> The Web thing which lets you drag a country or economy over any other and see how Mercator stuffs up their relative sizes is brilliant for getting a sense why people want this.

It's called "The True Size Of..." https://thetruesize.com

And indeed it's a brilliant tool.

My youtube feed gets a decent amount of recommendation from channels such as Mossy Earth, Plant Wild, etc. that showcase some nature restauration project. While I cannot help myself to be a bit skeptical of those efforts (how really sustainable is all of this; isn't that just a tiny drop in the ocean, etc.), I really like to have positive and hopeful news like the one of this article amidst all the ambient negativity and pessimism.

The way I see it, yeah it's a drop in the ocean, but these individual sites will act as "seeds", safe havens for wildlife that, from there, can spread out far and wide. Like these fish, they don't stay there, they go far and wide and become part of a much bigger ecosystem. Part of the reason why these restoration projects are important is because at the time, people weren't aware (or didn't care) of the scale or impact their efforts in hunting beavers had. I'm sure the individual hunters also figured their hunting was a drop in the ocean.

This is a good way to look at it. The more and more complex life survives the anthropocene, the better off the biosphere when this Age has passed. Many times in the past life survived in small pockets (an evolutionary bottleneck event), so making small pockets is more than just a symbolic gesture.

With how low many wildlife populations are, surprisingly small areas can be ecologically important

At the very least they give us real-world experiments for what works, and honestly I will take the occasional bit of ecological good news over another article explaining how doomed everything is

And new techniques for future efforts. I forget which groups are doing what but they're doing things like pulling over trees in old plantations to increase diversity, and designing(and iterating on) coral-reef-promoting structures that can be locally manufactured and installed where restoration is needed.

Next up - if human manipulation of the world makes it so that these animals stay animals or if we're just setting things up to be the next padded safe room and their behavior changes. (as if it hasn't already)

It will probably never happen, but maybe it's a way to facilitate the creation of traffic calming infrastructures (chicane, bump)? There's not better way to reduce the average speed than being forced to pay attention to not ruin your car (see the sibling comment with a picture of a narrow Japanese road)

Neat !

It would be interesting to have some filters; I'm mainly interested in genre (more romance is Paris ? more fantasy in Iceland ?), box office earnings (are all blockbusters in Hollywood / Vancouver ?) and review.

That is a good idea! I have not focused on that yet honestly so it seems a bit randomised at the moment.

I don't think it's fair to conflagrate "Europe" as a single entity. From what I'm reading and my distant recollection:

- In London you top up your Oyster card and pay a fare according to the zone your travelling to. Metro is gated.

- In Paris your load up tickets in your Navigo pass and pay a flat rate every time you take the metro or RER. It's also gated.

- In most (all ?) Swiss cities you don't have any card to charge and have to get a ticket for every travel (like in London your fare amount depends is zone dependent); however there's an app that let you get your location at the start of your travel and end of your travel and automatically charges you the correct fare. There are no gates.

There are no gates anywhere in Switzerland, but one will encounter patrollers much more frequently in the trains (seldom in the trams/buses). I was flabbergasted by the low-trust look of the 2.5-meters high gates in the Paris subway

Since they rely on curves for the sitting surface, they should have done a proper saddle chair shape instead. The current design prioritize the manufacturer/corporation over the user/human. This is a failure on my book.

Indeed, looks super uncomfy.

And yeah, I helped a friend who's a furniture designer [1] for a few years.

After a while, when you 'beta test' pieces in development a lot, you understand that looks are great but comfort always wins.

[1] https://www.saschaulber.com/works/

In my mind, the chair is meant to deform some, such that the curved seat gives a bit. But that might just be in my mind

I think you're correct. I think it would form sort of an upside down W shape when sat on, but with softer curves, and no edges digging into the user.

The actual game is playable in uour browser on archive.org https://archive.org/details/TETRIS_201612

It's not an old version of Tetris, so many of the niceties of modern Tetris are absents. Up to rotate irks me (because it's well accepted that being able to rotate a piece both clockwise and counterclockwise is beneficial).

I think you're correct, but only if you add "for a given environment". It's good to develop the ability to store super efficiently fat when you're a Pacific Islander and food is scarce, but this advantageous trait becomes a liability with modern and plentiful (junk) food.

see thrify gene hypothesis; I know it's not a good explanatory theory but it's a good illustration of my point

Sure, the form of the function being maximized will usually depend on the environment.

That was kind of my initial point... there are far too many permutations that alter what you want to maximise to consider this as a good option right now. Environment, gene-environment interactions, epigenetics, polygenecity, pleiotropy, etc, etc.

Antibiotic resistance happens all the time (at least in our artificial world) and it's a life or death situation for the bacteria.

But you were probably asking for multicellular eukaryote organism; you may be interested in the concept of saltation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saltation_(biology) . Behind the concept of the thing itself it's interesting to think about the mechanism behind it. Regular evolution is gradual (point mutation leads to a maybe slightly different protein, which has only a relatively small scale effect but you gain or lose function over many generation), but for a saltatory evolution you most probably need radical changes in the DNA, like duplication (of a single gene, multiple gene or whole chromosome), horizontal exchanges, etc.

It's possible in plant but in animal more often than not it's not beneficial at all to have such event. Famously if you have an extra chromosome nr. 21 you get Down syndrome.

Are microplastic produced predominantly by plastic leaching out of objects, or is it coming from garbage that got mechanically pulverized, UVized, and contaminating water sources ?