Tad Marko

[Handre @Handre]

@NASAAdmin This is the best take and attitude I can imagine from someone in your position. Thank you for sharing and well done Mr. Isaacman.

[Tad Marko @TXTad]

@AP2020_Outdoors what happened to your YouTube?

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

America burned Japan's first gift of cherry trees. All 2,000 of them, on President Taft's direct order.

The 1910 shipment arrived in DC crawling with insects and nematodes. Agriculture inspectors condemned the lot, Taft signed off on the bonfire, and the State Department braced for a diplomatic disaster. Tokyo's mayor, Yukio Ozaki, responded by sending 3,020 more, grafted from the famous grove along the Arakawa River.

Those trees have spent a century paying the friendship back.

Four days after Pearl Harbor, vandals chopped down four of them. Park officials renamed the survivors "Oriental" cherry trees for the rest of the war to protect them from axes.

Then came the twist. By 1952 the original Arakawa grove in Tokyo, the parent stock, had nearly died from wartime neglect. Japan asked Washington for help. The Park Service shipped budwood from DC's trees back across the Pacific and restored the grove that created them. When a flood wiped out more Japanese trees in 1982, horticulturists took 800 fresh cuttings from the Tidal Basin.

These 250 new trees solve a real problem too. The Tidal Basin is sinking, and a $133 million seawall rebuild forced crews to rip out roughly 150 trees. Japan offered replacements before anyone asked, timed to America's 250th birthday.

So the genetics run in a loop. Tokyo's grove seeded Washington's. Washington's saved Tokyo's. The saplings going in this spring descend from both.

114 years of diplomacy, running on grafted branches.

[NOBUNAGA🇯🇵🏯_夏樹蒼依 @japan_nobunaga]

A doughnut shop called Krispy Kreme. I was driving past when a red sign in the window lit up.

HOT NOW.

I have served three lords. None of them ever gave me an order that direct.

HOT NOW. Not "hot soon." Not "hot, when it is convenient for you." Hot now. A command. From the building. To me.

I pulled across two lanes of traffic. So did three other cars, which told me the building commands them as well, and that I had joined an army without learning its name.

Inside, a woman handed me a single warm doughnut. The glaze had not yet hardened. I had done nothing to earn it. I had simply obeyed the sign.

"First one's free when the light's on," she said.

So this is the wage. You obey the sign, you receive the warm thing. Discipline, rewarded instantly. No lord I ever served paid this fast.

I ate it standing up. I will tell you plainly: it was the softest thing I have put in my mouth on this continent. I understood, in that moment, why the army comes when the sign calls. I would come too. I have been coming ever since.

There are three Krispy Kremes within an hour of my home. I have learned the hours their signs light. The first at six. The second at six thirty. The third at seven. A man who leaves home at five fifty can obey all three before the workday begins.

My wife has asked why I smell of sugar at dawn. I told her I have taken an oath. She asked to whom. I could not answer, because the honest answer is "a sign," and a man does not like to say aloud that he has sworn his mornings to a sign.

But the sign said HOT NOW. What was I supposed to do. Read it, and keep driving? I am not made of stone.

[Barnaby Breaks History 🇺🇸 @BarnabyHistory]

🇺🇸 The 50 star American flag flying today was designed in 1958 by 17 year old Robert G. Heft as a high school class project.

He got a B-minus on it.

The teacher claimed the design "lacked originality" and jokingly remarked that if Heft didn't like the grade, he should get the flag accepted in Washington.

Heft called his teacher's bluff. He sent his physical prototype to his congressman, Walter Moeller, who forwarded it to the design pool.

Out of more than 1,500 submissions, President Eisenhower picked his design.

His teacher later changed his grade to an A.

Thank you, Robert! The flag is beautiful! 🇺🇸

[Antidepressant Content @depressionlesss]

No matter how many times you've watched it, Max the dog playing with his duck friend Fred never fails to make your day

[Be Believing @Be_Believing]

One determined dog..

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

That water clarity is an engineering decision, and the math behind it is wilder than the video.

Roman aqueducts ran on gravity alone. No pumps, no pressure systems. Engineers carved channels with a gradient so shallow it borders on absurd. The Pont du Gard in southern France drops 2.5 centimeters over 275 meters. That's roughly the thickness of a coin over the length of three football fields. They surveyed that accuracy with plumb lines and wooden leveling instruments.

