Skua

You're well on your way to effectively embargoing yourselves by the looks of it

Hey, this is me being dramatic about stars. I'm just doing it in the opposite direction because I think it's amazing that so many people solved so many problems solely because we looked up and wanted to understand

Why would a species who barely ever watch the stars anymore

This article is literally about the star-watching done with the enormous telescope that we built and sent to space specifically so that we could watch the stars better

It does seem like it. A lot of the details of the map in the full-size image are a bit screwy in that way that AI does it. Denmark appears to have merged a bunch of its islands together, Pembrokeshire in Wales has migrated northward, and Stranraer in Scotland has sunk beneath the waves

Coordinate with China on this shit. The EU and China may have their differences, but they have a common goal here and together they substantially outweigh the US

They basically are permanent if his alternative is the EU buying the entire GDP of Finland in extra LNG every year

It's super interesting that they're not social animals either. So much of our brainpower goes towards complex social bonds and effective cooperation, whereas octopuses generally just do not care about that stuff

America was about to have the Dust Bowl and China a drought that caused a massive famine, so we definitely had some localised ecological collapse

Since the kW part can cancel out, the resulting kWh/kWp value is basically measured in hours. There are 8,766 hours in a year and half of those are at night, so these numbers would make sense if you think of them as "this is how many hours of peak production equivalent you will actually get each year". You're in the Sahara, you get the equivalent of 2,400 hours of peak production. You're in Finland, you get the equivalent of 1,000 hours. If it actually magically ran at the peak production value all year 24/7, you get 8,766.

Whatever you want to call the set of traits that makes humans so good at manipulating the world, surely that set is still an interesting and worthwhile thing to study? It does frame every experience any of us ever has, after all. It seems notable to me that the birds that are amongst our closest peers in that specific set of traits seem to have gotten there by a completely separate path. I'd like to understand how we wound up thinking the way we do, anyway.

I'd expect it's a Cold War thing. When Germany (or West Germany, at the time) was concerned that it could be the frontline of WW3 at any moment, it probably wanted somewhere to keep its gold reserves that wouldn't be captured. The current German gold reserve is the second largest of any in the world, so on the assumption that at least most of that was from West Germany then it'd be a huge thing to capture in the event of war. If it could magically all be sold at the current London gold fix price, it'd be worth well over 300 billion USD