Link roundup for 30 March 2012

This week was full of articles to mention in a link roundup. Here they are:

--- Denmark aims to get 35% of its total energy from renewables by 2020 and 100% by 2050 - pretty self-explanatory.

--- Japan Airlines now has its first Boeing 787 Dreamliner, giving the world a total of seven of these airplanes so far.

--- Jeff Bezos (Amazon.com billionaire and the guy behind Blue Origin) has found the original Apollo 11 rocket engines and intends to raise them from the ocean floor. They should end up in a museum (they are still NASA property, even if Bezos recovers them), and hopefully their age and original appearance when first lifted up will remind the world of just how long ago Apollo 11 took place - in other words, we didn't go to the moon, a previous generation that has now mostly died away did. We have only been to Low Earth Orbit, no farther.

--- An article on why young Americans are less and less interested in buying cars, and even in getting driver's licenses.

--- An article on the checks and balances in the US system vs. the Canadian parliamentary approach. Americans by and large do not seem to be aware of how weak a president is compared to the Prime Ministers in other nations, and are frequently disappointed when the country has not changed 180 degrees in the two or four years after a presidential election. Remembering back to the passing of the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), the idea of a Prime Minister having to negotiate and negotiate again with his own party to pass a single bill is laughable.

--- From December - an interesting article on a French language program for Spanish speakers in Cal State.

--- The Office québécoise de la langue française, now with 246 staff, is adding another 69 (an increase of about 25%).

--- On Will Ferrell's Spanish immersion when filming Casa de mi padre and his language-learning ability. Will Ferrell is fluent in Swedish thanks to his wife, and so this is not the first time learning another language for him.

--- The PVV in the Netherlands on nomenclature in South Africa again.

--- An interesting brown dwarf has been discovered 29 light years away, trailing a star in the big dipper. I would prefer 1 light year away, but 29 is acceptable for now.

--- Votes and vowels: an interesting article on the pronunciation of certain vowels in parts of the US and how it affects the way a person comes across politically, plus a number of other things. I won't try to summarize it here, except to note that it's quite reminiscent of a Malcolm Gladwell book.

--- Finally, a small site with Italian etymology that I like. It seems to be just a number of images cobbled together from an old Italian dictionary, but being able to quickly search one word at a time is nice. The etymology for sbagliare (to be wrong) for example comes from Latin varius.

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Gunnar Wetterberg believes the Nordic countries should form a union by 2030

From an article here in Norwegian, that already has 433 replies in the comments section below. If the subject piques your interest but you don't know Norwegian then going through the comments section with Google Translate should be well worth your time.

We will be one of the strongest economies in the world, says the Swedish historian.

Today is Nordens Dag, which commemorates the basic agreement of cooperation between the Scandinavian countries that was signed in Helsinki in 1962.

All representatives from the Nordic countries were invited to Trondheim to mark the day. The Swedish historian Gunnar Wetterberg held a lecture today where he presented an exciting proposal: to merge the five Nordic countries into a single federal state. "When these countries are so near to each other in language and culture, it is no wonder that we were together not so long ago...We will have a very strong base for economic growth in the area, much stronger than we have when our countries are working separately."

There have been many Nordic unions over the centuries, but they have never quite worked. Wetterberg believes there are other causes behind that: "Perhaps there were others outside the region that didn't want it to go so well. For example the Dutch and English would not want both sides of Øresund (the strait between Denmark and Sweden) to belong to the same country...We also ended up in the middle of the USA and Soviet Union during the Cold War."

On the possibility of internal strife in such a union he says that "It has always been the case in Europe that one group fights with another. But now, after 600 years, the great powers are finally leaving us alone." On the possibility that Sweden would dominate such a union: "The Swedes are not so high on the pole any longer either, because you (Norwegians) are richer than us, Finns are better with technology, and the Danes did a better job getting through the financial crisis than we did. None of the lands would end up being Big Brother, and we will go together on equal terms."

