The FDR may need some kind of protection against flooding, but not the part south of the Brooklyn Bridge -- it is an elevated roadway at it's southern end, from Pitt street (north of the Manhattan Bridge) to Whitehall street at the entrance to the Battery Park Underpass. The underpass, which is a tunnel, definitely needs some kind of protection against flooding (Sandy filled it end-to-end with water) as does the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel (now the Hugh Carey Tunnel, also filled with water by Sandy and still not operational), the Holland Tunnel, the Lincoln Tunnel and the Queens Midtown Tunnel.

More importantly, those are just the problems that we had with this hurricane. The shoreline of southern Manhattan has actually been extensively expanded over the last 200 years. Protecting that man-made land from rising water seems likely to involve significant unforeseen difficulties. It seems safe to say that the whole city hasn't been built to withstand this kind of environmental attack (mostly because it seems safe to say that work in Manhattan has been done as cheaply and quickly as possible). What if the foundations of the towers for the Brooklyn Bridge finally wash away? They're not resting on bedrock. Much of the Lower East Side and Chinatown are built over land that used to be a swamp.

Finally, while this thread is limited to consideration of how to protect the borough of Manhattan, pretending that the other boroughs and neighboring states don't exist makes this a foolish exercise. The question shouldn't ever be "How can we protect Manhattan?" It should be "How can we protect the tri-state area?" In the words of Harry Buttle,* "We're all in it together."

* I mean Tuttle!

Careful -- you could get kicked to death talking that way.

Next up: record executives, realtors, and oil prospectors.

You forgot telephone sanitizers, account executives, tired T.V. producers, insurance salesmen, personnel officers, security guards and management consultants. Plenty of space in the B Ark!

Someone should go nail this article to the foreheads of everyone involved in creating the movie Battle Los Angeles (in which aliens invade earth in order to steal all of our precious, precious water).

you don't need the language part of your brain

my brain feels far more engaged

It's interesting that you feel your brain is more engaged when you're not using all of it.

The existence of mainstream casual and blockbuster video games is a fairly new development, but both types of games are part of the overall medium.

As was the case with other forms of media over the past 150 years or so, video games are going to start to become more diverse. Up until fairly recently it wasn't entirely nonsensical to simply say "I play video games." Today, though, that doesn't mean anything. One may as well say "I read books."

This is an exciting time for video games as a medium -- it's become a genuinely mainstream medium. That doesn't mean its less mainstream aspects will die. There's room for all types. People watch TV shows and feature-length films. People read short stories and epic trilogies. People play casual, simplistic or linear games, they play esoteric, deep or complex games, and they will do all of this on a wide variety of platforms in a wide variety of situations.

There's no reason a good quality stove shouldn't last you 50 years or more.

My parents happen to be stove enthusiasts (yes, I know that's pretty weird) and I helped them pull some clandestine intra-family action in order to secure my great-great-grandmother's stove. I have to admit that it's quite a prize, this is a machine that worked through the American Civil War. It currently bides its time until it heats a home again ...and, I suppose, cooks food -- it's just way over powered for such a simple task.

A stove that lasts 50 years? Get off my great-great-grandmother's lawn!

P.S. I love the subject line for this thread.

Space is the "somewhere else".

Did you just declare the ultimate NIMBY?

Hey, neat. Thanks for checking it out!

I took a look at MS Word 2007 on the PC I'm sitting in front of when I wrote my previous comment and didn't find any difference in the space, but I didn't use anything more fancy than a ruler. I'm happy to accept your findings. Perhaps there's a difference between Word on a PC and Word on a Mac?

So I accept the concept you're presenting, but it doesn't seem like an actual solution to the problem. If there is always more space after a period, there will be spaces after sentences, sure, but there will be spaces within sentences as well, which defeats the whole point. Does that make sense?

In order to have additional space only after sentences, you must have a decision made by something that can parse actual grammar. Machines cannot do this consistently. People can. ...Err, people are more likely to be able to. ;)

a word processor will space a document properly, such that the space between sentences IS wider than a space between words.

MS Word certainly doesn't do this. What you're describing is an extremely difficult problem, having software find the beginning and ending of sentences. I'm pretty confident that no standard word processing software even attempts to tackle this problem, but I'd be happy to be surprised -- what word processor do you think does this?

we could simply write software to be intelligent enough to automatically add a space between sentences when it detects a period-space-word starting with a capital letter.

This would wreak havoc on citations in legal documents.

The truth of the matter is that it's simple to remove the two spaces but difficult to add them. The best practice, therefore, is to type the two spaces by default.

What about the bombing of Sterling Hall at the University of Wisconsin, Madison in 1970?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sterling_Hall_bombing

If you're just working off the numbers, this was probably not as large a disaster as the World Trade Center disaster or the Oklahoma City bombing, but it has great historical significance nonetheless.

I just happen to know that one off the top of my head and I'm sure there are other people who could do the same, but I imagine that people who actually know what they're talking about could provide an extremely dismal list on this topic.

Video games can provide an escape from reality. They can also be a unique tool for understanding the world.

These two statements are also true of any media you can name, or which will ever be invented -- books, magazines, newspapers, movies, music, theater, dance, whatever.

Arbitrator also says my link sucks. Here:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-binding_arbitration