It’s honestly kind of wild to not pick France in general, they’re amazing at trains

If I wasn’t being mean about my boss beforehand, I would most definitely start being mean after he subjected me to a polygraph about it

I was greatly surprised when I learned that the country is named after the tree and not the other way around

“Scotland” is very literal. It’s the land of the Scots

In Scottish Gaelic - never the language of the whole area of the modern day country and a very small minority nowadays, but nonetheless a language that is uniquely Scottish and very influential on our history - it’s Alba. This one is kind of interesting, because it originally meant the entire island of Great Britain. “Scotland” in Scottish Gaelic therefore sort of means “Scotland, England, and Wales”

I have a personal suspicion - while recognising that I am by no means an expert on the topic and have no real evidence - that that origin story is a reflection of the Proto-Indo-European migrations as viewed through a lens of contact with Rome. The PIE homeland was roughly modern day Ukraine. When Romans show up in Britain and talk to the locals, their empire would have been the first society to have some knowledge of that area that Britons or Gaels had met in… well, forever. If they successfully described the area of the PIE homeland, a Roman with a good knowledge of the geography of the empire and its surroundings during the period of Roman arrival in the isles would say that they were describing Scythia

Oh, that is quite interesting. I’d hazard a guess it’s somewhere east of the mountains, so probably somewhere around Perth?

Yeah, I totally agree on the food situation unfortunately. There’s a Ghanaian lady that shows up at a farmer’s market near-ish me once a month and I love getting her jollof rice. I mostly just accept that if I want something out of the ordinary for this place, I need to make it myself

That’s totally fair! I am Scottish myself and don’t know a lot about Canada’s geography beyond “big”, “often cold”, and “lots of forest”, so I have no idea if those Scottish place names are concentrated in specific areas, not to mention what the chances of both versions being interesting to visit. Banff is probably the first example that comes to mind, but the Canadian one isn’t in BC and the Scottish one is just a pretty little seaside town in Aberdeenshire so not exactly a destination in its own right unless you’re already nearby

Though, every time I go to the Highlands I’m struck by just how very much it looks like BC…just a wee bit more wee…

You may already know this, but the Scottish highlands actually were formed when Canada and Britain collided! The wrong side of Canada, but still

Regardless, I hope you’re enjoying being here

Nutomic thinks that trans people are a bourgeois conspiracy, so I maybe wouldn’t let them off the hook that easily

Seeing as Scotland and Canada share a lot of place names, what’s your favourite place that you’ve been to both the Scottish and Canadian versions of? (Nova Scotia does not count)

He addresses that directly. He says that there’s absolutely no point in telling competitors to take fewer risks if risky behaviour is faster, so you need to regulate for safety

God that scene burns itself into your brain

Probably. The lettering is also not consistent and the shadows are going in the wrong direction

This is libel rather than slander, since it is written and not verbal. But even then, it’s not libel either. To be libel (or slander) against a public figure, it has to be factually untrue and Patterson would have to either know that it was untrue or act with disregard for the truth. He’s allowed to state his opinion - which he clearly stated as his opinion - that Mamdani isn’t a good fit for the position. We can think that Patterson is wrong about that, but he’s only wrong (and, in my opinion, strategically foolish), not libellous

The American one seems to match this, which has “National Climatic Data Center’s U.S. Stations 1961-1990 Monthly Normals for the Atypical Climate Elements” as its source.

The European one seems to be from this Wikimedia Commons user, but they never specified their source beyond “according to national data”

Strictly speaking, and to take a joke way too seriously, the shitty copper actually wasn’t even from Mesopotamia. Ea-Nasir was part of a guild that imported stuff from Dilmun, which was centred on modern day Bahrain. Ea-Nasir was basically running bronze age Temu

I appreciate the reminder of this, I had been meaning to try the recipe and completely forgot

Oh, interesting! I suppose that makes sense, given that humans have been drinking beer for millennia longer than we’ve been writing. The first society to start writing probably would talk about beer a fair bit. I’ve seen prayers about and recipes for beer before (sometimes the same text), but not the one you described

Semi-related: when I went to have a look for texts about drunkenness, I learned about the Dialogue of Two Scribes. It’s amazing. It’s literally just 130+ lines of back-and-forth insults

They’re actually not bad for space! I’m about 1.9m / 6’3", and while I’m not that heavily-built I’m definitely not unusually slim. It wasn’t roomy for sure, but I fit just fine. The lack of a roof did at least mean that headroom wasn’t a concern

I did once have to back out of a purchase of a second gen Toyota MR2 because I was too tall. That was a deeply disappointing day

I’m in the UK where people do have an unfortunate obsession with SUVs but we mostly don’t have the really enormous American ones. Since our roads tend to be significantly narrower than American ones - especially in rural areas and older towns - when you do see one of those big trucks like a Hummer or something they just look like they got lost and are now stuck

We know it’s not the entire extent because we also have a bunch of their literature and history in cuneiform. We even have some jokes! Although none of the ones I have read really survive the translation and time gap… at all. However, stuff like agricultural records are the bulk of it by the numbers simply because that was the stuff that was useful to ordinary people day to day