Which is closer to Kaliningrad, Germany or Russia?

Kaliningrad AKA Königsberg is an exclave of Russia, used to be a part of the German Empire, both joined to the country,

as well as separated from it. So being a Russian exclave isn't its first time being an exclave.

But which country is it closer to? On a map it looks fairly close. What is the exact distance?

There are more precise tools out there, but the distance calculator for Google Maps placed on two points that seem to be closest to each other will give us a good idea. The rules are that we are going as the crow flies, and sea borders don't count.

Let's start with Germany. We head to the northeast, get as close to the sea as possible along the Polish border, and extend the second point to that sandbar-like protrusion that I don't remember the name of.

That works out to: 357.539 km.

And Russia? The closest point is down in that corner where Russia, Latvia and Belarus share a border. It's not exactly on that confluence of the three countries, but it's close. The closest point in Kaliningrad is a part that bumps out a bit on the northeast due to a small river marking the border, and happens to be the closest part.

And the distance? It's...

...

362.122 km. Germany by a nose.

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Russia's $52 billion boost to Roscosmos, Venus Express to enter Venusian atmosphere

Russia lost another Proton rocket a few days ago, bad news for them, but they are also planning to boost the budget of Roscosmos by $52 billion (USD) by 2020.

The current budget is $5.6 billion per year, so an extra $52 billion by 2020 would be more than doubling it, an extra $8.7 billion a year. That makes me wonder whether the "has boosted the budget of its Federal Space Agency by 1.8 trillion rubles ($52 billion)" is actually a bad translation and the agency is actually planning to spend a total of $52 billion by that year, which would also be an increase.

Which means it's time to look through Russian articles on the announcement, and try to read them using both the Bulgarian I know and Google Translate. Here's one:

Общий объем бюджетного финансового обеспечения госпрограммы - 1,8 трлн. рублей. -- Total amount of budgetary financial support to the state program - 1.8 trillion rubles

Россия выделит из федерального бюджета 1,8 млн рублей на государственную программу «Космическая деятельность России на 2013-2020 годы», следует из документа, размещенного во вторник на сайте Роскосмоса. -- Russia will allocate 1.8 trillion rubles from the federal budget to the state program "Russian Space Activities from 2013 to 2020".

In any case, it's an increase. It's apparently being done mostly for modernization (kind of boring but very necessary) and lunar activities (not boring). Let's hope Russia also returns to its previous USSR backyard, Venus.



And on that note, Venus Express is running low on fuel and is going to start aerobraking at as low an altitude as possible: "We have performed previous short ‘aerodrag’ campaigns where we’ve skimmed the thin upper layers of the atmosphere at about 165 km, but we want to go deeper, perhaps as deep as 130 km, maybe even lower”. The aerobraking will take place from June 18 to July 11, and if there is enough fuel left they will take it back up into a higher orbit. Or it may simply not have enough fuel and that will be the end of the mission.

And then in a year, Akatsuki will try to enter orbit around Venus again.

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Smoking decrease by county in the US, attitudes towards Russia in breakaway provinces

Two interesting pages for the statistically inclined:

This one from the New York Times showing smoking rates by county between 1996 and 2012 in the United States. While many parts of the country still smoke heavily, I still haven't been able to find a single county where the rate has stayed the same or risen since 1996. Can you? Feel free to find out for usif you have the time to mouseover every single county in the US.

This one from the Washington Post on attitudes towards Russia in Abkhazia, South Ossetia, Transnistria. Transnistria is particularly important at the moment. I wonder though if Russia wouldn't be doing Moldova a (unintended) favour were it to annex Transnistria, which unlike Crimea has never really been under Moldovan control. Moldova only loses 12% of its area without Transnistria, and the remainder would be mostly Moldovan, Ukrainian, and Gagauz. The Russian percentage drops from 9.4 to 1.68 when Transnistria is removed, and this becomes a larger possibility.

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If Russia annexes Crimia

then it would leave a much more ethnically homogenous Ukraine in its wake. This map from the 2001 cenus shows the Ukrainian population compared to others, and in Crimea we have a large number of Russians and Crimean Tatars:

Were that to disappear the overall Russian population of the country would go from about 17% to 15%, and the Crimean Tatar population would be negligible as well.

Or take this graph, slim down the grey portion by an amount about half that of the blue sliver, and then remove that green 0.5 portion on the right.

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Link roundup, 7 July 2013

• The most recent episode of Radio Interlingua has an interview with a female interlinguist. The majority of IAL users tend to be men, so a female voice is always a bit of a novelty.
• After all the attention on Reddit and elsewhere, Mickey Mangan has begun making episodes of The Lernen to Talk Show.