Gunnar Wetterberg is optimistic about the timeframe, and believes it could be done around 2030. "The interesting thing is that the population has been in the forefront of this. 1 of 10 employees in Oslo are Swedish, and three percent of the population in Malmö (just across the bay from Denmark) commute across the bridge to Denmark to go to work. It's happening today, and now it is just up to politicians to put a frame on it."

Just to provide some economic background, the "core" Scandinavian countries of Sweden, Norway and Denmark together would have a GDP in between Australia and Mexico - right now the highest, Sweden, is 21th in terms of GDP but together they would be in 14th place. With Finland and Iceland added it would be around $1.4 trillion, in between Spain and India. Population of the core three together would be around 20 million, then add another 5 million to that with Finland and Iceland.

The inclusion of Finland would make such a union a political and not a linguistic one, since Finland only has Sweden as a nominal official language (with many Swedish speakers, but still a minority) while Finnish is from a completely different language family. Also, since Denmark is technically sovereign over the Faroese Islands (where the language is very similar to Icelandic) a union of even the first three countries would have a group of insular Scandinavian speakers anyway. And let's not forget Elfdalian (yes, that's a real language).

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Danish economist: US will be bankrupt by 2020

From an article here in Norwegian - translation of info from the article is just below. As a Canadian (73.3% of Canada's trade is with the US, China is still just 2.1%) one naturally hopes predictions like these will turn out to be wrong. Of course, right or wrong when it comes to these predictions is more a matter of political will than anything else, so in a sense this is more a warning than a prediction, and most economists would certainly love to be proven wrong about such things. Last year's New York Times deficit calculator shows how easy it is to actually reduce and completely get rid of the deficit as an interested observer:

but the problem is that one can't simply check off boxes like that in a real political environment. Cut aid to states by 5 percent, increase the Medicare eligibility age to 70, and Raise the Social Security Retirement age to 70 for example just won't happen due to opposition from pretty much everybody (those directly affected and most people that know them), while some others such as Return the estate tax to Clinton-era levels, allow Bush tax cut expiration on income above $250,000 a year and Millionaire's tax on incomes above $1 million are easily doable in terms of public support, but not when one factors in GOP opposition - not just the House right now but overcoming a Senate fillibuster even when Democrats had a majority in both houses.

Info from the article:

USA to be bankrupt by 2020

The US is in larger financial difficulty than crisis-hit Greece, believes researcher Jørgen Ørstrøm Møller.

The US is moving full speed towards a huge debt that will become impossible to repay.

The Danish researcher Jørgen Ørstrøm Møller believes that the USA will be bankrupt within the next ten years, saying that the US will have to cut its economic policies by two to three percent of the country's GDP by 2015 just to stabilize its debt. This is considerably more than the 17 euro countries, which should "only" have to cut by 0.9% of their GDP. Even crisis-hit Greece needs to cut by 1.3% of its GDP in order to stabilize its debt by 2015.

So far, however, the US has done just the opposite, continuing to lower taxes and raise government spending.

US interest payments alone will rise from 8-10% of the national budget today to 20% in 2020. It is impossible to see where all this money will come from, said Ørstrøm Møller at a top-level seminar according to business.dk.

States in Crisis

He points out that the situation in many states in the US are worse than in euro countries. 48 of 50 states cannot finance their expenses today. In President Barack Obama's home state Illinois, where Chicago is the largest city, the state can only finance 55% of its spending.

"California could receive the same junk status as Greece, and 50 to 100 American cities could go bankrupt. But the number of private companies and banks that are also threatened by huge debt and could go bankrupt is also huge," he said.

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German Fehmarn and Danish Lolland to be linked by tunnel in ten years

Welt has an article here in German today on the decision to construct a tunnel between the islands of Fehmarn (Germany) and Lolland (Denmark). This link has been talked about for a long time and is one of the EU's 30 top priority transportation projects. The current route from one to the other looks like this:


View Larger Map

The gist of the article is as follows:

Whether to join the German island of Fehmarn with the Danish island of Lolland just 17.6 km away with a bridge or a tunnel has been the subject of discussion for quite some time, and now it has been decided that a tunnel will link the two. The tunnel will commence operation ten years from now, at which time most boat traffic between the two islands will cease. Had a bridge been decided upon, it would have been the ninth-longest in the world.

