LOL, a country roughly the size of Maryland (one of the smaller states) has more trains than USA.

Can we get a map of tungsten (W) next time?

That would also make SEO so much easier.

So is Al-Madinah (literally ‘The City’) in KSA.

Makes me wish I could register “the pen” as a trademark or something and start selling pens under that name. I wonder if that also makes it impossible for anyone ever find this brand online.

When you have just enough resolution for Australia, you don’t really have the option to include smaller details.

That’s an interesting idea, but I disagree to some extent. Although, I really love the idea of having a single unified global time, it would make traveling inconvenient.

While staying in a different part of the world, you would need to translate local times to your home time. For example, 21:30 may sound like evening to you, but somewhere else that could be midday, morning or anything else. If you look at museum opening hours, it’s not immediately apparent if it opens just after breakfast or just before lunch time. You would need to do these translations several times a day during your stay to understand when things will happen.

However, time units are an inconsistent mess, and the calendar is a total disaster. If we need another french revolution to fix that, I’m not going to stand in its way.

The effects of colonialism can be seen quite clearly in this map. Many people used either English, French, Spanish or Portuguese, and that’s not a coincidence.

One of the lakes had normal units, but everything else was in fantasy units.

Also, there’s the actual Chad, which is bigger than Texas.

What happened in Iceland? I really thought they would have inherited this kind of stuff from Norway.

When in doubt, always guess it’s a Swedish loanword. You’ll be right surprisingly often.

Text written before 2023 is going be exceptionally valuable because that way we can be reasonably sure it wasn’t contaminated by an LLM.

This reminds me of some research institutions pulling up sunken ships so that they can harvest the steel and use it to build sensitive instruments. You see, before the nuclear tests there was hardly any radiation anywhere. However, after America and the Soviet Union started nuking stuff like there’s no tomorrow, pretty much all steel on Earth has been a little bit contaminated. Not a big issue for normal people, but scientists building super sensitive equipment certainly notice the difference between pre-nuclear and post-nuclear steel