• An article about using Kaapse Afrikaans in schools.
• 'Valencian and Catalan are the same language'.
• On the current situation of Spanish language teaching in the Philippines.
• Russia's planned reform of its space industry.
• SpaceX's newest Grasshopper test, this time making it to an altitude of 325 m:

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Proton-M rocket goes the wrong way

Yikes. Reminds me of footage from that disastrous Shenzhou launch in the 1990s, except that this one took place in an unpopulated area (and only carried three satellites) so nobody was hurt:



Edit: here's one more. Watch out for the loud boom at the end - you may wish to avoid headphones with this one.

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Funding for NASA vs. Roscosmos, 2009 - 2014

While we're on the subject, here's a quick graph showing the budgets for NASA and Roscosmos, including future projections to 2014. Sources are here and here (plus one other page somewhere where the 2010 Roscosmos numbers were found), and the numbers here represent one billion USD.

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Russia wants to see Russian become official or regional language in European Union

That's according to a very short article here on the Portuguese section of Voice of Russia. According to this, the full article by Rogozin, yet to be published, will be released on Wednesday. No idea where to find it online. I would like to give it a read (through Google Translate plus whatever help the Bulgarian I know gives when the translation is bad) because the argument made here (Russian is spoken by millions so it should be official) would apply to a great many other languages as well.

Edit: a helpful commenter has noted that Wednesday actually refers to a Wednesday last month, meaning that the article has already been published. You can read it here.

Russia intends to have the EU give the Russian language official status, announced Vice-Prime Minister Dmitri Rogozin today.

In his opinion, the Russian language should be recognized as an official or regional language wherever there are numerous Russophone communities, he wrote in an article to be published this Wednesday in the journal Russian Gazette. "We intend to make diligent efforts to have the Russian language obtain an official status in the European Union where millions of Russian speakers live", he wrote. With this, Russia will continue to closely monitor the compliance of rights and interests of Russians abroad.

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Link roundup for 8 February 2012

Today's links are:

--- This National Geographic article on Astana, the new capital of Kazakhstan. While I assume I would still prefer Almaty for its larger size and better climate, if this happens then I would consider living in Astana for a time:

With the core of the capital near completion, Nazarbayev has ordered his architects to explore the possibility of building another huge tent that would shelter a climate-controlled "indoor city" of 15,000 people.

I've always thought controlling a city's climate makes sense, and doing so would not necessarily require a perfect 20C temperature every day. Massive forestation for windy cities is one easy example of how a climate can be moderated, and simply connecting more areas through underground tunnels is an easy way to 'paraterraform' parts of them. There are quite a few examples of subway stations that are connected by underground malls, for example.

--- If you speak Portuguese and want to test your knowledge of Spanish false cognates, see here: http://noticias.terra.com.br/educacao/quiz/teste-seus-conhecimentos-sobre-falsos-cognatos-em-espanhol

--- The Bulgarian Wikipedia is having a "one new article a day" campaign from 1 to 15 March:

„1 нова статия“ — между 1 и 15 март 2012 г. ще се проведе инициативата „1 нова статия“. Целта на проекта е с общи усилия, в рамките на две седмици, Българската Уикипедия да се разшири значително. Начинът, по който това ще стане, е като всеки, който посети БГ Уикипедията между 1 и 15 март, напише по една нова статия. За повече информация и все още липсващи статии в Българската Уикипедия, посетете страницата на инициативата.

The gist of the campaign is this: if you visit the Bulgarian Wikipedia between those dates, please write a new page. The current number of articles is 126,000+, and shouldn't be too different in three weeks.

--- Barack Obama is returning $200,000 of campaign donations, a practice that, while well-intentioned, I wish politicians of all stripes would do away with. Passively receiving donations and soliciting donations are two different things, and a politician who campaigns on Position A should not be made to feel that they have to return donations from anyone who believes in Position B, has committed a crime, or anything else. Once money has switched hands it is the person who receives the donation who may now use it as he or she sees fit. If a politician does not believe in the views of someone they have received a donation from, why give it back so that they can make use of it again? Keep it and use it for good.

--- Vladimir Putin wrote an editorial for the Washington Post today about democracy.

--- Quebec solidaire sees French as a central priority, but not their primary one.

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20% of South Karelian police are learning Russian

From Voice of Russia here (found it on the Portuguese version of the site), referencing a report from the Finnish YLE:

According to the television agency YLE, Finnish police on the Russian border are beginning to learn the language of their neighbors. There are 40 policemen in the courses, which represents 20% of the personnel of the Police Department of South Karelia. The interest in the Russian language has obviously been caused by the influx of tourists, and may prove helpful in extending into local rescue services.