As the tunnel will be financed by Denmark, Germany has no say in the project besides the role it will play in the environmental impact assessment of the project, which will happen in the spring of 2013. In fact, this is one of the reasons for the decision to go with the tunnel as it would take but two years to construct and would have no effect on the marine life in the area. In spite of this though there is a lot of protest against the project on the island of Fehmarn due to how they see it affecting the environment, and revenues. If a fixed link is built between the two islands then the drivers that currently spend some time in the neighborhood waiting for the ferry to arrive will no longer stop, and tourist revenues would shrink.

The tunnel itself will look something like this, with rail as well as a roadway:

Now let's see what some of the comments below the article say.

Im Hochgeschwindigkeitszug nach Skandinavien. Toll.

To Scandinavia by high-speed train. Great.

Besser hier die Milliarden investieren als sie wieder für Integration verpuffen zu lassen.

Better to spend the billions here than to let it fizzle out again on integration.

Hoffentlich wachen die Dänen auf und schließen die Grenze nach Deutschland.

Hopefully the Danes wake up and close the border to Germany.

Auch an diesem Projekt werden unsere GRÜNEN wieder etwas zu meckern finden !!!

Of course our GREENS find something to grumble about with this project too!!!

Spätrömische Dekadenz. Schauen Sie mal auf der Wikiseite für wieviele potienzielle Menschen man das baut.... Für ein paar millionen Dänen....Na da wird sich der Tunnel in nichtmal einhundert Jahren amortisieren....

Late Roman decadence. Look at the Wikipedia page for how many potential people would build it...for a few million Danes...the tunnel won't be paid off in even a hundred years...


That last comment was mostly voted down.

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Danish private rocket to launch soon, see live stream here

Here's the live stream (as well as here). Mostly in Danish, some English, maybe some other languages too. Liftoff will take place in a few hours (90 minutes to 3 hours, I think).

If you're not sure what this is about, see here. It's a group of Danish people from Copenhagen Suborbitals launching a dummy to an altitude of 30 km for their first flight, after which they will continue to increase the altitude and prepare for being able to launch actual humans into space through subsequent launches.

The area where it is to be launched is near Bornholm Island, which is here:

View Larger Map

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China leads or is soon to lead in just about every sector

This is a bit of a pet peeve of mine - articles that refer to China as being the leader in a sector (in this case renewable energy), but with scant reference to the statistics per capita. Denmark is mentioned in the first sentence of the article ("China vaulted past competitors in Denmark, Germany, Spain and the United States...") but no mention is made that wind power provides for 24.1% of the total energy production in Denmark, more than any other country. On the other hand, the article mentions that China intends to produce 8% of its energy through renewable sources by 2020, double the current 4%. Not only is China still producing only one fifth of the energy per capita that Denmark is compared to energy the countries use, but using total numbers instead of per capita China would only need to produce a bit over 20% to surpass Denmark forever, because then the tiny country would need to produce over 100% of its power from renewable energy in order to match China. Plus, using this measure countries like poor Iceland (population 300,000+) can never be the leader in anything.

This is not to say that China's investment into renewable energy isn't a good thing of course; it's just not the world leader in this area. As China continues to develop we should see more and more of these articles as it becomes the leader in X, leader in Y and leader in Z until (hopefully) we will begin to realize that a country with a population that huge only needs to have a production per capita about a quarter or a third of most developed countries in the world in order to be the "leader" when everything is added together.

And in fact, China makes this argument too when emissions are brought up, since its CO2 emissions per capita are only about a quarter that of the United States. Qatar has the highest by far.

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Residents of Copenhagen to soon have completely free wireless internet

Strøget, one of the first parts of the city planned to have free wireless internet.

Noticed this here in Norwegian, 20 April:

Soon residents of Copenhagen will be able to use free wireless internet throughout the city. This decision has been made by the politicians of the city because they want the city's residents to not have to pay for the service, writes Berlingske.dk.

"The internet has become very important for making use of the city, for example going to the restaurant, to the swimming pool or the movies. Because of this it will be a big help to be able to use the internet in densely populated areas," said Anne Vang from the Social Democrats to the newspaper.

