Interesting Links for 28-03-2019

[andrewducker]

Storing time data as UTC is not a silver bullet (wish I'd read this last time I'd written something with dates in it)

(tags:date calendars software data )

The British government's view is that in the event of No Deal there both will and won't be a border in Ireland

(tags:ireland NorthernIreland europe uk OhForFucksSake )

The obscene moral spectacle of Theresa May's resignation

(tags:conservatives politics EpicStupidity UK europe )

Facebook to ban white nationalist content

(tags:facebook racism )

Brexit: Arlene Foster says DUP will not support withdrawal agreement in crushing blow for Theresa May

(tags:UK NorthernIreland europe hope DUP )

How Inuit Parents Raise Kids Without Yelling ??? And Teach Them To Control Anger

(tags:psychology children parenting Inuit emotion anger )

Indicative votes: A People's Vote just became much more likely

(tags:UK europe politics hope )

How the UK lost Brexit battle (decisions made two years ago led us inexorably to this point)

(tags:UK europe politics )

The number of new coal plants being built has collapsed by 84% in 3 years

(tags:coal electricity globalwarming GoodNews )

Mercury is the closest planet to all seven other planets (video)

(tags:physics space video viaSwampers )

The Library of Rare Colours (video)

(tags:video colour art history )

Edinburgh sees 80% surge in job adverts

(tags:jobs edinburgh )

How Do Blind People Who've Never Seen Colour Think About Colour?

(tags:blindness colour psychology )

Comments

[haggis]

I wish the coal plant article listed how many plants, rather than just generating capacity. Coal plants are large and built relatively infrequently so those figures could be meaningful or they could be fluctuations due to project delays.

Dates

[channelpenguin]

Yeah, as soon as we heard about the EU non-summer-time thing, we went "aaaaaargh".

another Y2K-style goldmine for contractors :-)?

Re: Dates

[andrewducker]

Time zones change all the time. I'd expect that dealing with updates to the time zones would be standard.

Re: Dates

[calimac]

The catch in the example given in the article is that, if you say "the conference will start at 9 AM on [future date N]," you don't know know what time, in UTC terms, 9 AM will be on that date, so there's nothing to tag it to. Handling current updates is relatively easy, assuming you've been informed of them. (I've found plenty of websites giving detailed information on the world's time zones, but none with authoritative info on who has DST and when it applies.) But predicting what wayward governments will do about time policy ... that's hard.

[cosmolinguist]

I wish it wasn't so remarkable that blind people do know about colors and do think of them the same way we all think about things we cannot see. :(

[andrewducker]

I think that it's remarkable that people who have never experienced something, have any frame of reference for it at all.

[calimac]

ref. an article some time ago, possibly on Slate Star Codex, about people who haven't experienced something but think they have. e.g. people with no sense of smell who think that other people's talking about smells is some sort of metaphor.

[danieldwilliam]

I think the next step for the end of coal is to see how many existing coal plants are closed due to price and cost pressure over the next three or four years.

That has big implications for climate change and also the financial stability of the global economy.

[danieldwilliam]

I am genuinely uncertain if the Tory party recognise that they are being unprincipled and hypocritical about Brexit or if they don't realise how they actually behaving. I wonder if they believe that, because they are the Tory Party, the voters will forgive them for their behaviour or even just shrug it off with a "boys will be boys" sort of attitude.

I'm not sure which I would find most disgusting.

And I am disgusted. I'm not a natural Tory voter (1) but it's getting to the point where I think I would struggle to be friends with someone who continued to be a Tory supporter in the wake of what they are doing. I'm not sure I could respect someone who could look at the current Tory party and think they represent the natural party of government.


(1) other than by race, gender, class, income bracket, profession and I suppose age.

[alithea]

Yeah, I used to think they were mostly decent-ish people I happened to fundamentally disagree with, but now I'm inclined to consider them selfish bastards who shouldn't be allowed to run anything because they don't care about anyone who isn't rich enough to not need public services.

[danieldwilliam]

It's not just that they don't care about people who can't afford to provide their own services (and self-insure for all the things you *might* need).

I can see an argument, both economic and philosophical that people ought to stand on their own two feet. I don't agree with it. I think that philosophy doesn't work well in practice and causes more problems than it solves and it also strikes me as pretty bleak and that we could do better as a species but I see the legitimacy of the debate.

What's getting me at the moment is the Tories inability to see that what is in their own personal and group interests is not the same as what is in the interests of other groups or the nation as a whole. Britain is not the Tory Party.

[alithea]

Yeah, selfish bastards covers that for me but obviously YMMV :)

time zones

[fanf]

My old essay on this topic https://fanf.livejournal.com/104586.html was kind of a reaction to the 2007 USA / North American time zone changes. I had some scathing words about Exchange, which implemented Jon's option 2 (which has many many failure cases). Jon's option 3 is basically what iCalendar does, and even that isn't enough, because time zones can split so the TZ ID for a particular place and time can become wrong. (I think this happened in Indiana in 2007, iirc.)