Yep, the closest I can get with my own oven is 300 celsius with a pizza stone. At that point the heating elements are on pretty much constantly. It leads to a relatively good crust, but still isn’t as good as a proper pizza oven. I’ve seen some normal electric ovens that go up to 350 here, which could be enough to make up the difference.

The oven is also clearly not meant to be used like this on the daily. Parts of the oven exterior get to around 200 degress celsius when baking multiple pizzas.

While it’s true that we’ve had improved yields in the short term in e.g. Finland (this year has been quite good for farming), suitable temperatures aren’t really enough to make creating a new bread basket in the arctic feasible. Lot of the arctic area doesn’t get enough rainfall in the summer to be proper farmland, especially the vast areas of land in Russia. We’re lacking the predatory insects that would keep the pests in check, and overall the ecosystem is very poorly protected against high temperatures.

This year is also anomalous in being somewhat normal a summer in terms of temperature and rainfall for us. Previous two were very dry, to the point of causing issues for farmers. We’re not necessarily suffering from a drought over here, as opposed to e.g. Mediterranean Europe, but are still seeing abnormally low water levels and less snowfall than usual.

The arctic also doesn’t have a lot of soil that’s suitable for farming, were the weather to warm up. Much of the soil is sand and peatland, covered with a thin layer of moss or lichen. There really aren’t a lot of nutrients available; Finland has a long history of trying to clear fields on swamps as well as planting forests on a drained swamp. Neither have typically worked that well, as drained swamps are a difficult growing medium for most crops and trees. Nowadays we see the swamp as an increasingly more important thing as itself, providing a good carbon sink and improving water quality in the lakes by absorbing excess nutrients and humus.

The only real sustainable solution is, apart for pushing for renewables even harder, trying to decrease the consumption of meat and other unnecessary use of farmland. We can relatively easily absorb a 50-80 % reduction in farming yields globally if we were to get rid of most livestock and bioethanol/biodiesel from edible crops. Another thing is that in developed countries people are far too picky in terms of what they’re willing to eat. As an example, around here we’re actively trying to get people to eat more freshwater fish, as we have an issue with there being too much nutrients in the lakes, and fishing is one of the easiest way to reduce the amount of nutrients in water. Good fish like smelt, roach, ide and bream are often through to be “trash fish” as they can be difficult to prepare (or can smell weird (smelt), can taste of mud at the wrong season (roach)). They’re all very good when prepared correctly and caught at a correct time, though. Nowadays you can get them in a can as a more sustainable alternative to canned tuna, and those have been selling quite well AFAIK.

Most likely is. Many open source projects have a joke as a name, often containing some form of innuendo or a double meaning. Helps in maintaining the free nature of the tool (corporations don’t want anything to do with it) as well as lower expectations on professionalism. Plus it’s funny, especially if it’s an in-joke of a niche language.

On the topic of “runk”, it’s also been loaned from Swedish to Finnish as runkata, or to runk = to jerk off. The actual act of it would be runkkaus or runkkaaminen. Can also be encountered in the form runkkari, aka a wanker (I’d assume Swedish had a matching equivalent). So the joke works in Finnish as well.

And by some miracle, I wouldn’t be surprised if the Panzer II felt more spacious inside. It’s baffling how cramped modern SUVs and especially crossovers are compared to their external size.

Our relatively small VW ID.3 is more spacious inside than most small-to-mid crossovers in Europe (e.g. Renault Kadjar/Nissan Qashqai, Volvo XC40 etc.). It’s still a lot smaller in external dimensions, and actually fits to parking spots.

Tomorrow: Georgian script and Ogham.

Here my European brain was thinking the two sets of counting and alphabet meant two counting in two different languages and systems and listing two different alphabets like Cyrillic and Greek…

I should learn to read things through before jumping to conclusions.

True, the responsibility for safe lane change lays on the driver who is changing lanes. However, any sensible country also prohibits obstruction of a lane change, i.e. you can get fined if you don’t hold enough distance to the driver in front of you to allow merging, don’t make room for the person with the signal on in reasonable time or if you deliberately close the gap so the other person can’t change lanes.

That kind of cooperation is mandatory for good traffic flow and properly made laws try to ensure that. Turning signal should result in people noticing you, and letting you safely switch lanes. Too often people get into some vigilante-mode because they see the other driver skipping in line or something similar.

Merging is another story. Merging traffic should explicitly yield to all traffic already on the highway, similarly to how it works in a roundabout. This prevents people merging on a highway that’s over its capacity, so the traffic clears quicker. It means that traffic should queue on the ramp until it’s safe to merge, indefinitely if necessary. Mathematically it makes sense, but goes against intuition.

Some municipalities have tried out metered entry on highways, that block turning onto the on-ramp altogether if the level of congestion is too high. Some trials have already ended due to the perceived injustice as well, as people already on the highway are typically from out of the city, and thus preventing those living closer from merging onto it. Personally I think if you’re close enough to complain about that you should be in public transit range of the population center, and complaining more about the lack of alternatives to driving.