The clarity you're seeing is a direct product of flow velocity. Too steep and the water erodes the channel walls, picks up sediment, turns brown. Too flat and it stagnates. Roman engineers targeted a slope of about 20 centimeters per kilometer, which kept the water moving fast enough to stay fresh but slow enough to stay clear. Before the water reached the city, it passed through multi-chamber settling tanks where velocity dropped near zero. Suspended particles sank. Clean water flowed out the top into the next chamber. Repeat three or four times.

Pliny specified the minimum slope in writing. Vitruvius published the exact mortar ratio for hydraulic cement: one part lime to two parts volcanic ash for underwater work. The pozzolana from Pozzuoli reacted with water to form a calcium-aluminum-silicate compound that actually gets stronger the longer it sits submerged. Modern concrete degrades in water. Roman concrete bonds with it.

Scale the whole system and it gets harder to process. Eleven aqueducts fed Rome at its peak. Combined output: roughly 1 million cubic meters of water per day. That works out to about 250 gallons per person for a city of one million. Modern New York delivers about 125 gallons per person per day. Ancient Rome had access to double the per capita water supply of the largest city in the United States, running entirely on slope and stone.

The Trevi Fountain in Rome is still fed by one of them. Two thousand years, same source, same gravity, same water.

[Tad Marko @TXTad]

@ViewFromAS46610 @giveashitnature No, they're generally safe for non-targeted species.

[Give A Shit About Nature @giveashitnature]

The USDA has kept raccoon rabies out of the central United States for over 30 years by air-dropping fish-flavored ravioli from helicopters.

Each one is a small packet coated in fishmeal with an oral rabies vaccine inside. Raccoons, foxes, coyotes, and skunks find them by smell, bite through, and swallow.

Many animals that consume the bait develop immunity, helping build a protective barrier across populations.

The bait is generally considered safe for pets and tested in many non-target species.

The USDA's Wildlife Services has been running this since 1995. Without the bait program, raccoon rabies very likely would have spread much further west.

A federal program you've probably never heard of is protecting your pets and your kids by feeding wild animals ravioli from a helicopter.

[Archaeo - Histories @archeohistories]

Most people remember him as Saruman, Count Dooku, or Dracula. But those iconic roles were merely shadows of the man behind them.

Christopher Lee didn't live one life. He lived several—each more extraordinary than most people's entire existence.

Born in London in 1922, Lee grew up in a family of old European distinction. His step-cousin was Ian Fleming, who would go on to create James Bond—a character whose elegance and danger some say carried echoes of Lee himself.

Then the world erupted into war.

Lee volunteered immediately. Poor eyesight kept him from flying, so he joined RAF Intelligence instead, eventually moving into special operations—the kind of work that remains partially classified even today. He worked behind enemy lines in the final stages of the war and beyond, doing things he would almost never discuss.

Years later, on the set of The Lord of the Rings, that silence broke for just a moment.

Peter Jackson was directing a scene where Saruman gets stabbed from behind. He suggested Lee let out a dramatic scream.

Lee calmly interrupted: "Have you any idea what kind of noise a man makes when he's stabbed in the back? Because I do."

The set fell silent. Jackson quietly adjusted the scene.

After the war, Lee turned to acting—not chasing stardom, but simply working. And he worked relentlessly. Over 280 films across seven decades, in multiple languages.

He spoke fluent English, French, Italian, German, and Spanish, with working knowledge of Swedish, Russian, and Greek. Long before Hollywood embraced international stars, Lee was one—performing across Europe with the same commanding presence he brought to British cinema.

He became the face of Dracula for a generation. He brought menace and sophistication to villains that could have been cartoonish. He made every role—great or forgettable—watchable simply by being in it.

Then, at age 88, he did something nobody expected.

Christopher Lee released a heavy metal album.

Not as a novelty. Not as a joke. A serious, symphonic metal concept album about Charlemagne—sung in multiple languages, backed by actual metal musicians who respected his vision.

Critics were stunned. It was genuinely good.

He released another album at 91. Another at 92. His final recording was a thunderous metal cover of "My Way"—less Frank Sinatra's croon, more Viking battle cry.

A man born before television existed was recording metal music in the streaming era.

But perhaps his most profound connection was literary.

In the late 1950s, long before The Lord of the Rings became a global phenomenon, Christopher Lee met J.R.R. Tolkien briefly at a pub in Oxford. Lee was already a devoted fan who read the trilogy every single year.

Decades later, when Peter Jackson assembled his cast, Christopher Lee was the only actor who had actually met the author himself.

He desperately wanted to play Gandalf. He was cast as Saruman instead.

