Ahh, thanks! My knowledge of the region isn’t great, I just remembered that story off hand - and of course, that’s the story as told by the British colonial administration too

Ahh fuck, stuff being published by them was usually a decent sign that it’d be interesting in some way. Best of luck to the actual team, I hope they can put something new together

It definitely is

I think part of the problem is the volume of it that is just completely uninteresting. You absolutely can do cool stuff with, I agree. It just seems like most people aren’t. In the same way that Duchamp managed to do something pretty cool with Fountain, but I would not give the slightest hint of a damn about a collection of other readymade art made in the same quantity and with the same thought as AI outputs

I kind of like the argument that Ecuador’s Chimborazo is the tallest on the basis that it’s the farthest point of Earth from the centre of the Earth

Funnily enough, the man it was named after was against calling it that. It came about because the Tibetans and Nepalis on either side of the mountain used different names for it (Qomolangma and Sagarmatha respectively), so British surveyors concluded that there was no accepted name to put on a map and they would simply give it a new one. In English. George Everest, the prior top British surveyor in India, objected on the grounds that his name couldn’t be written easily in Hindi, but the Royal Geographic Society ignored him and the used it anyway

It could well be a consequence of how recently it became a state. There’s a similar situation in the UK where elections for the entire country use FPTP but elections for the devolved parliaments (Northern Ireland in 1973, Scotland in 1999, and Wales also in 1999) use other better options . Maybe seeing FPTP in action for a long time just turns you against it.

Eckert IV is mine, which is quite similar visually. It has the upside of being equal-area, but the downside of squashing the poles a bit more. Sadly both of us suffer the injustice of being excluded from that one xkcd comic

This is 100% amateur guesswork, but maybe the geography is part of the answer here? Norway is a bunch of extremely jagged coastline opening on to the fairly cold and empty North Sea, and most of the rest of it is equally jagged mountains, so it was probably easy for communities to be relatively isolated most of the time and therefore wind up speaking a little differently to the guys in the next fjord over. The Maghreb, on the other hand, is right on the Mediterranean, which has been one of humanity’s busiest and most travelled areas for thousands of years

Right, but my point is OP is criticising the community or its mods for not wanting to interact with everyone and then not wanting to interact with everyone themselves

I personally think blocking and banning is fine in sensible amounts. Sometimes someone is just making your experience worse and bringing nothing to the table for you. I’m interested to hear OP’s thoughts on what looks a bit hypocritical to me

OP has actually posted an update that (indirectly) explains it! https://sopuli.xyz/pictrs/image/f2a9b56e-f915-4932-a35a-d4c3a6e472c9.webp

The equator is actually the less-salty bit in between the two high-salt bands. You’ll see the note that says that the less saline areas around the equator are the tropical latitudes that get a lot of rainfall. Because the equator is the most consistently-warm latitude, a lot of water evaporates there and is carried upwards, then falls back down as rain. That air can’t keep going up forever though, so it spills out to the north and south. By this point the water has fallen out of it and it has cooled, so it sinks back down and creates dry areas either side of the equator. We can see this as the two yellow bands on the map, and you’ll notice that the land in line with those is where we see deserts like the Sahara, the Kalahari, Arabian desert, and central Australia. And also lots of salt at the surface of the ocean, apparently, because there’s no rain falling on it.

The Nile’s average volume is not actually all that big. The Amazon puts more than 70 times as much water into the ocean, apparently. Although the Amazon is quite an outlier in that regard, being about as big as the 2nd through to 7th largest combined

Nothing. There were far more dimensions in the original data and the author asked the computer to squash that down into two axes in whatever way preserved groupings

Jesus, that’s literally a credit card rate

€6,000 is, unfortunately, well into the territory of competing with used cars. It absolutely needs to be cheaper than that to gain mass adoption. I’m sure it can be since this looks like a high-end product aimed at a very specialist market just now, but right now that is a major obstacle.

He is not, sadly. His name is a real surname that did originally mean “from Picardy” though, so presumably his great-great-great-whatever-grandparents were

For Scotland, if we are to approximately match the time period and granularity represented in England:

• Northumbria probably extends up towards that big river estuary (the Forth) on the east coast.
• The big triangular part of the east north of that is Picts (probably not unified depending on your specific year, at least not in any sense beyond paying tribute). We don’t know a huge amount about these guys, but they’re a Celtic people who probably spoke a language somewhat related to Welsh. They’re also probably the descendants of the people the Romans mostly saw north of Hadrian’s wall.
• Dàl Riata in the west coast, probably not extending as far north as the big island in the northwest (called Lewis & Harris, despite being one island) or as far south as the peninsula in the southwest but possibly including part of northwest Ireland and the Isle of Man depending on the year. These are the Gaels that moved to Scotland from Ireland, and it’s from them that we get the name “Scotland”. What went on to become the Scotland we know today was formed when a king of Dàl Riata managed to make himself king of the Picts too.
• Alt Clut or Strathclyde in that peninsula in the southwest. These guys were Cumbrians, close cousins to the Welsh, and would eventually be conquered by Scotland after being subject to a lot of Norse raiding.
• This leaves the north, including Lewis & Harris and the islands in the northeast. These were probably mostly Pictish up until they became the main power base of various Norse kingdoms, and the Norse influence held long enough that the culture shifted away from the emerging Scottish culture. Whether or not they are counted as Norse or Pictish depends on the year you pick. I’d probably lean towards Pictish if we’re matching the borders in England, which look to be during the Mercian supremacy a little before the Norse got a real foothold on Britain, but if you want to show the historical regions that influenced area as it is today you’d go with Norse. Scotland would gradually push the Norse out over centuries, eventually acquiring the northernmost islands (Shetland) as collateral when the king of Denmark and Norway failed to pay a promised dowry in the 14th century.

While I agree with that in principal, quite a few African countries are rather justifiably wary of us coming in and promising to invest in the place

Vegans are a relative minority group that a lot of people like to antagonise. That’s not to say you were doing that, I haven’t looked at what you got banned over. Just that a lot of people do go out of their way to try to annoy vegans, and because there are relatively few vegans those people can quickly drown out any attempt to discuss, like, vegan recipes and such

Isn’t blocking them essentially you banning them from your posts and comments? Why is that different?