This is your check-in post for today. The poll will be open from midnight Universal or Zulu Time (8pm Eastern Time) on Thursday, June 4, to midnight on Friday, June 5 (8pm Eastern Time).
I was out with a friend and we were talking so long I missed the last métro home. So I went back on foot, which took around 90mn and was quite lovely. I only had to check a map thrice, on account of my brilliant strategy of "follow Seine to [Landmark], know how to get home from [Landmark]". Idk why I'm feeling so proud of navigating a city I've lived in my whole life, but I do.
In 2003, Disney opened a new Epcot ride, “Mission: Space.” Formally, it was a space travel sim that used a giant, high-intensity centrifuge to simulate gee stresses; practically, it turned out to be the most efficient machine ever created for surfacing previously undiagnosed heart defects in extremely dramatic and potentially lethal ways.
It turned out that a small number of people have these heart defects, and that the defects themselves are quite harmless, provided that you are never put in a giant, high-intensity centrifuge. Given that most of us will never be put in one of these centrifuges, it is quite possible to live your whole life without ever knowing that you have this lurking vulnerability. But once you build one of these machines and start shoving millions of people through it, you’re bound to catch some of those rare people, and they will have cardiac episodes that are scary at a minimum, and are at the worst fatal.
For me, the lesson isn’t that Disney did something wrong by building a giant cocktail shaker for human bodies. I’m not a thrill-ride guy, but lots of people like ‘em and the machines themselves are benign for nearly everyone who puts their bodies into them.
Rather, I think the lesson here is that there are rare pathologies lurking in all of us, vulnerabilities that may never surface – until we come into the presence of a novel stimulus that unlocks them.
There’s an analogy here to technology debt: technologically unsophisticated people think of software as a machine that never wears out and has no incremental usage costs (apart from electricity). In this framing, software is the perfect asset, one that never depreciates. But the reality is that software is a liability, not an asset:
Software exists in a system, and while software might function perfectly under the conditions in which it is first created and deployed, there are continuous changes to all the technology that is upstream, downstream and adjacent to the software, which means that systems that are robust and secure at the time of deployment can become brittle and dangerous, even though the software doesn’t change at all:
Weird timing. Yesterday, far too late to be watching an hour long video, I watched this video (The Psychic Burden of Being Watched by Lily Alexandre) about cameras and what being constantly watched by one can do to your psyche. They also talked about about the difficulty people combating their paranoid delusions face.
This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, non-partisan news organization that covers climate, energy and the environment. Sign up for their newsletter here.
The destruction of wetlands in the United States has increased the amount of flood insurance claims by $10 billion over the past 40 years, a phenomenon expected to worsen in tandem with climate change, according to new research.
The peer-reviewed study, conducted by scientists at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the nonprofit Environmental Defense Fund, was published June 1 in the journal Nature Water.
The scientists used federal flood insurance claims data to calculate the dollar value of wetlands in reducing river flooding. They considered other factors as well, such as rainfall amounts and upstream changes in impervious surfaces, like parking lots and roofs.
In dollars, flood insurance claims have increased the most in the Houston metropolitan area, southeastern Louisiana and coastal Florida, according to the study.
Quantifying the flood control benefits of wetlands is crucial in light of the U.S. Supreme Court’s rollbacks of wetlands protections under the Clean Water Act, said Adam Gold, senior manager for coasts and watersheds science at the Environmental Defense Fund.
“Wetlands provide benefits to people, and it’s important that we protect them,” Gold said.
Wetlands ease the severity of flooding. They store water, slow the velocity of its flow and reduce runoff. In 2023, the controversial U.S. Supreme Court decision, Sackett vs. EPA, narrowed the scope of the Clean Water Act and redefined wetlands to include only those with a continuous surface water connection with other waterbodies.
The ruling stripped protections from millions of acres of wetlands that intermittently flood or whose hydrological connection with other water bodies is below ground. The value of flood-mitigation benefits from unprotected wetlands is an estimated $177 billion, according to the study.
North Carolina’s share of mitigation benefits from those unprotected wetlands is $4.6 billion. At least 52,000 acres of wetlands in the state have vanished from 1985 to 2023, according to the study.
Yet the dollar figures are likely an underestimate because the study focused on flooding along rivers and streams, and did not account for coastal and tidal inundations. Nor did researchers capture the value of losses not covered by the National Flood Insurance Program. Only a third of expected annual losses from flooding are insured by the NFIP, so the economic benefit of wetlands in preventing flooding is likely much higher.
“What really stood out to me was the value of existing wetlands for flood risk reduction that may no longer have protections either at the state or federal levels,” Gold said. “That shows the recent rollbacks and federal wetlands protections under the Clean Water Act and at the state level have really potentially large impacts on downstream communities.”
Wetland loss and subsequent flooding disproportionately affects communities of color and low-income neighborhoods, the researchers found. These residents often live in low-lying areas that are prone to repetitive flooding—a legacy of racist planning and zoning decisions—and are often too poor to afford flood insurance.