And he gave that role a gravity no one else could have—because he wasn't just performing Tolkien's words. He had heard Tolkien speak. He understood the weight of that world from the source.

Lee never retired. His final film roles came in 2015—the year he died—at 93 years old. He worked until the very end, not from necessity, but because creation was simply how he lived.

Think about the span of that existence:

Born in 1922. Fought in WWII. Worked in intelligence operations that remain classified. Witnessed the birth of cinema, television, and the internet. Moved from silent films to CGI blockbusters. Played Dracula, wizards, Sith Lords, and sang heavy metal in his nineties.

Legends grew around him—some exaggerated, some untrue. But the truth never needed embellishment.

Christopher Lee was a war veteran, a polyglot, a cinematic titan, a metal musician, and the last living bridge between Tolkien's world and its retelling on screen.

He once said: "Every actor has to make terrible films from time to time. The trick is never to be terrible in them."

#archaeohistories

[Lucy @TheLucyShow1]

This delivery man is humanity at its best! 🤗

[Batu @yetkisizherif]

bir otel çalışanı her gün yüzmeye gelen yavru ördeklerin havuzdan rahatça çıkabilmeleri için havluyu ıslatıp basamak yapıyor

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

A parasite that has been eating people for 3,500 years is about to be wiped off the planet. It infected 3.5 million people in 1986. Last year, it infected 10. And I have not seen it make a single front page.

It is called Guinea worm. You drink contaminated water from a pond in a poor village. A year later, a worm up to three feet long starts coming out of your leg through a burning blister. There is no pill that stops it and no surgery that works. You wrap the worm around a stick and pull it out slowly, over days or weeks, inch by inch. If you rush, the worm breaks inside you and causes a fresh infection.

Guinea worm is ancient. Preserved worms have been pulled out of Egyptian mummies from around 1000 BCE. The Ebers Papyrus, an Egyptian medical scroll from 1550 BCE, describes pulling the worm out with a stick. For three and a half thousand years, that was the best humans could do.

Then in 1986, public health workers decided to kill the parasite off. They had no vaccine and no drug. What they had was cheap cloth water filters and a small army of volunteers willing to walk from village to village for decades.

The plan was simple. Give everyone who drinks from a pond a cloth filter to strain out the tiny water fleas that spread the parasite. Then send volunteers walking house to house, year after year, teaching people how to use the filters and keeping anyone with an emerging worm out of the water.

It worked. From 3.5 million cases a year to 10. Four were in Chad, four in Ethiopia, two in South Sudan. The other four countries where the worm used to be common, Angola, Cameroon, the Central African Republic, and Mali, had zero human cases for the second year in a row. The World Health Organization has already certified 200 countries as Guinea worm free. Six are left.

The last hurdle is dogs. Cameroon had 445 infected animals last year and Chad had 147, so a lot of the remaining work is on animals, not humans. Strays get leashed, and crews treat ponds to kill any remaining worms. The campaign keeps watching until the number hits zero.

When Guinea worm hits zero, it becomes the second human disease ever erased from the planet. The first was smallpox. It will also be the first parasite humans have ever wiped out, and the first disease ever ended without a single dose of medicine. Volunteers walked village to village with cloth filters for 40 years. Now a plague from the age of the pharaohs is about to be gone.

[Rodney Smith Jr @iamrodneysmith]

Thiss morning I had the honor of mowing Mr. Smith’s lawn. It’s always a privilege to serve him—he served in the Air Force. Thank you for your service. Grateful for the opportunity to give back. Making a difference, one lawn at a time.

[Interesting things @awkwardgoogle]

The way he jumped in without hesitation 😭

This is peak dog happiness.

[John Ʌ Konrad V @johnkonrad]

Marco Rubio if you don’t stop posting Marco Rubio memes.

[B&S @_B___S]

He woke up and realised he still has the bone from last night...

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

"There's no evidence carnivore is healthy long-term!"

- Inuit: 10,000+ years eating primarily animal products
- Maasai: 2,000+ years eating blood, milk, meat
- Mongols: Conquered the world on fermented mare's milk and fatty mutton
- Plains Indians: Thrived on bison and pemmican
- Traditional cultures globally: Prioritised animal products, perfect health

"But where are the randomised controlled trials?"

You want me to lock people in a lab for 50 years eating only meat to prove what traditional cultures already demonstrated?

Meanwhile, seed oils got approved with zero long-term human trials and everyone just shrugged.

The standard of evidence required is suspiciously dependent on whether it threatens industrial agriculture profits.