View Larger Map

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Euronews on Portuguese youth leaving the country, voting Communist in Vladivostok

One interesting video and one article from Euronews to mention today:

1 - A video of ten minutes in length here in Portuguese and here in English (and for other languages, just change the language in the menu bar above) about Portuguese youth leaving the country for opportunities in other countries, in particular those that speak Portuguese such as Angola and Brazil. I recently wrote about how Angola's economy is helping Portuguese citizens find work abroad, so this is a nice complement to the previous post. In order to accentuate the video's theme it is replete with clip after clip of people standing in lines looking for work, and Portugal ends up looking like a pretty depressing place to be in this video.

2 - an article here on Vladivostok's voting communist in the recent Russian elections (once again, you can change the language if you want). Anything on Vladivostok is of particular interest to me since it is the only real major Russian city near Japan and Korea, and in spite of being located nearby it is not that easy to get to: a plane ticket to Vladivostok from Seoul for example costs about $800, about three times what it costs to get to somewhere like Japan or Taiwan. Flights also take place only once, or maybe twice a week. In Seoul it is easy to forget that Russia is just an hour away by plane, though the port city of Busan (Korea's second-largest city) has a much larger number of Russian sailors.

View Larger Map

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Russia may require working immigrants to prove their fluency in Russian

Not much detail from this article in Spanish - anyone have further knowledge on this bill?

The Lower House of the Russian Parliament has introduced a bill that requires immigrants to confirm their knowledge of the Russian language, if they intend to work in public services and trade.

If approved, immigrants would have to present a document certifying their fluency in Russian. The certificate could be one obtained at secondary schools in CIS countries, or a certificate that proves that the student has taken a state test of the Russian language.

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Norwegian student council wants students to get degrees in BRIC countries for free

From here in Norwegian:

Norwegian student council wants to give degrees for free if they are done in emerging countries, but faces opposition from the Ministry of Education, NSO, and NTNU. The proposal was adopted by the Student Council in a discussion meeting on 6 October. "By growing economies we mean all economies that are experiencing great growth. At the present time we are talking about BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China) but in the long term it can include other countries with high growth", said director Per Martin Sandtrøen. According to ANSA (Association of Norwegian Students Abroad) there are 300 Norwegian students studying in China. Of these only 25 are getting an entire bachelor or master's degree, a number that Sandtrøen believes to be too low. "All the risk is on the students the way things work now. Taking an entire degree in these countries means that a person must support oneself for the entire first year, without any financial support...To work in the future in Norway we must educate students that know the language and conditions in these countries. The economic benefits would be far greater than what it would cost to educate them." he said.

Opposition to the idea seems to have more to do with implementation than anything else: the Ministry of Education and others don't believe it's an easy task to educate Norwegian students in countries that don't offer much education in English and don't think students would be prepared to learn in other languages by the time they get there either, and there is also difficulty in finding places that meet Norwegian education requirements.

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Looks like the Russia - Alaska highway may be good to go by 2030

Great news - it looks like a the Russian side of the project to link Russia with Alaska and therefore the rest of North America has been approved, with the Russian part to consist of 5,000 km of road and then a 100 km tunnel under the strait. Not sure whether the $100 billion estimated cost is only about the road or includes the tunnel, and whether the tunnel would be jointly financed by Russia and the US (assuming the US decides to go ahead with its part of the project too).

So what will the world look like then? According to future GDP estimates, we'll see the following change over that time among the countries closest to this rail link:

US: $15 trillion ---- $23 trillion
Russia: $1.5 trillion ---- $4.3 trillion
China: $5.8 trillion ---- $34.3 trillion
Japan: $5.4 trillion ---- $5.8 trillion
Korea: $1 trillion ---- $2.2 trillion

So this would be a link to quite a different market than that found in 2011.

Of course, there is no guarantee that the situation will not drastically change by then: North and South Korea is an obvious example as there is almost no possible way the North will have the same leader by then - the already fairly unhealthy Kim Jong-il would be almost 90.


While we're still on the subject of Russia, another Korean article I found yesterday - this article is about how interest in other languages besides the three Koreans usually study (English, Japanese, Chinese) is increasing, with more interest in Spanish, French and Russian. The reason given is that the first three are already fairly saturated with a hagwon (school) to be found anywhere to learn them, while there is a very small number of schools that teach the other three in comparison with demand.

No exact numbers are given, but the article gives the example of a hagwon that teaches Russian, German and Arabic along with the usual three, and has seen a lot of businessmen coming to learn these languages.

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Busan wants Russian medical tourists from Vladivostok.

Found an article in Korean on medical tourism in Busan from Vladivostok, Russia.

First some background: Busan is Korea's second-largest city, and has a relatively higher number of both Japanese and Russian people than the capital Seoul. A glance at the map shows why this is the case:


View Larger Map

Busan is a big port city located right in the middle of the easiest trade route between the far east of Russia, Japan, and China. Meanwhile Seoul, though technically a port city if you include Incheon, is quite out of the way.

