The quantities of water and salt involved are not on human scales.

It's hard to overstate how bad it would be. Iceland doesn't just get glaciated in ice ages, it gets catastrophically glaciated. As in "mass kills almost all of our plant species". That's why there's currently no native conifers even though there used to be, for example - virtually the whole island ends up under an extremely thick sheet of ice.

Of course, a shorter localized ice age, in an otherwise warming world, isn't as bad as a Milankovitch Cycle ice age. But it'd be pretty awful for us. Right now, we're benefiting from a warming world (though losing our glaciers and regularly getting annoying new insect species which previously couldn't survive here :P). Our growing reason is so short, and the difference between our winter and summer temperatures so small, that even a small amount of warming drastically lengthens our growing season, and makes a vast difference to how well things can grow in it.

Palm trees kinda grow in Iceland ;) I had a windmill palm (in an area with geothermal-heated soil) last for like 4 years, though it slowly declined each winter. You can keep them alive by covering them with Christmas lights and then a blanket.

It does get overplayed though, with people acting like there was no reason to name Iceland "Ísland" and no reason to name Greenland "Grænland". There's plenty of ice here (much of the middle of the country doesn't melt until quite late in the year, and settlers approaching from the south and east sailed past the huge terminal glaciers of Vatnajökull), and the places that were settled in Greenland weren't all that different from e.g. Vestfir(th)ir. Grænland was chosen as a name to advertise it, but it's not like it was some sort of lie - most new settlements, even random villages wherever you are, are generally given pleasing names to try to attract people.

Also, Iceland got its name due to Flóki "Raven" Vilgerðarson, the viking-discoverer of Iceland (though the Irish already knew of Iceland). He had a clever trick to find islands, which was having ravens (land birds) on his boat; they'd fly up, look for land, and if they spotted it, beeline for it, but otherwise had no choice but to return to the boat. Ravens are quite large, black birds and thus easily visible to track from a boat. Anyway, his first winter at Bar(th)arströnd was abnormally cold, and there was sea ice visible offshore (something quite rare in Iceland), so he chose the name "Ísland".

It's "ís" (accented), and is pronounced "eece" :) "Eece-land" (land said like with a British accent, not an American one)

Fun fact: while ís does indeed mean "ice", it's not the colloquial word for ice - like, if you want ice at a restaurant, you ask for "klaki" (people sometimes jokingly refer to being in Iceland as "á klakanum" ("on the ice" ;) ). "Ís" these days is used as short for "rjómaís", lit. "cream-ice", aka ice cream - if you ask for "ís" at a restaurant, you'll get ice cream.

So in modern parliance, the country is "Ice Cream Land". ;) (Honestly, our ice cream is really good here - try the bilberry ice cream at Erpssta(th)ir for example :) )

Do you think it is interesting that the century during which an ice age was ending is the one used as a baseline for climate analysis?

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2F...

"The Little Ice Age (LIA) was a period of regional cooling, particularly pronounced in the North Atlantic region.[2] It was not a true ice age of global extent.[3] "

Literally right at the top of the article.

Also, for the record, there is no single "baseline timeperiod for climate analysis".

The company standard for servers is RedHat 10. RedHat 10 does not support 32 bit applications.

The legacy app is running happily on RedHat 9.

...laura

I support a legacy app that was written back in the 1990s. It originally ran under VxWorks with custom hardware, variously 68k and PowerPC.

The first port I did was to Solaris. No byte-order issues and I kept the 32 bit ABI. It worked well.

When the Powers That Be decided to ditch Sun hardware and Solaris in favour of x86 and Linux I ported it to Linux. Parts of the code weren't byte-order clean, but I worked through them. The code is heavily 32 bit dependent and I never did create a viable 64 bit version (I tried, believe me...), so it runs on our last 32 bit server in the data center. The service it supports is slowly dying so there's no business case to spend any more time or money on it. If the business case existed I'd apply what I've learned in the meantime and rewrite it from scratch anyway.

The Linux port was initially unstable. It would run for a random time, hours to weeks, then two threads would deadlock. After a couple of years of letting it run and watching it crash I traced the deadlock to an "optimization" that didn't actually do anything, with an if statement that had about a one in a trillion chance of going the wrong way. I removed the optimization and the application has been running fine ever since.

...laura

OMG, I'm so stealing that ;)

"Woke" simply means "I'm conservative, and the thing I'm calling 'Woke' is something that I hate". It has no well-defined meaning beyond that. I've heard things as diverse as "the concept of the Metaverse" and "removing copyrighted content so you don't get sued" described as "woke".

No call by push value or P vs NP or complexity theory etc.

So a different set of things that are also useless to the vast majority of people?

Even when Chrome adds support, we'll have to wait ages before we can actually reliably use the format without having to implement fallback logic and fallback formats for legacy browsers.

AVIF is also painfully slow. And if I recall correctly, is outperformed by JPEG XL at moderate and low compression (but - again, if I recall correctly - AVIF wins at highly compressed images). Also, AVIF faces some patent threats. And misses a lot of JPEG XL's interesting features.

A practical issue with a circle is that it is not a circle until it is finished,

That's not the reason at all, AFAIK. The reasoning is, okay, we want people to be able to move from one place to some distance place in the city at the maximum comfortable speed, which is limited by G-forces. You have some guaranteed G-forces from first accelerating and then decelerating. But if it's linear, that's your only G forces. If it's curved, however, you also have radial G-forces.

The Line's train going from one end to the other (170km) nonstop is supposed to do it in 20 minutes, aka with a mean speed of ~510 kph. Let's say a peak of 800 kph. Now if we shape that 170km into a circle, that's 54km diameter, 27km radius. From the centripetal force formula a=v^2/r, that's 222,22...^2 / 27000 ~= 1,83 m/s^2, or a constant ~0,2g to the side. This is on top of the G-forces from your acceleration and deceleration. You can probably deal with ~0,2g in a train if everyone is seated without much discomfort, though it's double what's acceptable for standing passengers. But you can eliminate that if the city is linear (at the cost of increasing the mean distance that the average person has to travel to go from one arbitrary point in the city to another)

That's not to defend this concept. Because the city doesn't need to be 170km long; you can just made it more 2d and have the distances be vastly shorter (at the cost of just needing some extra lateral travel within the city). Honestly, if I were building a "designer" city from the ground up, I'd use a PRT (Personal Rapid Transit) system rather than trying to make it super-elongated.

What got me is that I don't see why this isn't readily resolved by active damping, the same systems that many tall towers now use to resist earthquakes or resonant wind forces. Big heavy weight at the top (or in this case the bottom) hooked up to actuators that make it move in an inverse direction to the sway.

Again, this is not to defend this colossal waste of money. I just don't see why there aren't ready solutions for this specific problem.