Skua

The process of making it involves cooking limestone until the carbon dioxide comes out, basically. Limestone is CaCO3 (one calcium, one carbon, three oxygen). Cement requires lime, which is CaO (one calcium, one oxygen). That leaves a C and two O, which stick together on the way out

Pluto being too small isn’t actually the grounds on which it got demoted. The size requirement is just being massive enough to reach hydrostatic equilibrium - that is, be heavy enough that it’s round. Pluto does meet this one

The one it fails is clearing its orbit. This basically means being much heavier than everything else in the same orbit. Be gravitationally in charge of your orbit. The other eight are all hundreds if not thousands of times heavier than everything else in their orbit (not including moons, since they’re gravitationally bound to the planet anyway), whereas Pluto is less than a tenth of the total mass in its own orbit. Ceres is actually more gravitationally dominant over its orbit than that, although still nowhere near the eight planets.

This one sounds a bit weird at first, but I kinda like how it has such a massive delineation between the things we instinctively think of as planets and everything else.

Never mind the depths I was already on edge when I met the fucking crashfish

It’s kind of a shitty name to insist upon given our history with Ireland though, isn’t it? Like, regardless of what it was called, we can call the archipelago “the British and Irish Isles” or something if we want to.

Personally I reckon we should call it Maughold’s Isles. “British and Irish Isles” is fine, if a little wordy. “Islands of the North Atlantic” is one I see floated every so often, but it’s miserably generic and even longer. So I suggest we use the patron saint of the Isle of Man. It’s in between Britain and Ireland and technically not part of the UK. Maughold himself was a pirate who tried to play a practical joke on St Patrick, so he’s a bit of a scoundrel, and it’s exactly the kind of silly trivia that we like so much here

Oh neat, I have a book by the creator of this but had no idea about their website

I suspect that this might be a tactic intended for the domestic audience. The current government is extremely unlikely to be in power a week from now, and might be doing this just to force the next government to either follow through or retract it

Concrete is something like a tenth of humanity’s total CO2 emissions, so if this is something that lets us use less concrete then that’s actually great

Power word: erektiohäiriö

Power word: impotence

Depends on what’s on offer in the steam sale! Although I did pick up the Myst remaster, so I might just be having a crack at that

For only 7.99 you can get enough store points to open three Crates of Eden, each of which has a chance to give you four seconds of total invisibility or two silent takedowns!

Deadnaming is okay when you’re doing it to mercenary companies

It’s actually in England, although funnily enough the part of England it’s in is called Cumbria, which has the same origin as the Welsh for Wales “Cymru”. So it’s sort of in Wales, just not the Wales that we call Wales in English.

Anyway it’s Old English torr, Middle Welsh penn, and Danish hoh. And like many British place names the pronunciation is not what you would expect at all at first glance. It’s “tra-pen-uh”

The map has south at the top. Look in the bottom right quarter and you can see the Mediterranean, and the islands at the bottom right edge are Britain and Ireland

Why is the continent described as “west of the Old World” when it’s drawn exactly where the southern half of Africa actually is? I can’t work out why he would think it’s separated from the rest of Africa, but that definitely looks like Tanzania and Mozambique to me

That is a very strange article. The headline is “How Boris Johnson Sabotaged Ukraine Russia Peace Deal In April” and the bulk of it is about how a former US National Security Council officer didn’t say that.

Frankly the NYT one seems a lot more convincing to me. That addition to the security guarantee clause is obviously completely unworkable.

Apologies, I was using “NATO troops” as a shorthand for the large number of countries involved rather than the specific command structure. You are right to bring that up

Maybe find an article that says that then. The one you linked says that yes, they were close to an agreement, but at the last minute Russia inserted a clause that was a dealbreaker

What that link actually says:

To the Ukrainians’ dismay, there was a crucial departure from what Ukrainian negotiators said was discussed in Istanbul. Russia inserted a clause saying that all guarantor states, including Russia, had to approve the response if Ukraine were attacked. In effect, Moscow could invade Ukraine again and then veto any military intervention on Ukraine’s behalf — a seemingly absurd condition that Kyiv quickly identified as a dealbreaker. Russia tried to secure a veto on Ukraine’s security guarantees by inserting a clause requiring unanimous consent.

With that change, a member of the Ukrainian negotiating team said, “we had no interest in continuing the talks.”

Under this interpretation, the headline could then read “New Polling Shows Significant Ukrainian Support for War to End the War”