And as for Vladivostok: it's Russia's largest city in the far east. Few people know that it exists though since flights there are super expensive and it has quite the reputation for high crime.

Now to the articles:

Article 1 explains how the Busan city government is putting up 6 x 3 metre billboards in the city of Vladivostok promoting medical tourism. The billboards are to say something to the effect of "come visit the health care Mecca of Busan" in Russian and English.

The article ends with some numbers: of the 5,921 patients who came to Busan from abroad, 28.9% (1,709) of them were Russian.

Health care, of course, usually means plastic surgery. Sometimes also cheaper health care, though I'm not sure how much general health care is in Vladivostok.

Their site promoting medical tourism is this one, and besides Korean it's in English, Japanese, Chinese, and Russian.

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NASA astronauts now need to learn Russian?

That's according to this article in Russian. Nothing really controversial or uncommon about this - as far as I know anyone going to space by Soyuz ends up learning some. It mentions that the Italian astronaut Roberto Vittori was able to bring his Russian up to the required level in eight months.

A page here gives his thoughts during the training:

"Ho fatto molti progressi. E' stato difficile per me all'inizio. I tempi standard dell'ESA sono di un corso di 300 ore di Russo prima di un corso intensivo di sei mesi. Ma a causa dei cambiamenti di programma io ho avuto poche ore a disposizione. Ho avuto molte difficoltà, specialmente all'inizio, ma ora è passata. Non ho più bisogno dell'interprete."

"I've made a lot of progress. It was difficult for me in the beginning. In the standard ESA program (think that means program) there's a 300-hour intensive Russian course that takes place over six months. But because of a change in the program I had few hours available. I had a lot of difficulty especially in the beginning, but that's done now. I don't need interpretation anymore.


Links to official info on this are welcome.

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Sochi Olympic stamps to be in six languages.

This article in Norwegian from Voice of Russia says that the Olympic stamps for the Winter Olympics in Sochi will be in six languages: Russian, English, French, German, Spanish, and Chinese, and one stamp costs 15-30 rubles or 0.5 - 1 dollars. Apparently this is the largest number of languages to be included on Olympic stamps.

One other note about the site itself: in some of its many languages you can find audio articles with matching text, which is good for relatively uncommon languages like Czech. See this article for example.

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YouTube has a German documentary on Kaliningrad / Königsberg

Well well, look what has recently been uploaded to YouTube!



It's a five-part (on YouTube that is) documentary on Kaliningrad, originally known as Königsberg. Unfortunately it has no English subtitles and is either in German or Russian with German subtitles - maybe some English here and there too, as I have yet to watch it. I found out about the video after visiting here for the first time in a while.

While still woefully uninformed on the region, I still imagine a solution to its isolation to be independence with a lot of Russian aid, with the end goal being a state within the EU that speaks Russian along with a certain amount of revived Prussian and maybe a smattering of German. If Russia were to agree on independence and a lot of funding for the new state, there is no reason why it wouldn't be an extremely Russia-friendly country through which Russian would become an official language of the EU for the first time. It would be a kind of Macau in the role it could play as a bridge between two large groups (Macau as a bridge between Portuguese countries and China, Kaliningrad/Königsberg as a bridge between Russia and the EU) and eventual visa-free travel to and from the EU would make it a prime destination for this. A German/French/Polish/etc. company that wants to expand into Russia would simply go there to set up a branch office and wouldn't have to worry about navigating Russian bureaucracy to do so.

Yes, I know that's not going to happen. It's another one of those "if I were king of the world" hypotheticals.

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Spanish is the fourth-most studied language in Russia

That's according to this article in Spanish.

The study "Spanish in Russia" takes a look at diverse facets of the growing presence of the Spanish language in Russia. It shows it to be one of the most spoken foreign languages in Russia and the fourth-most studied after English, French, and German. More than 100,000 people say that they can communicate in Spanish, and there are 21 Spanish departments in universities in 14 Russian cities.

And of course 2009 was particularly interesting as it was the year RT launched a Spanish-language channel, one that is still going strong today. Here again are the first few minutes after it went live.

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Language news from mid-February 2011 - Galician magazine uses Portuguese orthographic accord, Chinese in Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha...

Busy busy! We'll be on a plane in just a few days. Here are a few articles on languages from the past few days.

An article from here in Portuguese on a Galician journal that now uses the Portuguese orthographic accord, signed in 1990 and finally ratified by Portuguese-speaking countries including Portugal itself.

One here in Spanish on demand for Chinese at the Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha surpassing expectations.

Jojo sucht das Glück, the telenovela for German language students, is done as of this week with all 32 episodes online. Don't tell me how it ends as I've only seen up to episode 13.

Portuguese article on Georgia's decision to learn English instead of Russian.

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