Iceland Raises Volcano Aviation Alert Again 38
An anonymous reader writes Iceland's authorities have raised an aviation warning for a region close to the Bardarbunga volcano after a small fissure eruption in the area. The eruption began around 0600 GMT prompting the Icelandic Met Office to raise the aviation warning code to red for the Bardarbunga/Holuhraun area, the Department of Civil Protection and Emergency Management said in a statement. The country's meteorological agency described the eruption as a "very calm lava eruption and can hardly be seen on seismometers."
Doesn't affect just people flying to/from Iceland (Score:3, Informative)
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In light of the incidents with Eyjafjallajökull and Bardarbunga, I wonder if it would be possible to issue trade embargos on words longer than 10 characters to limit the prevalence of these volcanoes.
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Or for an English example volcano, "Yellowstone" (11 letters).
To an Icelandic speaker who knows the component words, it's obvious where they split. Eyja (of islands) Fjalla (of mountains) Jökull (glacier), easy as pie. Their brain automatically cues into the "a"s as context clues for splits to make it even easier.
But picture a person who doesn't speak English at all who sees yellowstone. So they don't know the word "yellow" and they don't know the word "stone". Nor do they know what letter clusters are
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The newest eruption is at Holuhraun, which is only 9 letters. And if it gets all the way to Askja, that's an easy 5 ;)
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"Putin" is less than 10 letters long.
GMT? (Score:1)
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That's because the Washington Post, like the Associated Press, NASA and so many other organizations, still thinks Imperial and British, and likely both.
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No, I would have have a federal judge rule that the volcano must stop. Look at all the US-made aircraft that would be affected if the eruption is allowed to continue.
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All for nothing? [softpedia.com]
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The problem was that engine manufacturers hadn't specified levels of airborne ash below which it
Iceland Raises Volcano Aviation Alert Again (Score:5, Funny)
Frankly, I'm shocked that Iceland extends pilots licenses to volcanoes. That seems like a terrible idea.
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Hey now, who doesn't want to see two miles of exploding doom flying their way.
The volcano could affect the weather! (Score:2)
We had an ICE-COLD 2010 winter with record breaking low temperatures that year. I'd rather not have another wolf-winter.
Guess it's not my call.
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Barak should get real houked up and sign an Executive Order on Deportation and deport himself to Kenya.
Only if.. But as bad as BHOS (Barack Hussien Obama Soetero) is, you REALLY don't want Joe Biden as Pres.... They come as a matched
set..
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The Met Office's decisions have all been perfectly cogent, it's only the poor reporting that's led to confusion from lay people.
In the first case there were all signs of an eruption under the glacier. They issued an alert. Later there were no signs on the surface, so they removed it. Later on, glacial subsidence proved that an eruption had indeed taken place, but stopped. In both cases, correct behavior on their part.
Then there was the 1st Holuhraun eruption. When an eruption begins, theres no way to know h
Bah, character-set ignorance. (Score:2, Informative)
I feel embarrassed every time I see an English-language site render this as "Bardarbunga", when that "d" should be "th". Yes, the letter "eth" looks like a lowercase d with a crossbar and erectile dysfunction, but it's pronounced like "th".
They should render the a-with-diacritic as "au", too. (Maybe even take the "g" to a "k".) But while there's a long and stupid tradition of dropping diacritics without rewriting the vowel, there's no damn excuse for getting it this badly wrong when you've got to replace a
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Baurtharbunka is a better transliteration.
Re:Bah, character-set ignorance. (Score:4, Interesting)
This is wrong on all counts. It is very much traditional for us Icelanders (yes I'm from Iceland) to transliterate eth (ð) as d and accented characters like á without the accent.
Th is only used to transliterate the thorn (which Slashdot refuses to render).
What is annoying is when the eth is transliterated as o. I have one in my last name and I've had trouble with checking in to flights booked via Expedia due to this nonsense.
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Mér finnst samt pirrandi THegar fólk gerir THetta. THað er ófagmannlegt - Washington Post er mikil fréttasíða, ekki eitthvað skrifað á Facebook. :P
If it's so reasonable to "transliterate foreign proper names", then why is it that they only seem to do it with countries like Iceland? They don't usually transliterate proper names from other countries - for example, German (Düsseldorf) or [washingtonpost.com] France (Équipe FLN) [washingtonpost.com], just to pick a few quick examples.
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I feel embarrassed every time I see an English-language site render this as "Bardarbunga", when that "d" should be "th". Yes, the letter "eth" looks like a lowercase d with a crossbar and erectile dysfunction, but it's pronounced like "th".
The reason is because the Icelandic alphabet has two different letters that produce a sound that could be written "th" in English. The letter eth (Ð or ð) is a voiced "th", like in "they" or "this"; whereas the letter thorn (Wikipedia link [wikipedia.org], since Slashdot won't render it) is unvoiced, like in "thistle" or "theater". By convention, eth is transliterated as "d", whereas thorn is transliterated as "th". It does make some sense, as "d" is a voiced consonant, so that in addition to the look being s
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Well, cool. It always takes some of the sting out of being wrong when I learn interesting things from the correction. Thanks!
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The character you have in mind is 'thorn'. If we had Unicode, betcha we could do one.
Volcanic eruption streaming! (Score:1)