Interesting Links for 19-08-2016

[andrewducker]

Plans for 2,000 homes at Edinburgh Marina receive full approval (tags: edinburgh housing construction trams ) All Olympic 100m winners compared in one race (tags: visualisation race olympics history ) US ready to 'hand over' the internet's naming system (tags: internet names usa ) Uber and Volvo partner up, robot ride-sharing starts this summer

Comments

[ljgeoff]

It seems a bit of a risk to build anything right now up against the sea. According to a study (pdf) by The City of Edinburgh Council, there's not much risk -- but that's based on an estimated sea level rise of 1m, +/- 0.5m. New research suggests it's a good bet that we're going to see more that 1m.: The study-written by James Hansen, NASA’s former lead climate scientist, and 16 co-authors, many of whom are considered among the top in their fields-concludes that glaciers in Greenland and Antarctica will melt 10 times faster than previous consensus estimates, resulting in sea level rise of at least 10 feet in as little as 50 years. The study, which has not yet been peer-reviewed, brings new importance to a feedback loop in the ocean near Antarctica that results in cooler freshwater from melting glaciers forcing warmer, saltier water underneath the ice sheets, speeding up the melting rate. Hansen, who is known for being alarmist and also right, acknowledges that his study implies change far beyond previous consensus estimates. In a

[andrewducker]

I'm glad I live 35m above sea level!

[danieldwilliam]

Matt Mackowiak sounds like he thinks the Senate might be at risk.

[woodpijn]

Is tagging the Olympic 100m link with "race" a pun, a mistake, or something actually about ethnicity-race that I'm missing?

[a_pawson]

I think it is simply because the 100m is a running race.

[woodpijn]

I realise that, but I thought Andrew usually used the "race" tag for things to do with race as in ethnicity. So using it for a running race is either a pun or a mistake. Or the tag is intended to be used for both meanings of race, I guess, but that doesn't make it a very useful tag.

[andrewducker]

It was me not thinking.

[simont]

PowerShell is open sourced and is available on Linux

I don't know much about PowerShell (I never really got out of the habit of doing my Windows scripting by old-school .bat files or else resorting to Cygwin), but I had a quick look at this, and the thing that struck me as at least potentially interesting about it is its use of an SSH subsystem.

SSH subsystems (for those who don't already know) are a means of standardising the invocation of a particular SSH-transported service by abstracting away the local details of the command line you need to find the service program. For example, if you want to run the SFTP file transfer system on a typical Linux system, you could SSH to the target host and ask it to run /usr/lib/openssh/sftp-server; but that strategy falls down when on some less normally set up machine it turns out to be somewhere else such as /usr/local/lib or /usr/lib/someotherssh or C:\Program Files\ShonkySFTP 1.0 or (god help you) SYS$SYSTEM. So instead you ask for the subsystem name "sftp", and it's the job of each SSH

[andrewducker]

Funnily, that's not part of the selling point to me - because I pretty much never have to do that.

On the other hand, it is definitely the best shell I've used, and I adore piping objects rather than text between commands.

[lilchiva]

Your Romantic Fantasy thread is the most satifying tumblr read ever. If you know of where I can read more informative exchanges like that, I'd love to have them pointed out to me. Anyway, I had no idea that these genres were as linked as they are. And, your friend is spot on about the LGBT stuff. But my favorite is " Evangelion was a groundbreaking grimdark apocalyptic disaster as notorious as it still is famous, and its audience was pretty well split in every way imaginable, including on whether they hated it or not." This was exaclty the case among my local nerds.

For everyone who forgot about this classic

[fub]

I also enjoyed that piece about Romantic Fantasy. I don't think I ever read anything in the genre. There is an RPG specifically set in a Romantic Fantasy setting, Blue Rose. There was a successful Kickstarter last year to update it from a D20 to the AGE system. There's an art preview in the updates there.
I might get the PDF out of pure curiosity.

[lilchiva]

In the 90's it was basically the only place for "gay wizards". The problem, of course, is that it was mostly striaght women writing this. So, there were no lesbians. And, the hot gay sex was really quite tame, when compared to actual hot gay sex.

Ya know, it was like this:

[fub]

Oh wow, that cover! Emo guy hugging a white horse with huge eyelashes...
Take a look at the art preview for the new Blue Rose edition to see stuff that rivals that cover.

Looking at the story of the demise of the genre, it seems like it wasn't that good but it scratched particular itches. And then when media came along that also catered to those tastes, it sort of evaporated as it lost it's audience.
But I do think that the themes are not dead -- not by a long shot. If you look at Bioware games like Mass Effect or Dragon Age, there's lots of emotion and romance (and yes, gay sex if you want it), but the world themes are a bit more grim...