I've been living for the past few years in another coastal region in Indonesia, which happens to be flooded since a millennium ago, probably more.
The flooding the article is talking about is relatively recent so the disaster aspect is real. It catches people by surprise. But when the flood has been there since time immemorial, people find ways to adapt and stop treating it as a disaster.
Where I live, houses are built on the water, even today. Poles are driven in the bottom, and you build on top. For streets, they pour shit ton of rubble to displace the water, then put tarmac on top. In the past, there were almost no roads at all, people moved around in boats. You want to buy food - you go with your boat to the "local market", which is just a bunch of other boats with sellers.
It affects the language as well. Since your house is high above water, you don't say "I'm going out", you say "I'm going down" - because you have to go down the stairs and into your boat. When you invite guests in, you say "Please, come up!", as if you are in a tree house :) This wording is used even today, when most houses are at ground level.
When you order food where you can choose the protein part yourself, the seller asks you "What [kind of] fish?", and you can say "eggs", or "chicken breast"! Historically, since most of the meat available was various kinds of fish, this was the established expression, and it has stuck to this day.
> When you invite guests in, you say "Please, come up!"
japanese also does this idiomatically: the verb 上がる "to rise" can be used for "to enter (a house)", which gives rise to expressions like お上がりください for "please come in"
The gtk3 docs give the following reason for the deprecation:
Menus are not meant to be torn around.
Yeah, they are meant to be implemented with web technologies and look like shit.
BTW, this tear-off style is probably quite old. Long ago, I used an early version of ANSYS (for Windows) which apparently was still close to its Unix original, and it had its menus pop up like real windows, with close buttons! They were nicely cascaded, but one could rearrange them.
Yeah, I agree with that. I was using some ancient X11 program that had tear-off menus, but I'll be fucked if I can remember which one it is.
> Yeah, they are meant to be implemented with web technologies and look like shit.
Yuuuuuup. If you always take the "yes" side, you'll come out quite a bit ahead of your fellow gamblers for the "Will GNOME make things worse for sophisticated users and call it 'simplicity'?" wager.
Reminds me of the old Soviet joke of somebody going to the butcher and asking if they have fish. The butcher responds we only have no meat here, you need to go to the fish shop if you want no fish.
Developing new vaccines is expensive, and if the target population is mostly in poor countries, there's nobody to foot the bill. That's why these diseases are called "neglected".
> They are not a significant food source for other animals
In Indonesia for one they are. Every night, countless geckos come out, both indoors and outdoors, and start hunting for mosquitoes. Even lullabies sing about it [1].
The above song is so popular that it got an AI parody [2].
I'm curious what food chain reaction this will start if successful.
The geckos can eat other insects, they are not obligated to eat aedes aegypti. You would need to identify a creature that can't eat anything else, and then justify why humans have to die in order to support that creature's extremely selective diet.
The extermination of sparrows – also known as the Eliminate Sparrows campaign – resulted in severe ecological imbalance, and was one of the causes of the Great Chinese Famine which lasted from 1959 to 1961, with an estimated death toll due to starvation ranging in the tens of millions (15 to 55 million).
Though that's unlikely to follow on from simply reducing mosquitoes in urban areas ... it absolutely warrants a close eye being kept on roll out and knock on effects.
The choice is not between making one species of mosquito extinct or doing nothing.
The choice is between making one species of mosquito extinct or using traditional mosquito control methods such as removing standing water. The traditional methods affect many different insects not just mosquitoes. Attacking specifically the species that are vectors for disease is the more ecologically sound method.
If we could remove the insects that carry disease then the outcome could be more insects overall, because people will be more willing to have ponds, etc.
There is a crazy guy in our neighborhood, not unlike the one in the story.
He would walk around the streets all day, yelling, and swinging fists exactly when someone passes by him.
People from the neighborhood know him, and are not afraid. He never actually hits anybody, no matter how near his fists come to you.
One day, I saw the guy passing near the photo studio in my building, and the fake Santa that works there said something to him. Our crazy guy stopped and they had a conversation. I was passing by, and from the little I overheard he sounded like a completely normal person. Totally not matching his everyday crazy behavior.
I have no idea what made this transformation possible. My theory is that the Santa guy was probably a neighbor of his, and knew him from before he went crazy.
In my country, despite voicemail being available since the introduction of mobile phones decades ago, I am yet to hear of a single instance of anybody actually leaving a message.
It is bad ergonomics only on modern keyboards. Back in the day, there were keyboards with "lower case parentheses"[1].
Same case for vi - the : key was in a different place, and no Shift necessary[2].
Nowadays, I use a bespoke layout (in software) that solves the above two problems, among others.
My number row is inverted, so parentheses become lower case, and I put the colon key next to 0 and Enter next to P.
The flooding the article is talking about is relatively recent so the disaster aspect is real. It catches people by surprise. But when the flood has been there since time immemorial, people find ways to adapt and stop treating it as a disaster.
Where I live, houses are built on the water, even today. Poles are driven in the bottom, and you build on top. For streets, they pour shit ton of rubble to displace the water, then put tarmac on top. In the past, there were almost no roads at all, people moved around in boats. You want to buy food - you go with your boat to the "local market", which is just a bunch of other boats with sellers.
It affects the language as well. Since your house is high above water, you don't say "I'm going out", you say "I'm going down" - because you have to go down the stairs and into your boat. When you invite guests in, you say "Please, come up!", as if you are in a tree house :) This wording is used even today, when most houses are at ground level.
When you order food where you can choose the protein part yourself, the seller asks you "What [kind of] fish?", and you can say "eggs", or "chicken breast"! Historically, since most of the meat available was various kinds of fish, this was the established expression, and it has stuck to this day.