tda

Also related, artificial oyster reefs as coastal protection in the Netherlands: https://www.ecoshape.org/en/projects/oyster-reefs/

I would prefer spherical elephants and mosquitos

I believe this is already the case with hyper-v, is it not?

I beg to differ: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OazFiIhwAEs

you can zoom in to individual tree level. I just did, and can confirm this data includes trees. Also make sure to adjust the colormap min and max to your area of interest. This dataset is the official height measurement of the Netherlands (of a few years ago), made with LIDAR. So it should be accurate to within a few cm.

Actually it won't, as there is relatively little ocean-side property to affect in the first place. With the exceptions of a few coastal towns like Scheveningen, property development is illegal along the coast as it would hinder future coastal protection. Consequently private ownership of coastal area is also unheard of here. Because there are no buildings on them, the most cost effective way of improving our coastal defences is relatively easy and low-tech: just add more sand to the dunes and beaches.

Current investments in the river and coastline protection ("Ruimte voor de Rivier" and "Zwakke Schakels") are done not only to protect for the current conditions, but also for the anticipated climate change.

As an example, the second large expansion for the port of Rotterdam, Maasvlakte2, is at 6m above sea level. The previous one is at 5m. That added one meter has cost a few hundred million euro's extra, but money well spent in my opinion. The foundation of the Maasland Barrier is designed for a storm surge of 6m above mean sea level, even though the gate is currently at 5m above. Thats why it can easily be upgraded.

So even though not much is changing in the general publics perspective, for large infrastructure that takes 10 years to prepare and design, and is built to work for 50-100 years, taking into account (expected) climate change has been a necessity for many decades now.

On another note, here is a nice point cloud visualization of the entire country: http://ahn2.pointclouds.nl/

I find this sample much more informative than the entire 'How it works' section. You tool is pretty much self explanatory, so skip the text and modals and just show what it is about directly when you enter the site

Even more surprising: babies in space!

I really hope we get there soon. Not only could this eliminate usage of herbicides, but many smaller autonomous robots vs one really big John Deere could also remove the need for monocultures. And that would really be a major improvement for both crop yields and the environment

I have also had that idea. Instead of giant machines only capable of harvesting monocultures, couldn't we downscale to small, autonomous vehicles that can farm efficiently on a vegetable garden at scale. Many cheap drones to farm the way our ancestors did using manual labour

You can nicely see where land turned to see and vice versa with the aqua-monitor: http://aqua-monitor.appspot.com/

A lot of the Louisiana marshes have disappeared

I heard a closed beta for managed postgres on Azure is currently running

I wanted to partition a table by the foreign key, as the table receives a few hundred rows per foreign key per hour (it is a timeseries db).

So I figured partitioning the table by foreign key would group all data together in a way that allows for faster access (typical access pattern would be select * where foreign_key = x). However, as the number of keys in the foreign table is unbounded and can be quite large, I wanted to partition the data to a limited number of tables, with

  mod(foreign_key, number_of_partions) 

If I understood correctly, check constraints can't operate on a calculated value

I just tried to implement table partitioning in PostgreSQL 9.6 this week. With some triggers and check constraints this seem to work quite nicely, but I was a bit disappointed that hash based partitioning is currently not possible (at least not without extensions).

Will hash based partitioning be included in PostgreSQL 10? The post notes

  A partitioning "column" can be an expression.

so I can assume it will be supported?