I think some people way overestimate him and others way underestimate him. I think he's a human which in some ways has been very strategic and very short sighted. He's a hardcore nationalist and idealist, and is willing to take huge risks toward those goals. But he's also playing a very high stakes game that he could well lose. And I see little evidence that his actions in Ukraine have been anything more than winging it; Russia seems to have been repeatedly caught off guard by many of the events on the ground, including the low local collaboration rate, the willingness of the Ukrainian military to engage in military ops in populated areas, the inabilitity of the small Russian forces and local collaborators to hold ground, the amount of resources needed to successfully resist Ukraine, and whether the EU and US would dare risk Russian anger in terms of punishing Russia or helping Ukraine. In each case, Russia has had to hastily assemble counteraction.

When Yanukovitch fled, Ukraine's military was by all standards broken, the public had no stomach for fighting in their own territory, Russia was still more thought of as a partner than an enemy, joining NATO was a minority position in Ukraine, the EU and US were afraid of doing anything that could antagonize Russia, and so forth. Now Ukraine has been shifting their economy into a war economy, their forces are now veterans (still underarmed, but that could change rapidly), the public by and large fully supports the military action, Russia is by and large hated, joining NATO is a strong majority position, the EU and US have taken direct action against Russia and look ready to accelerate it, and so forth.

So let's say that - as it looks increasingly likely to happen - the US and EU arm Ukraine. Not just a little but, but fully commit to it - tanks, warplanes, antiaircraft, ships, subs, tactical missiles, the works, plus full realtime intelligence data sharing. What's Russia's next play? Ukraine, given enough modern US and EU equipment, could most likely defeat anything but total war with Russia. It's extremely doubtful the Russian public would have the stomach to do what would be necessary to take on and defeat a western-armed Ukraine using conventional weapons. So... nuclear weapons? They could, of course. But they'd instantly become a global paraiah, there'd be so much pressure against them that I don't think even China would leave their doors open to Russian trade anymore. Most Europeans would rather burn trash to heat their homes than pay for a wisp of gas from a nation that's actively using nuclear weapons on an aligned state (and realistically the loss of Russian gas wouldn't actually be that devastating, but it'd take too long to go into why). Not to mention what would happen in terms of internal terrorism/guerilla warfare within Russia, which is already a huge problem among Russia's many ticked off populations, and you can add tens of millions of recently-nuked Ukranians to that list, with pretty much unlimited funding for their actions provided by the US and EU. And Russia is a petroeconomy. Its manufacturing sector is grossly undersized compared to its population, even worse than during Soviet times. There's every reason to think that a fully embargoed Russia would collapse even worse than the USSR.

Putin doesn't want to use nukes, of course. He wants to threaten to use nukes. He wants Ukraine to think that he's actually crazy enough to do it so that they'll drop all future claims on Crimea and turn the eastern portion of their country to be a "federated" (Russian puppet) zone. And you know.... it is a possibility. Raise the fear level enough and people might just give in to the unthinkable.

It's an incredibly high stakes game he's playing, however, with a far from certain outcome.

And did you hear, rvz.ru/~vladimir/bullshit.html is reporting that Ukraine is now working with ALIENS and THE ILLUMINATI to force Russian mothers in the Donbass to eat their own babies! It's TRUE!

Freedom House on press freedom in Russia. Reporters Without Borders's take.

It's one thing if you're dumb enough to take state propaganda outlets of a country that takes #148th place on the press freedom ranking, where even blogs are forced to register with government censors if they get too many readers and where it's standard practice to hire actors to play parts in the news. But it's even more ridiculous when you do so in regards to an event where said propaganda outlets have put forth literally more than a dozen different, completely contradictory reasons why it's not Russia's fault, including but not limited to "we have proof Ukraine shot it down with a surface-to-air missle", "we have proof Ukraine shot it down with an air-to-air missile", "we have proof that Ukraine gunned it down with a fighter cannon", "we have proof that Ukraine rammed it", "we have proof that Ukraine loaded a plane full of dead bodies, disguised it as a civilian airliner and tricked the rebels into shooting it down", "we have proof that Ukraine deliberately tricked the rebels into shooting down an actual civilian airliner", and my favorite - the original reported in the Russian press, before it became clear that it was a civilian aircraft - "we've confirmed that the heroic rebels of the Donbas just successfully shot down a Ukranian military jet!"

Ugh... puns. :( Are you just trying to ruffle peoples' feathers here?

Passenger pigeons were not primarily a grain species, although they would eat grain when other preferred foods were in short supply. Part of the reasons the flocks increasingly turned to grain with time is due to the cutting and burning of many of their native forests to make room for farmland (and with an average lifespan in captivity of 15 years, probably half that in the wild, populations don't readjust right away). They were a migratory species, of course, but the habitat destruction was going on all over their range. If you get rid of the oaks and chestnuts in an area and the only other food option is grain, of course they're going to eat that. They also ate insects, mainly when breeding.

