laugh from WAY not being one, and politely said I wasn’t but I could still try to help him.
He asked what wine would go best with goat cheese.
I immediately told him that yeah, I was going to go get my shift lead to help him with that one.
Alison Meeks@reay You might find this helpful. Michael is a friend of a friend who does wine reviews. https://michaelpinkuswinereview.com/
@kimlockhartga @mayintoronto
@kimlockhartga @mayintoronto
@Alison @kimlockhartga @mayintoronto Thanks!
I’ve learned a TON more about wine since working there, of course. But at least as much as not has come from my own interest. How’s a Malbec different from a Carmenere isn’t covered by the on-boarding training, but I wanted to know. Stuff like that.
Our product consultant, Steve, is a wealth of wine (and other product) info. He’s forgotten more about wine than I’ll ever know, but always politely and casually talks to people at their level and gives them what they need, even if it’s not what they think they want, and that will often be cheaper than what they thought they’d be spending.
Zero complaints about his suggestions, ever.
When he was transferred to another store, we lost vintage customers because some literally started going to his new branch in order to keep contact with him.
When he got transferred back recently and he started flagging items again with his Steve’s Pick tags, people for weeks were asking me if that was “THE Steve”, and were delighted to hear he was back.
I try to listen in to anything he tells customers to hopefully absorb some of it, but I don’t have a memory for all the details.