And from here in Danish with a question with the same political spokesperson:

People in Copenhagen and city guests will be able to use wireless internet throughout the city. A political majority in city hall want there to be hot spots set up for internet access for $160,000, first in the areas of Strøget, Nørrebrogade and Vesterbrogade, making it quick and easy for all to go on the internet and obtain information without having to enter into a payment agreement with an ISP.

...

Q: "Why do you believe that free internet is a municipal task?"
A: "We must recognize as a city that we live in an information-based society and help the city's residents and tourists as well as to prevent an increase in inequality, where some are disconnected from the information-based society. There is already free internet in libraries."

One possible snag:

TDC's chief for Public Affairs, Anders Thomsen, isn't convinced that the model is legal. "It's always worrying when a city wants to compete with private companies. The telecommunications market has been privatized and fully liberalized for ten years", he said.

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Norwegians understand other Scandinavian languages the best...and other Scandinavians understand Norwegian the best too

Østlandet, where Norwegians have the easiest time understanding Swedish.

In this post from last year I sourced a forum post that claimed the following:

Norwegians understand 88% of the spoken swedish language
understand 73% of the spoken danish language

Swedes understand 48% of the spoken norwegian language
understand 23% of the spoken danish language

Danes understand 69% of the spoken norwegian language
understand 43% of the spoken swedish language

Fig. B. An understanding of the written language

Norwegians understand 89% of the written swedish language
understand 93% of the written danish language

Swedes understand 86% of the written norwegian language
understand 69% of the written danish language

Danes understand 89% of the written norwegian language
understand 69% of the written swedish language.

But even though that forum post agreed with my own experiences, it was unsourced and I've always wanted to find an actual study on the matter. Yesterday I found one, from 2004 (it also references a previous study from 1976 so even better). Here's what it says:

Skandinaver snakker nesten samme språk. Men er det nordmenn, svensker eller dansker som forstår hverandre best?

Scandinavians speak almost the same language. But is it Norwegians, Swedes or Danes that understand each other the best?

En undersøkelse utført av Nordisk språkråd prøver å komme til bunns i mysteriet, skriver Dagsavisen. Du har kanskje opplevd om du møter andre skandinavere at det lett oppstår diskusjon om hvilket annet skandinavisk språk man forstår best. Noen nordmenn synes dansk er enklere å forstå enn svensk, mens andre har motsatt oppfatning. Og hva så med svensker. Er norsk eller dansk lettest å forstå?

A study done by the Nordisk språkråd attempts to get to the bottom of the mystery, writes Dagsavisen. You might have experienced when you meet other Scandinavians that it is easy to get into the discussion on which other Scandinavian language is best understood. Some Norwegians think Danish is easier to understand than Swedish, while others have the opposite opinion. And what about Swedes? Is Norwegian or Danish easiest to understand?

- Nordmenn er skandinaviske mestere i nabospråkforståelse, sier Arne Torp til Dagsavisen.

- Norwegians are the masters in Scandinavia in understanding neighboring languages, says Arne Torp to Dagsavisen.

Han er førsteamanuensis i nordisk ved Universitetet i Oslo og har deltatt i utformingen av en språktest som er gjennomført i Norge, Sverige og Danmark.

He is an associate professor in Nordic at the University of Oslo and has taken part in the designing of a language test conducted in Norway, Sweden and Denmark.

Nordmenn, svensker og dansker fikk se en sekvens av tv-programmet «Vil du bli millionær», de fikk lese en avisnotis og høre på en nyhetssendig. Testgruppene fikk poeng ut fra hvor dyktige de var til å forstå hva som ble sagt og skrevet. 60 poeng var full pott.

Norwegians, Swedes and Danes saw a sequence of the tv program "Who wants to be a millionaire", read a newspaper notice and listened to a news broadcast. The test groups received points for how well they understood what was said and written, with a maximum of 60 points.

Undersøkelsen viste at nordmenn hadde størst forståelse av de nordiske språkene. Nesten en tredel bedre forståelse av de andre språkene enn svensker og dansker ble status når poengene var talt opp. I 1976, da man foretok en lignende test, kom også nordmenn best ut, skriver Dagsavisen.

