Yeah, by far. They account for 40+% of the entire world’s production, so they’re making so much more than anyone else that it’s basically a guarantee they’re the top per capita too

There is some! Argentina, Chile, and Australia grow a fair bit. Nowhere near as much as the major Mediterranean producers, certainly, but not nothing

I suppose they’ve got the climate for it. Same reason those three are some of the biggest wine producers outside of Europe

Well I love a whisky but I’ve never had a German one. I’ll have to have a look out for it, especially if it’s gonna be a bit cheaper!

The thing about the name reminds me a little of some of Scotland’s islands. The Orkney and Shetland islands, two archipelagoes in the north, both call their biggest island “Mainland”

It’s actually fairly common for mostly-autonomous overseas parts of an EU member state to not be part of the EU. The Dutch Caribbean and French Pacific islands have the same status as Greenland. They’re quite independent in terms of domestic policy and also not typically very close to Europe, so applying the EU’s laws to them is not always practical or useful. I believe they all have standing invites to join if they wish, though.

There’s actually a tiny exclave of Germany that is completely surrounded by Switzerland and is also not in the EU customs union, so sometimes it can happen on mainland Europe. Other EU stuff does apply in that exclave that does not in Greenland, so it’s not quite the same, but still

The two British military bases on Cyprus do still fall within the EU customs union despite being British Overseas Territories, so a tiny bit of the UK that sort of didn’t Brexit

To be honest most of the basic physics behind rocketry actually isn’t too difficult. The matter of engineering it into reality definitely is very difficult, finding fuels that burn hard enough and figuring out how to contain them while they burn and the like. The nature of going so far and so fast also means that tiny errors add up to very big problems.

All rockets function on the fact that if you push something in one direction, you also go in the opposite direction by a proportionate amount. Lighting fuel on fire while it’s in a tube that only has one way out just happens to be a great way to push the burning fuel really, really hard and therefore get a really hard push back. The forces involved always have to cancel out the total momentum of everything involved; you chuck X kilograms of burning fuel out of the back at Y metres per second, you accelerate forward by however much you need to to make your momentum match that in the opposite direction. This is Newton’s third law of motion, the “for each action there is an equal and opposite reaction” one

Nozzles and the like can adjust which direction the way out is pointing. If the way out points left a bit, the momentum of the fuel is also going left a bit, so the reaction momentum you get goes a bit to the right, and now you have steering

I think the biggest conceptual block people usually have about orbits is that they’re not about going up fast, they’re about going around the Earth fast. If you point your rocket straight up and just keep going straight up, you won’t go into orbit around the Earth. Either you’ll crash straight back down when you run out of fuel, or you have a rocket with enough power and fuel to reach Earth’s escape velocity, in which case you’ll just continue travelling away from Earth forever until you find something else’s gravity. You know the kind of arc that a ball has when you throw it? Imagine that you’re superhumanly strong and can throw a ball literally however hard you want. You could throw it beyond the horizon without breaking a sweat. Once you’re throwing it that hard, the curvature of the Earth starts to become relevant, right? The ground is effectively dropping away underneath the ball as it travels forward, letting it fly farther before it hits the ground. Eventually if you throw hard enough, the curvature of the Earth turns away from the ball at the same rate as the ball is falling. The ball is now in orbit. The ISS (and anything else that wants to orbit at the same altitude) goes around the Earth so fast that it does 15 entire laps around the planet every day

Unfortunately for our rockets, the Earth’s atmosphere is very bad to actually move through that fast, so they go up first to get out of the thickest part of the atmosphere and then gradually turn sideways to achieve orbit

Once you start getting into things like how to get from Earth to other planets you’ve got to worry about some other stuff, but this comment is probably getting long enough by now and not many of our rockets do that yet

I totally get what you mean about planes not looking like they should work. The size of them and the fact that we’ve got basically nothing to reference them against for scale and motion when they’re in the air is really confusing

Do you want explanations for the jets and rockets, and if so what is your current understanding?

