r/coolguides

Torrenting itself is a neutral file-sharing technology. This map focuses on unlicensed copyrighted content, with downloading and sharing treated separately where a country’s rules make that distinction clear.

Grey (“Not Specifically Assessed”) does not mean legal or low-risk. It means this map does not assign a country-specific P2P classification. General information only, not legal advice.

Effects and benefits

The idea here is pretty simple but easy to forget in the moment. Behavior like yelling or shutting down is just the tip of the iceberg, and there's usually a real need underneath it. Once a kid feels seen instead of misunderstood and has a calm adult nearby to help them settle, a lot of the power struggles just start showing up less.

2026-specific version

2027-specific version

I made this chart because I couldn’t find one online. If there’s already a good one out there, or if you have corrections to mine, let me know!

Whenever I hear about meteor showers, it’s usually in the form of an announcement “xyz meteor shower peaks tonight at 2:51 AM”. Sometimes they include the Zenithal Hourly Rate, but I feel there is still a lot of context missing. How does that ZHR compare to the best meteor showers of the year? How does it compare to the background rate of any random day of the year? And how much does it matter if I miss the peak by an hour, or a day, or a week? I thought “there ought to be a chart that combines all the meteor showers in one place, adds them to the background rate, and gives you the bottom line of ‘how many meteors can I see on any given night’”.

So here’s what I came up with! The first is general to any year, and shows a best-case curve and a medium-case curve depending on the moon and light pollution (the worst-case curve is always zero). The next two are specific to 2026 and 2027, taking into account the phase of the moon on each day of those years.

My source for almost everything is this great site that explains the background rate, how to correct for your latitude and the moon, and rates for the main showers. I also used Wikipedia and some researchgate figures to find minor showers and the distribution curves. (other sources in comments)

There’s necessarily some information missing, like how different showers can have different colors or longer tails, year to year variability, and the rare chance of meteor storms. It is made for mid-latitudes in the Northern Hemisphere, such as the US or southern Europe, so it won’t be as accurate to other latitudes. But I think it captures the general idea fairly well. It also doesn’t capture what time the moon rises – since most people will want to stargaze before midnight, the waning moon should be preferable, I hope to account for this in a later iteration.

The main results seem to be 1) the moon matters a lot, and 2) the minor meteor showers don’t matter much. Not to rain on anyone who wants to be excited about them, but if you want to see meteors, go out on any night and look up for a while, you’ll have a good chance of seeing one! Getting out of town on a random cloudless, moonless night will get you a much better chance than staying up until the exact peak of a minor shower if the weather/moon/city lights aren’t favorable. By far the best times of year are mid-December and mid-August, but even then, missing the peak by a day or two is fine, so wait for the better weather rather than the peak time.

Color Perception of Humans(Homo Sapiens) vs Cats(Felidae)

Humans(Homo Sapiens) Color Vision: Trichromacy

Cats(Felidae) Color Vision: Dichromacy

Only two of the twenty can't contribute to glucose at all, leucine and lysine, and they both start with L which is honestly the whole mnemonic. Everything else is either fully glucogenic or splits down both routes.

The bit I found genuinely surprising is that your body can't turn fat into sugar either, for the exact same reason. Both fat and those two amino acids end up as acetyl-CoA, and the step that makes it only runs one way. That's a big part of why prolonged fasting eventually starts eating into muscle, since amino acids are one of the last things left that can hold blood glucose up.

If anyone wants a closer look, this one and a bunch of other biochem charts are at biochemtools.com/charts.html. All free, no signup, and you're welcome to print them or drop them in a handout.