The survey showed that Norwegians had the greatest understanding of the Nordic (Scandinavian) languages. They had almost one third better understanding of the other languages than Swedes and Danes when the points were added up. Norwegians also did best in 1976 when a similar test took place, writes Dagsavisen.

Undersøkelsen viser at både svensker og dansker synes norsk er enklest å forstå. I Sverige er det slik at de synes nynorsk er enklere å forstå enn bokmål. Trolig skyldes det at svenskene har problemer å forstå dansk, og bokmål har større innslag av dansk språk enn nynorsk. Nordmenn forstår litt bedre svensk enn dansk, viste undersøkelsen.

The survey shows that both Swedes and Danes see Norwegian as the easiest to understand. In Sweden they found Nynorsk to be easier to understand than Bokmål (note: these are the two official standards of the Norwegian language. Bokmål is used by the majority and looks a lot like written Danish). Perhaps that is because Swedes have problems understanding Danish, and Bokmål has a greater Danish element than Nynorsk. The survey showed that Norwegians understand Swedish a bit better than Danish.

Forståelsen av norsk har bare økt siden 1976, spesielt forstår svensker nordmenn bedre nå enn før.

Understanding of Norwegian has only increased since 1976, especially where Swedes understand Norwegians better now than before.

- Det at vi har blitt rike på olje og at svenske arbeidere kommer hit for å arbeide kan ha endret synet på det, sier Torp til Dagsavisen.

- The fact that we've become rich in oil and that Swedish workers come here to work may have changed the outlook on it, said Torp to Dagsavisen.

Undersøkelsen viste også at de som bor på Østlandet forstår svensk veldig godt. Trolig skyldes det at de har lett tilgang til svensk tv og at dansebandmusikk er populært på Østlandet.

The survey also showed that those living in Eastern Norway understood Swedish quite well. This is probably because they have easy access to Swedish television and that dance music is popular in Eastern Norway.

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'It was as if the Nazis had just left yesterday' - secret Nazi bunkers hidden for 50 years suddenly unearthed by the sea

Here's the part of Denmark where the discovery was made: "Varde is a municipality (Danish, kommune) in Region Syddanmark on the west coast of the Jutland peninsula in southwest Denmark. Its mayor is Gylling Håhr, a member of the Venstre (Liberal Party) political party. The main town and site of its municipal council is the town of Varde. Its area is 1255.79 km². It has a population of 50,125 (2008)."

I see this story is from August the 4th but since I just noticed it for the first time I'll pretend it's breaking news. Take a look at the entire article if you missed the news like I did. There are few things more exciting than unearthing a completely preserved bunker/house/town/temple/what have you in the 21st century when it sometimes (falsely) can feel like we've already explored every nook and cranny of the planet.

And a third expert, Tommy Cassoe, enthused: "It was like entering the heart of a pyramid with mummies all around. Wat I saw blew me away: it was as if the German soldiers had left only yesterday."

The team working with Cassoe emptied the structures within a few days of boots, undergarments, socks, military stripes, mustard and aquavit bottles, books, inkpots, stamps featuring Hitler, medicines, soda bottles, keys, hammers and other objects.

All of the objects from the shelters have been taken to the conservation centre at Oelgod museum, some 20 miles from the beach to be examined.

The centre's German curator, Gert Nebrich, judged the find 'very interesting because it is so rare.'

'"We don't expect contemporary objects like these to be so well preserved. Maybe it's because they were kept for 60 years in the cold and dark like in a big vacuum," he says, carefully showing four stamps featuring Hitler's image and the German eagle, found in one bunker.

The Germans left the bunkers in May 1945 after the Nazi surrender.

Historical records show that Gerhard Saalfed was a 17-year-old soldier with the German army when he arrived at the bunker in January 1945.

Germany surrendered on May 8 1945, but it wasn‘t until two days later that he and his fellow soldiers left their remote station.

They shut the steel doors of the bunker behind them on their remote beach and went to the nearest town ten miles away to surrender.

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