It’s about as close to a random person as you can get while still being recorded. They were royalty, but the two real ones get literally a sentence each at max

• Eithne ingen Bresail Bregh married the king of Tara and is described as “having deserved reward from God for her good works, and for her intense penance for her sins” in one source and “deserved to obtain the heavenly kingdom, having done penance” in the other
• Eithne ingen Cinadhon was the daughter of a Pictish king and is literally only recorded as having died
• The legendary Eithne is the daughter of a king of Scotland (mostly Pictish at the time) and crossed the sea to Ireland, where she gave birth to the hero Túathal Techtmar. This is the entirety of her role in the story; a couple of paragraphs in a collection that, in the translation I’m looking at, has 600 pages just for part five

Not sure if I can call this knowledge since I don’t know if it’s true, but I think I identified a couple of women from the 8th century CE who are mentioned in some Irish annals as actually being the same person. As far as I know there’s next to no discussion of these women on the internet and there are basically no historical records of them, at least. So I guess if I’m right it’s very obscure?

The women in question are Eithne ingen Bresail Bregh and Eithne ingen Cinadhon (and possibly also the legendary Eithne mother of Tuathal Techtmar)

I’m not normally keen on mentioning people’s spelling and grammar mistakes, but if they’re going to be dickheads about the language everyone is speaking while writing “your a dumbass”, “has major issue”, and “germen” then it’s another matter

I usually wind up watching it not because I choose to but because a good friend absolutely loves it and her birthday is very close to it. I just try to make the most of the night and have fun with everyone

You’d better bring a copy of the Noita wiki with you so that you can decipher what half the late game stuff is/does. Or even just where it is. Although I suppose if you have basically unlimited time, you could just do your alchemy from first principles

Gotta be one of the Paradox strategy games. I have two reasons for this: the first is that a good game unavoidably takes ages on them, so they have staying power; the other is that I know how to mod them, so I can make myself new scenarios once I get fed up of it. I’ll bring Crusader Kings 3 and Victoria 3 because I like them but haven’t yet played them much

I’ll add in Assetto Corsa and Dirt Rally 2 for some driving. Both have very high skill ceilings that I am nowhere near, so that gives me a lot to do. I also don’t own a wheel, so if I get that as part of the deal then that’d be fun to try. These two also have an odd bonus for me: they both have courses set near my home. I can sort of visit them by playing when I get a bit homesick

Lastly I’ll have Deep Rock Galactic for low effort shooty fun. I can’t always be putting mental energy into games

There are games I like as much or more than these five but which lack the replayability for this scenario. Like I adore Outer Wilds, but you can only really play it once

There is no way this doesn’t wind up making an ad that’s misleading enough to get Netflix and/or the advertiser in trouble

I wonder if it’s a language issue? Lithuanian is only really spoken in Lithuania, which is quite a small country, and most Lithuanians also don’t speak another EU language (the most common second language by a wide margin is Russian). It might be that nobody has made a successful effort to publicise the campaign in a language that most Lithuanians know. The disclaimer here is that I don’t speak Lithuanian and cannot check

• A Highland Song. I can confirm that this one is nice to take a walk through because it is a game about running through a fictionalised version of a place I frequently enjoy walking through in real life. Possibly stretching the definition of open world a little, but the gameplay is about navigation
• Shadow of the Colossus. Which is good because you do spend a lot of time walking across it.

Also, not an open world game at all, but the environments in Pacer are amazing. You barely get a chance to look at them because you’re zooming along a racetrack at 400 mph, but they’re still there. Sonashahar is a futuristic neoclassical Indian city, and I want to explore that

I don’t think I agree with that. None of the Souls games ever had anything like Siofra River or Liurnia. Areas like Leyndell and Farum Azula, sure, but there’s a lot of variety in the Elden Ring map

The visuals were stunning but am I fuck taking a walk through:

• The ultra-plague fallout zone
• The lake of giant sniper lobsters
• The mountaintops of giant spiders made from hands with way too many fingers

I don’t think I can offer much here other than that I sincerely hope it succeeds

Entirely besides the point of the actual petition, I really feel like that flag could be a lot better. Half of the stars are blending into the background too much

True, but I would argue that TLJ actually did substantially better than the Disney and Star Wars averages on the visual front. Not necessarily in terms of the technical execution of the effects since they’re always basically as good as they get for the time in both Disney and Star Wars stuff, but in terms of the composition of shots

I’m also pro-TLJ, but I do think it could have done with a few tweaks to the script to catch some stuff. In terms of how it looked and was acted on the moment-to-moment scale they nailed it though, so I’m not sure if that falls under “better execution”