Ahh okay, that makes sense. Thank you!

Most of my brewing is for beer, so I have heaps of 500ml bottles that I use to make cuts, thankfully. I don’t actually own any tools to properly measure the content of spirits, though. I’m currently going on “is it flammable” and “what does it taste/smell like”. If I can actually get into it a bit more I’ll invest in the gear, but I feel like I need to get over the mental block first

I appreciate the advice though. It’s good to have some reassurance, because man it just fucking sucks to wait weeks to brew something and then totally fuck up the distillation. What’s the thinking behind covering the jars with a paper towel rather than just the lid of the jar (or the stopper of the bottle, in my case)?

Please don’t do this to my wallet

Are there any scripts in which all the characters are symmetrical across the vertical axis? So that, when written like this, the letters would be the same either way.

Edit: oh wait, I know one! Ogham, from medieval Ireland. There is one character that’s not symmetrical, but it’s apparently one of the five “additional” characters that do not appear in the majority of known examples of ogham

I have finished the brewing stage of what will hopefully be my first gin and now need to gather up the mental fortitude to stare at a thermometer for several hours and potentially ruin all the prior work. I’m not very good at distillation yet.

For those wondering why these borders don’t match up: England’s county system is actually the butchered remains of several iterations stitched together in a manner that would appal Dr Frankenstein. This image shows the historic counties, but those basically only exist for cultural reasons today and have not been used for governance since the 70s. They don’t quite match the post - see, for example, Yorkshire being one massive thing in this image but split into four in the post. Even though one of the four is called “east third”. The post’s border also don’t match the modern counties though, so I’m not quite sure what exactly is being shown, but it could be older borders or just whichever borders had the most interesting set of names

That one is basically still understandable in modern English too

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

It definitely is

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

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

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

Islands have been done separately from the mainland when they’re part of the same country on this map. Look at Canada, where Vancouver Island and Newfoundland end up far away from the rest of Canada

For Civ 6, I’d say winning each victory once. Try to do it with different civs each time too. You can set your goal as winning a game on the highest difficulty if you want, but personally I don’t find that to be as interesting as the shift in gameplay necessary to win the different victories without just militarily crushing everyone else.

I don’t think I’ve ever had it with any sort of sugar, or with water for that matter. My experiences with it have been when friends show up with a bottle of it

It was indeed a typo, heather ale was what I meant to write

I love the flavour of wild fermentation but I’m terrified of screwing it up somehow and making something dangerous. I know that the fact that I’m making alcohol out of it should make it safer by default, but there’s a part of my brain that struggles with it