Under Pressure: Transporting and Storing Military Nuclear Waste

A French research and production facility for military nuclear weapons put out a call for tender for 4000 pressure cookers for transporting and storing nuclear waste in them. The operator of the nuclear facility says pressure cookers are “well suited” for this task where “a few hundred grams” of material in cylinders “10 cm in height and 2cm in diameter” will be first put in “radiation-proof cases” and then stacked into low cost containers. The cookers themselves will be stored in a bunker on-site as “this kind of container is not certified for transportation outside of the facility.”

Sources: Call for tender (French) Der Spiegel (German) FeFe (German)

Statt kausal-logischer Ermittlungsarbeit, computergestützte Wahrsagerei

Die Süddeutsche stellt sich die Frage “warum demokratische Regierungen so große Angst vor ihren Bevölkerungen haben” … und beantwortet sie eigentlich nicht. :(Dem Artikel kann man dennoch etwas Gutes abgewinnen, da die Begründungen für die Datensammelwut von Behörden und Geheimdiensten und ihr tatsächlicher Nutzen zur Sprache kommen, die im folgenden Zitat gut zusammengefasst sind:

Statt kausal-logischer Ermittlungsarbeit betreibt man eher computergestützte Wahrsagerei, der man umso mehr glaubt, je mehr Daten, Profile, Verhaltensmuster in der Datenbank lagern.

A Feast For Language Geeks

My brother just gave me a great present for ‘Eid: he sent me a link to the Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center’s (DLIFLC) Language Survival Kits. It’s unsurprisingly a little heavy on the vocabulary necessary/useful for foreign occupants (yay, USA!) … but it’s still a lot of fun. 😀

They provide the same set of sentences in several dozen languages with translations, transliterations and native writing. To top it off they have audio samples for unfamiliar sounds in each language and with a native speaker saying the sentences out loud and then saying them slow in order for you to repeat them … awesome! 😀

Interesting omissions from the list are German and South Korean, while the list even contains separate entries for several regional dialects of Arabic, Spanish, Portuguese, Pashto, etc. … o.O