Market prices generally don’t reflect the economic losses of wetlands that are converted to other land uses, such as housing, data centers and strip malls, the study says. The costs, though, are incurred by the public rather than the property owner.
“While we know that wetland losses are occurring and have been increasing in recent years, it can be difficult to pinpoint the effects on the ground,” said Portia Osborne, executive director of the National Association of Wetland Managers, who was not involved in the study. “To put a dollar amount on that benefit is especially important as those headwater wetlands are the ones most likely to have lost protection post-Sackett.”
The Carolina Wetlands Association, a nonprofit based in Cary, N.C., has begun monitoring the Carolina Bays, a type of oval-shaped wetland depression found in coastal areas and which are largely unprotected.
Wetlands can be protected and restored through regulations and voluntary programs, such as conservation easements. The Carolina Wetlands Association will soon restore wetlands along Stony Run, a stream near Dunn, in Harnett County.
During Hurricane Matthew in 2016, a dam on Stony Run breached and killed someone. Nearby wetlands “are extremely disturbed,” said Rick Savage, executive director of the Carolina Wetlands Association. “We’re trying to put them back into better shape so if flooding like that happens again the wetlands can take care of it.”
Gold said he hopes federal, state and local policymakers can use the study to consider the economics of wetlands loss.
“Wetlands are really important ecosystems, not just because they have inherent value, but also because they provide important benefits to people,” he said. “There’s a lot of great new science coming out to quantify benefits of these natural ecosystems, and I think once we have a really, really full accounting of all their benefits … it’s going to make so much sense to protect them rather than allow further degradation.”
Featured in Jon Crabb’s essay “Woodcuts and Witches” about the witch craze of early modern Europe, and how the mass-produced woodcut helped forge the archetype of the broom-riding crone so familiar today: https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/woodcuts-and-witches
First: I am asking about musicians who either are queer, or are predominantly considered to be singing about queer motifs. (do NOT start flame wars about Gaga or Swift, please)
What musician rocks your queer little heart?
My most influential is NOT Freddie Mercury, Elton John, George Michael, or any of the others that dominated my early childhood because... I didn't yet have the questions they were asking fully formed in my heart.
No. Melissa Etheridge, who I found very solidly in the summer of '88 after I'd had my first realizations of being attracted to my best friend more than just the visual crush I'd had on lady celebs. She's my heart's queer anthem leader. The ambiguity of her early songs really just... wrapped around me so tight.
5. What is the last book you read and the first you'll read next?
Copy and paste to your own journal, then reply to this post with a link to your answers. If your journal is private or friends-only, you can post your full answers in the comments below.
If you'd like to suggest questions for a future Friday Five, then do so on DreamWidth or LiveJournal. Old sets that were used have been deleted, so we encourage you to suggest some more!
**Remember that we rely on you, our members, to help keep the community going. Also, please remember to play nice. We are all here to answer the questions and have fun each week. We repost the questions exactly as the original posters submitted them and request that all questions be checked for spelling and grammatical errors before they're submitted. Comments re: the spelling and grammatical nature of the questions are not necessary. Honestly, any hostile, rude, petty, or unnecessary comments need not be posted, either.**
I had almost everything else. I'd been working on this project to do these specific legendaries for a year, and just finished the last one. How much materials and currencies is that? It took me 2 hours to combine them all, switching between menus and crafting stations. I don't play much, but I was doing a few things every day towards this and it's nice to complete it all.
The final one I crafted is a Gen3, so it's basically a 6 in 1. Tyria has 6 Elder Dragons, and the Gen3 set comes in Aurene colors and with Aurene effects. But, when you bind it to your account, it unlocks quests to re-spec it to any other dragon. So, you can make it match your character's vibe/colors. Different legendary effects and footfalls for each version. So, it's basically a choice of 6 leggies. I mean, it's a longbow, but it's a choice of 6 longbows
The good news? Project accomplished.
The bad news? I've been playing this game 13 years and I now only have 8 gold and my crafting materials bank is in a tragic state. I ate equipment on my alts to get currencies. But, I've made sure the Tyria Pride events are well supplied.
I'll have to wait until after tomorrow's big announcement to plan out what to work on for next year.
After Heinlein's death, some of his books were reissued in new "uncut" editions. AFAIK, there are four: Red Planet, Puppet Masters, Stranger in a Strange Land, and Podkayne of Mars. In each case, changes were insisted on by editors, and after Heinlein's death, Virginia Heinlein renegotiated contracts and specified that the original unaltered manuscripts be used instead of the originally published versions.
3 Stranger in a strange land (1961) ( Read more... )
4 Podkayne of Mars (1963) As originally written, Podkayne dies at the end. Heinlein's editor demanded that the final chapter (narrated by Podkayne's brother) be altered to have her survive instead. Modern versions of the novel restore the original ending, or provide both endings. The final chapter is just a few pages long.
I strongly dislike this novel regardless of which version of the final chapter it has, so I can't speak to which might be better.