40 Maps to Understand the World...

Well, some aspects of the world, anyway :)  It is a fascinating collection of maps, visualizing all sorts of things I'd never have thought of visualizing.  Like this one:

One thing I learned from this is that I'm not even close to the national average consumption for the U.S. – I'd better get to work on that!  Assuming the U.S. average is about 8 liters of alcohol a year, that works out to 3/4 ounce of pure alcohol.  My consumption is nearly entirely in wine, so that works out to about 6 ounces a day.  That doesn't sound like much, but I actually only have wine a couple times a week – which means I'd have to drink about 20 ounces of wine at a sitting.  Yikes!  That would knock me for a loop!

I'm not surprised by the large Russian consumption.  I saw an awful lot of vodka when I was there, and witnessed people drinking in amounts and at rates that I'd have thought were fatal.  But France and England?  I wouldn't have guessed that their alcohol consumption was on a par with Russia's...