Interesting Links for 16-06-2022

[andrewducker]

1. Putin's new approach to censorship will probably backfire

(tags:russia censorship )

2. If you want more interesting shops then you need better zoning laws

(tags:viaDanielDWilliam business regulation cities )

3. Europe cracks down on data cap exemptions in update to net neutrality rules

(tags:internet regulation Europe )

4. How autistic and neurotypical viewers see things differently

(tags:eyesight eyetracking autism psychology )

5. Many pieces of art by Tolkien are now on the official website

(tags:Tolkien art lotr TheHobbit )

6. Love On The Spectrum is designed to make autistics look awkward and uncomfortable

(tags:autism TV OhForFucksSake )

7. Rising sea levels: 200,000 English properties will be abandoned

(tags:globalwarming sea housing UK Doom )

8. Renting: No-fault evictions to be banned in England

(tags:rental GoodNews uk )

9. Microsoft retires Internet Explorer after 27 years

(tags:internet ie GoodNews )

10. The linguistics professor who was a Swahili Room

(tags:language linguistics ai )

Comments

[simont]

#6: even after following the link, I don't know what "Love On The Spectrum" actually is, because the person presenting the video seemed to think the audience already knew that part.

But I hope I'm not the only person who responded to that ignorance by having a confusing mental image of 80s home computers :-)

[andrewducker]

A terrible terrible dating show about autistic people.

[simont]

And #10 reminds me of Nigel Richards, who was able to win the French-language Scrabble world championship despite not speaking French – he just ("just") learned a huge amount about what letter sequences were permitted, without reference to what they meant or how to put them together into valid sentences.

(I mean, presumably he had to learn something about French morphology, because that would have been one of the shortcuts you use to avoid having to inhale the whole French word list as an undifferentiated blob of arbitrary data. But even so, it would have been enough to learn "lots of words come in related groups with this collection of endings" without going as far as "... and here's how their meanings are related".)

[conuly]

Oooh, fascinating. I know my mother would like to hear about this dude.

[andrewducker]

That's an amazing feat. And for most people I suspect it would be harder than just learning French!

7. Rising sea levels: 200,000 English properties will be abandoned

[anef]

Only 200,000? Seems optimistic to me (and no, I have no data).

Re: 7. Rising sea levels: 200,000 English properties will be abandoned

[andrewducker]

As the article says, work will be put into saving a lot more than that. Those are just the ones that won't be economic to save...

Re: 7. Rising sea levels: 200,000 English properties will be abandoned

[danieldwilliam]

I'm surprised the government is housing refugees in them, or Remain voters.