How Rotterdam Uses Water to Protect Itself from Flooding

As global warming melts the polar ice caps we are witnessing a human caused increase in sea level. The city of Rotterdam is on the front lines of holding back this tidal increase and they have designed some nifty ways to protect the people that live in the city from the encroaching waves. They are using a rive that flow through the city to act as a giant sponge to absorb any influx of water from storms, this will contain and slow the water from entering parts of the city with lots of people or commerce. It’s a nature-friendly way to deal with a human caused problem.

A €2.3bn “Room for the River” project – making floodplains at more than 30 locations on four rivers – is credited with saving the country from the worst flooding this year. The national delta programme is investing in action to guard until 2050, and a multi-billion euro flood protection programme (HWPB) involves 100 projects to strengthen kilometres of dykes, without which, says Rijkswaterstaat infrastructure organisation, 60% of the country would regularly be under water.

But in cities, too, water protection must meet urban design to create an attractive, adaptive city, says Arnoud Molenaar, Rotterdam’s chief resilience officer. A vast amount of work has been going on, and the city has built water squares, green and blue roofs and a 2km-long railway viaduct rooftop park. The water squares, also designed by De Urbanisten, are, very simply, built in overflow areas – when there is too much rainwater they fill up, and then slowly drain away so that the storm drains are not overwhelmed. And when the water has gone, they become public spaces again.

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Beautiful Books from Standard Ebooks

books

Reading is cool, and it can look cool too! The volunteers over at Standard Ebooks have collected public domain books which they polish up with fancy covers to look more appealing. That’s not all though. They also clean up the scans of books that exist and also fix any formatting and typos that exist. If you’ve read a book from Project Gutenberg you might notice misspelled words or odd line breaks due to the inaccuracies with character recognition software. With Standard Ebooks you can read knowing that you’re getting well edited material.

Standard Ebooks is a volunteer-driven effort to produce a collection of high quality, carefully formatted, accessible, open source, and free public domain ebooks that meet or exceed the quality of commercially produced ebooks. The text and cover art in our ebooks is already believed to be in the U.S. public domain, and Standard Ebooks dedicates its own work to the public domain, thus releasing the entirety of each ebook file into the public domain. All the ebooks we produce are distributed free of cost and free of U.S. copyright restrictions.

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Johns Hopkins: Narrow Lanes Save Lives

Johns Hopkins has reached a conclusion: to protect lives we need to narrow lives. Cars kill. Cars (and the people driving them) are more likely to cause death when they move fast and wide lanes encourage speeding. A logical step to curb reckless driving by car drivers is to limit the space they have to drive cars, and make the space they drive in more interesting. By narrowing lanes there are many benefits to be had by society at large. It’s good to see an institution like Johns Hopkins has figure out that car focussed design is not a good thing – streets are for people.

  • Narrower lanes did not increase the risk of accidents. When comparing 9- and 11-foot lanes, we found no evidence of increased car crashes. Yet, increasing to 12-foot lanes did increase the risk of crashes, most likely due to drivers increasing their speed and driving more carelessly when they have room to make mistakes.
  • Speed limit plays a key role in travel width safety. In lanes at 20-25 mph speeds, lane width did not affect safety. However, in lanes at 30-35 mph speeds, wider lanes resulted in significantly higher number of crashes than 9-foot lanes.
  • Narrower lanes help address critical environmental issues. They accommodate more users in less space, use less asphalt pavement, with less land consumption and smaller impervious surface areas.
  • Narrowing travel lanes could positively impact the economy. This includes raising property values, boosting business operation along streets and developing new design projects.

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YOLO: Throw Away Your Phone

We only have one life so use it wisely. It feels like a lot of pressure, but maybe we should focus on the small wins like using out mobile phones less. If you’re one of those people with new year’s resolutions than you may want to consider reducing your phone usage to help you achieve your goals. Go ahead and try whatever technique you want to reduce your phone usage as one of them is going to work, of course, it’s worth noting that the act of using your phone isn’t the problem it’s what you are using it for.

The consequences, from a global level, are shocking. As Harris writes: “Never before have a handful of tech designers had such control over the way billions of us think, act and live our lives.”

What’s more, we’ve become so conditioned, thanks to dopamine, to believe that checking our phones is a behavior worth repeating that when we can’t check our phones, we often feel anxious, and start to experience Fomo, the “fear of missing out”. Anxiety is, of course, unpleasant, and so what do we do to alleviate it? We check our phones. And when we do, we encounter a dopamine trigger, which reinforces the idea that checking phones is a behavior worth repeating. And the cycle continues.

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Wind Turbines & Birds, Ok; Gas & Birds, Not Ok

industry

People opposed to a clean economy argue that birds get killed by wind turbines so therefore we shouldn’t build wind farms. Of course, those same people would argue that we should stick to planet-killing fossil fuels instead; somehow, in their minds using fossil fuels is better than renewables when it comes to protecting nature. To hopefully put this ridiculous debate to bed The Economist has stepped in. The magazine that is trapped in the last century agrees that when it comes to power generation and protecting nature that renewable energy is best.

But Dr Katovich did not confine his analysis to wind power alone. He also examined oil-and-gas extraction. Like wind power, this has boomed in America over the past couple of decades, with the rise of shale gas produced by hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, of rocks. Production rose from 37m cubic metres in 2007 to 740m cubic metres in 2020.

Comparing bird populations to the locations of new gas wells revealed an average 15% drop in bird numbers when new wells were drilled, probably due to a combination of noise, air pollution and the disturbance of rivers and ponds that many birds rely upon. When drilling happened in places designated by the National Audubon Society as “important bird areas”, bird numbers instead dropped by 25%. Such places are typically migration hubs, feeding grounds or breeding locations.

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