When you're talking about reintroducing a species from scratch, obviously the issues of what to do if a billion birds come into the area is totally inapplicable. The forests capable of supporting those numbers are gone. Birds that primarily consume seeds and grains are a much bigger threat to farmers than birds with a primary focus on nuts like the passenger pigeon.

it would take years for the ground plants to recover

Citation needed. Bird manure is one of the best natural fertilizers in existence. Have you seen what people charge for chicken manure? It's outrageous. Now, it's a concentrated enough fertilizer that you have to use it more like a chemical fertilizer than a soil suppliment - so it's possible that the pigeons would "nutrient burn" a location. But that's short term, in the long term that means leaving the area incredibly lush. And not to mention full of seeds in their droppings.

Trees and many smaller plants primarily cater to birds as their seed distributors.

Passenger pigeons mainly ate tree nuts, particularly acorns, for most of the year. So they had a big effect on controlling tree distribution - in particular red oak has taken over from white oak after their demise in their former habitats (white oak is a slightly more valuable timber tree, FYI). During the summer they would also eat berries. They would sometimes steal grain from farmers but it wasn't a main part of their diet. They additionally consumed insects such as caterpillars and snails, so they did some good for farmers as well.

FYI, honeybees aren't native to the US. And colony populations are totally artificial, as people can raise as many colonies as they want, queens are mass-raised (you can mail order them) and the only limiting factor on the number of honeybees is the number of hives raised by beekeepers. Colony losses are a financial hit to beekepers but they're no threat to the species or the usage of honey bees for pollination (only the economics of their usage). And the increase in the rate of colony loss is way overplayed.

There were humans living alongside the passenger pigeon for thousands of years before European settlers arrived.

Anyway, this "readapting" of an ecosystem isn't necessarily a good thing. For example, the extinction of the Carolina Parakeet (the only parrot native to the eastern US) coincided with major spreading cockleburs in the US, as it was a major part of their diet. Are you a fan of cockleburs?

Mér finnst samt pirrandi THegar fólk gerir THetta. THað er ófagmannlegt - Washington Post er mikil fréttasíða, ekki eitthvað skrifað á Facebook. :P

If it's so reasonable to "transliterate foreign proper names", then why is it that they only seem to do it with countries like Iceland? They don't usually transliterate proper names from other countries - for example, German (Düsseldorf) or France (Équipe FLN), just to pick a few quick examples.

The Met Office's decisions have all been perfectly cogent, it's only the poor reporting that's led to confusion from lay people.

In the first case there were all signs of an eruption under the glacier. They issued an alert. Later there were no signs on the surface, so they removed it. Later on, glacial subsidence proved that an eruption had indeed taken place, but stopped. In both cases, correct behavior on their part.

Then there was the 1st Holuhraun eruption. When an eruption begins, theres no way to know how its going to evolve, but since it was just a lava eruption, it was only restricted on instrument-only flight and only to 5000 feet. When it died down, they removed it. Again, right call by the Met Office.

Then there was the 2nd Holuhraun eruption. Again, 5000 foot instrument-only restriction, and when it steadied out, they removed the restriction (yes, the Slashdot article is wrong, the restriction has long been removed). Again, right call by the Met Office.

People need to stop armchair quarterbacking, they're doing the right thing.

All for nothing?

Or for an English example volcano, "Yellowstone" (11 letters).

To an Icelandic speaker who knows the component words, it's obvious where they split. Eyja (of islands) Fjalla (of mountains) Jökull (glacier), easy as pie. Their brain automatically cues into the "a"s as context clues for splits to make it even easier.

But picture a person who doesn't speak English at all who sees yellowstone. So they don't know the word "yellow" and they don't know the word "stone". Nor do they know what letter clusters are common together in English - or example, "st" - and which ones are not - for example, "ws". To them it'd be just the same thing, they don't see where to split it, and thus the word looks like a jumble of letters.

The newest eruption is at Holuhraun, which is only 9 letters. And if it gets all the way to Askja, that's an easy 5 ;)

Electric cars wouldn't use half the country's electricity, passenger vehicles' share of total energy consumption is much smaller than that. But I don't disagree with you that it's bad to waste power. Still, for a potential EV consumer whose turned off from EVs because they're lazy, if the choice is between "waste 20% more electricity" and "keep driving a gasoline car", the wireless EV is still the much better option.

You act like there's no research papers on this subject. There have been tons, and the conclusions in each case are the same:

1) CO2 emissions would decline even on the US's current grid (which is, I should add, getting cleaner every year, while the amount of emissions associated with oil production keep rising)

2) On a generation basis, every region in the US has enough space capacity for a full switchover of the passenger fleet today, without any new plant construction, except the Pacific Northwest. Most charging is done at night when most power plants lie idle, but the Pacific Northwest is an exception because their heavy use of hydro means time of use isn't important, only net consumption.

3) The only thing that there's not enough of at present is simply local distribution capacity, to peoples' homes.

Of course, that's for a complete, instantaneous switchover, which is of course an impossiblity. Your average car is driven for about two decades before it goes to scrap, only a small fraction rotate out of service every year. And that's assuming that everyone bought EVs as replacement, which if course is an impossiblity because even if everyone was suddenly sold on the concept of EVs it'd take a decade or more to ramp up production to that level. And of course everyone is not suddenly sold on the concept of EVs. You're looking at maybe a 30-40 year transition time period here. If power companies can't keep up with a trend that's stretched out over the scale of several decades, they deserve to fail.

25 kWh per day? What are you, a courier? That's like 100 miles a day on average (including weekends), over 3x the US average.