I'll add my experience as a primary bike commuter for 5+ years in the US. I do own a car and drive it maybe twice a week, mainly for transporting things that would be difficult on my bike or when the weather is bad.
I perceive people behind the wheel to be increasingly reckless, entitled, and disrespectful. A lot of the reasons for this are already mentioned so I won't rehash the issues of distraction by smartphone, "sharing economy" de-professionalization of shared transportation, and driver resentment towards anybody not in a personal automobile claiming their lawful space on the road.
Somebody needs to mention that each and every person who drives a car is contributing to undeniable, irreversible climate destruction, and plausibly a future earth that won't be able to support human prosperity. EVs really are not much better than ICE vehicles - replace some fossil fuel consumption with enormous mineral extraction and it's a toss-up at best.
There are also a lot of (in)equity issues in our current transportation system that need to be sorted out. Cars reinforce the wealth gap by virtually ensuring economic success for those who can afford them while leaving those who can't out in the cold. Eisenhower's "drive" (pun intended) to build the US interstate system adopted and encouraged common, preexisting local policies that carved up any neighborhood where minority communities could begin to take hold, replacing them via eminent domain with freeways for white suburban commuters.
In sum, cars are bad. But they're so deeply seated in the collective USA brain stem that I'm not sure we will be able to do much to improve the situation.
Tales from Earthsea gives a lot of context to the realm and introduces an important character in the plot of The Other Wind. I took it to be the fifth book in the series with TOW #6.
Yep - I figured based on the projects, but didn't want to call out your real ID in case that mattered. Lunch out on your plaza sounds pretty appealing right now compared to the weather up here!
Perhaps of interest to this sub-thread is "IIIF" (the international image interoperability framework), an attempt to standardize access to images (and collections of images) with a JSON(-LD) metadata model: http://iiif.io/
The first 40 minutes of this week's "Invisibilia" touches on the effects transcranial magnetic stimulation had on a woman who lived with undiagnosed aspergers for most of her life.
> ALIX SPIEGEL, BYLINE: Until she was 54 years old, Kim (ph) was totally unaware that there were things in the world that she could not see.
> KIM: Everything that was intended in this went completely over my head, and now I saw it - completely missed the meaning of the whole thing until after the TMS. And then I saw the whole thing clearly.
`wp-cli` comes in handy. It can migrate a database and do a global search and replace (for the millions of URLs in that database that you need to change for the site to work after it's cloned) a lot cleaner than some of the plugins that are out there.
There's a kernel of truth to this, but 'city == wasteland + cesspool' is ridiculous. I've lived in south minneapolis most of my life, and never spent any significant amount of time in the burbs. (The last time I made it outside the MSP/St. Paul limits was last november to have my wisdom teeth out, at my local dentist's referral.)
There's plenty of culture here, and I haven't been mugged/shot/raped yet. North minneapolis is essentially a different city, with its fair share of crime and other problems, which I can't speak to.
The big difference between here and a "big coastal city" is that things are a lot more spread out per person. I think this leads to everything being on a smaller scale and more distributed. Most of minneapolis isn't downtown, but mixed use residential. My peers (25-30 year olds) mostly rent houses and live with roommates. Small (3 story max?) apartment buildings are the norm.