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.
I just finished downloading this this morning. I've been able to look through some of it so far and there's some really fascinating stuff.
I'm particularly interested in the paintings for use as wallpapers, but there are lots of printed materials dating back to the 17th century (and probably earlier).
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/
RE: IIIF, we're interested in going in that direction as well. Fortunately it looks like someone already wrote a plugin for it: https://github.com/mejackreed/Leaflet-IIIF
PS - Hey Kjell! This is Eric from the Getty. It's nice to see there are other museum folks on HN!
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!
Finished Ultima a couple of weeks ago, didn't know it was the second in a series. I'm looking forward to reading Proxima when I can get to it on my list.
After reading the first one I pre-ordered both the 2nd in paperback and the 3rd in hardcover, so they'd arrive at about the same time. It felt sort of clever at the time, but I guess I won't do very much that weekend...
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.
There is a much longer and even more fascinating article here on HN about a similar case. You should search for it, if I was in front of a computer I'd find it for you. In it the man seems to have a lasting effect and is "cured" from Aspergers ends up splitting with his wife of I remember correctly.
